The aviation grounds—Arabian Nights’ heroes and their magic carpets—Corps’ spirit—A chivalric custom—Billeting in French houses—Well-disciplined guests—Teaching the art of war—Picturesque tribesmen from India—Their loyalty—British justice—Matins and Angelus—Farming without men—The peasants win—Greeting the French troops—Sir John French on duty—“Inspecting and disinfecting”—The new “shilling a day” men—Albert Edward, the “willing prince”—Care of the wounded.

A single incident, an impression photographic in its swiftness, a chance remark, may be more illuminating than a day’s experiences. One does not need to go to the front for them. Sometimes they come to the gateway of our chÂteau. They are pages at random out of a library of overwhelming information.

One of the aviation grounds is not far away. Look skyward at almost any hour of the day and you will see a plane, its propeller a roar or a hum according to its altitude. Sometimes it is circling in practice; again, it is off to the front. At break of day the planes appear; in the gloaming they return to roost.

If an aviator has leave for two or three days in summer he starts in the late afternoon, flashing over that streak of Channel in half an hour and may be at home for dinner without getting any dust on his clothes or having to bother with military red tape at steamer gangways or customs houses.

The airmen are a type, with certain marked characteristics. No nervous man is wanted, and it is time for an aviator to take a rest at the first sign of nerves. They seem shy and diffident, men of the kind given to observation rather than to talking; men accustomed to using their eyes and hands. It is difficult to realise that some quiet young fellow, who is pointed out, has had so many hairbreadth escapes. What tales, worthy of Arabian Nights’ heroes who are borne away on magic carpets, they bring home, relating them as matter-of-factly as if they had broken a shoelace.

Up in their seats, a whir of the motor, and they are off on another adventure. They shy at mention of their names in print, for that is not good for the spirit of corps of this newest branch in the service of war. Anonymity is absolute. Everything is done by the corps for the corps. Possibly because it is so young, because it started with chosen men, the British Aviation Corps is unsurpassed; but partly it is because of the British temperament, with that combination of coolness and innate love of risk which the British manner sometimes belies.

Something of the old spirit of knighthood characterises air service. It is individual work; its numbers are relatively few. I like one of the aviation customs, not for its chivalry alone, but because it makes one feel more kindly toward the Germans. If a German aviator has to descend in the British lines, whether from motor trouble or because he is winged by an anti-aircraft gun, a British aviator flies over the German lines and drops a “message-bag” with long streamers telling whether the unfortunate one is dead or alive, and the Germans do the same.

Some mornings ago I saw several young soldiers with notebooks going about our village street. They were from the cadet school where privates, from the trenches, take a course and return with chocolate drops on their sleeve-bands as commissioned officers. This was a course in billeting. For ours is not an army in tents, but one living in French houses and barns. The pupils were learning how to carry out this delicate task; for delicate it is. A stranger speaking another language becomes the guest of the host for whom he is fighting. Mr. Atkins receives only shelter; he supplies his own meals. His excess of marmalade one sees yellowing the cheeks of the children in the family where he is at home. Madame objects only to his efforts to cook in her kitchen; womanlike, she would rather handle the pots and pans herself.

Tommy is thoroughly instructed in his duty as guest and under a discipline that is merciless so far as conduct toward the population goes; so the two get on better than French and English military authorities feared that they might. Time has taught them to understand each other and see that difference in race does not mean absence of human qualities in common, though differently expressed. Many armies I have seen, but never one better behaved than the British army in France and Flanders in its respect for property and the rights of the population.

And while the fledgling officers are going on with their billeting, we hear the t-r-r-t of a machine gun at a machine-gun school about a mile distant, where picked men also from the trenches receive instruction in the use of an arm new to them. There are other schools within sound of the guns teaching the art of war to an expanding army in the midst of war, with the teachers bringing their experience from the battle-line.

“Their shops and their houses all have fronts of glass,” wrote a Sikh soldier home, “and even the poor are rich in this bountiful land.”

Sikhs and Ghurkas and Rajputs and Pathans and Gherwalis, the brown-skinned tribesmen in India, have been on a strange Odyssey, bringing picturesqueness to the khaki tone of modern war. Aeroplanes interested them less than a trotting dog in a wheel for drawing water. They would watch that for hours.

Still fresh in mind is a scene when the air seemed a moist sponge and all above the earth was dripping and all under foot a mire. I was homesick for the flash on the windows of the New York skyscrapers or the gleam on the Hudson of that bright sunlight in a drier air, that is the secret of the American’s nervous energy. It seemed to me that it was enough to have to exist in Northern France at that season of the year, let alone fighting Germans.

Out of the drizzly, misty rain along a muddy road and turning past us came the Indian cavalry, which, like the British cavalry, had fought on foot in the trenches, while their horses led the leisurely life of true equine gentry. Erect in their saddles, their martial spirit defiant of the weather, their black eyes flashing as they looked toward the reviewing officers, troop after troop of these sons of the East passed by, every one seeming as fit for review as if he had cleaned his uniform and equipment in his home barracks instead of in French barns.

One asked who had trained them; who had fashioned the brown clay into resolute and loyal obedience which stood the test of a Flanders winter? What was the force which could win them to cross the seas to fight for England? Among the brown faces topped with turbans appeared occasional white faces. These were the men; these the force.

The marvel was not that the Indians were able to fight as well as they did in that climate, but that they fought at all. What welcome summer brought from their gleaming black eyes! July or August could not be too hot for them. On a plateau one afternoon I saw them having a gymkana. It was a treat for the King of the Belgians, who has had few holidays, indeed, this last year, and for the French peasants who came from the neighbourhood. Yelling, wild as they were in tribal days before the British brought order and peace to India, the horsemen galloped across the open space, picking up handkerchiefs from the ground and impaling tent pegs on their lances. The French peasants clapped their hands and the British Indian officers said, “Good!” when the performer succeeded, or, “Too bad!” when he failed.

If you asked the officers for the secret of the Indian Empire they said: “We try to be fair to the natives!” which means that they are just and even-tempered. An enormous, loose-jointed machine the British Empire, which seems sometimes to creak a bit but yet holds together for that very reason. Imperial weight may have interfered with British adaptability to the kind of warfare which was the one kind that the Germans had to train for; but certainly some Englishmen must know how to rule.

That church bell across the street from our chÂteau begins its clangour at dawn, summoning the French women and children and the old men to the fields in harvest time. But its peals carrying across the farmlands are softened by distance and sweet to the tired workers in the evening. In the morning its peal in their ears tells them that the day is long and they have much to do before dark. After that thought I never complained because it robbed me of my sleep. I felt ashamed not to be up and doing myself, and worked with a better spirit.

“Will they do it?”

We asked this question as often in our mess in those August days as, Will the Russians lose Warsaw? Would the peasants be able to get in their crops, with all the able-bodied men away? I had inside information from the village mayor and the blacksmith and the baker that they would. A financial expert, the baker. Of course, he said that France would go on fighting till the German was beaten, just as the old men and the women and children said, whether the church bell was clanging the matins or the angelus. But there was the question of finances. It took money to fight. The Americans, he knew, had more money than they knew what to do with—as Europeans universally think, only, personally, I find that I was overlooked in the distribution—and if they would loan the Allies some of their spare billions, Germany was surely beaten.

A busy man the blacksmith, and brawny, if he had no spreading chestnut tree; busy not only shoeing farmhorses, but repairing American reapers and binders, whose owners profited exceedingly and saved the day. But not all farmers felt that they could afford the charge. These kept at their small patches with sickles. Gradually the carpets of gold waving in the breeze became bundles lying on the stubble, and great conical harvest stacks rose, while children gathered the stray stems left on the ground by the reapers till they had immense bouquets of wheat-heads under their arms, enough to make two or three loaves of the pain de mÉnage that the baker sold. So the peasants did it; they won; and this was some compensation for the loss of Warsaw.

One morning we heard troops marching past, which was not unusual. But these were French troops in the British zone, en route from somewhere in France to somewhere else in France. There was not a person left in any house in that village. Everybody was out, with affection glowing in their eyes. For these were their own—their soldiers of France.

When you see a certain big limousine flying a small British flag pass you know that it belongs to the Commander-in-Chief; and though it may be occupied only by one of his aides, often you will have a glimpse of a man with a square chin and a drooping white moustache, who is the sole one among the hundreds of thousands at the British front who wears the crossed batons of a field marshal.

It is erroneous to think that Sir John French or any other commander, though that is the case in time of action, spends all his time in the private house occupied as headquarters, designated by two wisps of flags, studying a map and sending and receiving messages, when the trench line remains stationary. He goes here and there on inspections. It is the only way that a modern leader may let his officers and men know that he is a being of flesh and blood and not a name signed to reports and orders. A machine-gun company I knew had a surprise when resting in a field waiting for orders. They suddenly recognised in a figure coming through an opening in a hedge the supreme head of the army in France. There was no need of a call to attention. The effect was like an electric shock, which sent every man to his place and made his backbone a steel rod. Those crossed batons represented a dizzy altitude to that battery which had just come out from England. Sir John walked up and down, looking over men and guns after their nine months’ drill at home, and said, “Very good!” and was away to other inspections where he might not necessarily say, “Very good!”

Frequently his inspections are formal. A battalion or a brigade is drawn up in a field, or they march past. Then he usually makes a short speech. On one occasion the officers had arranged a platform for the speech-making. Sir John gave it a glance and that was enough. It was the end of such platforms erected for him.

“Inspections! They are second nature to us!” said a new army man. “We were inspected and inspected at home and we are inspected and inspected out here. If there is anything wrong with us it is the general’s own fault if it isn’t found out. When a general is not inspecting, some man from the medical corps is disinfecting.”

Battalions of the new army are frequently billeted for two or three days in our village. The barn up the road I know is capable of housing twenty men and one officer; for this is chalked on the door. Before they turn in for the night the men frequently sing, and the sound of their voices is pleasant.

A typical inspection was one that I saw in the main street. The battalion was drawn up in full marching equipment on the road. Of those officers with packs on their backs one was only nineteen. This is the limit of youth to acquire a chocolate drop on its arm. The sergeant major was an old regular, the knowing backbone of the battalion, which had taken the men of clay and taught them their letters and then how to spell and to add and subtract and divide. One of those impressive red caps arrived in a car, and the general who wore it went slowly up and down the line, front and rear, examining rifles and equipment, while the young officers and the old sergeant were hoping that Jones or Smith hadn’t got some dust in his rifle-barrel at the last moment.

Brokers and carpenters, bankers and mechanics, clerks and labourers, the new army is like the army of France, composed of all classes. One evening I had a chat with two young fellows in a battalion quartered in the village, who were seated beside the road. Both came from Buckinghamshire. One was a schoolmaster and the other an architect. They were “bunkies,” pals, chums.

“When did you enlist?” I asked.

“In early September, after the Marne retreat. We thought that it was our duty, then. But we’ve been a long time arriving.”

“How do you like it?”

“We are not yet masters of the language, we find,” said the schoolmaster, “though I had a pretty good book knowledge of it.”

“I’m learning the gestures fast, though,” said the architect.

“The French are glad to see us,” said the schoolmaster. “They call us the Keetcheenaires. I fancy they thought we were a long time coming. But now we are here, I think they will find that we can hold up our end.” They had the fresh complexions which come from healthy, outdoor work. There was something engaging in their boyishness and their views. For they had a wider range of interests than that professional soldier, Mr. Atkins, these citizens who had taken up arms. They knew what trench-fighting meant by work in practice trenches at home.

“Of course it will not be quite the same; theory and practice never are,” said the schoolmaster.

“We ought to be well-grounded in the principles,” said the architect—imagine the average Mr. Atkins talking in such language!—“and they say that in a week or two of actual experience you will have mastered the details that could not be taught in England. Then, too, having shells burst around you will be strange at first. But I think our battalion will give a good account of itself, sir. All the Bucks men have!” There crept in the pride of regiment, of locality, which is so characteristically Anglo-Saxon.

They change life at the front, these new army men. If a carpenter, a lawyer, a sign-painter, an accountant, is wanted, you have only to speak to a new army battalion commander and one is forthcoming—a millionaire, too, for that matter, who gets his shilling a day for serving his country. Their intelligence permitted the architect and the schoolmaster to have no illusions about the character of the war they had to face. The pity was that such a fine force as the new army, which had not become trench stale, could not have a free space in which to make a great turning movement, instead of having to go against that solid battle-front from Switzerland to the North Sea.

We have heard enough—quite enough for most of us—about the German Crown Prince. But there is also a prince with the British army in France. No lieutenant looks younger for his years than this one in the Grenadier Guards, and he seems of the same type as the others when you see him marching with his regiment or off for a walk smoking a briar-wood pipe. There are some officers who would rather not accompany him on his walks, for he can go fast and far. He makes regular reports of his observations, and he has opportunities for learning which other subalterns lack, for he may have both the staff and the army as personal instructors. Otherwise, his life is that of any other subaltern; for there is an instrument called the British Constitution which regulates many things. A little shy, very desirous to learn, is Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, heir to the throne of Great Britain and Ireland and the Empire of India. He might be called the willing prince.

This was one of the shells that hit—one of the hundred that hit. The time was summer; the place, the La BassÉe region. Probably the fighting was all the harder here because it is so largely blind. When you cannot see what an enemy is doing you keep on pumping shells into the area which he occupies; you take no risks with him.

The visitor may see about as much of what is going on in the La BassÉe region as an ant can see of the surrounding landscape when promenading in the grass. The only variation in the flatness of the land is the overworked ditches which try to drain it. Look upward and rows of poplar trees along the level and a hedge, a grove, a cottage, or trees and shrubs around it, limit your vision. Thus, if a breeze starts timidly in a field it is stopped before it goes far. That “hot corner” is all the hotter for a burning July sun. The army water-carts which run back to wells of cool water are busy filling empty canteens, while shrapnel trims the hedges.

A stretcher was being borne into the doorway of an estaminet which had escaped destruction by shells, and above the door was chalked some lettering which indicated that it was a first clearing station for the wounded. Lying on other stretchers on the floor were some wounded men. Of the two nearest, one had a bandage around his head and one a bandage around his arm. They had been stunned, which was only natural when you have been as close as they had to a shell-burst—a shell that made a hit. The concussion was bound to have this effect.

A third man was the best illustration of shell destructiveness. Bullets make only holes. Shells make gouges, fractures, pulp. He, too, had a bandaged head and had been hit in several places; but the worst wound was in the leg, where an artery had been cut. He was weak, with a sort of where-am-I look in his eyes. If the fragment which had hit his leg had hit his head, or his neck, or his abdomen, he would have been killed instantly. He was an illustration of how hard it is to kill a man even with several shell-fragments, unless some of them strike in the right place. For he was going to live; the surgeon had whispered the fact in his ear, that one important fact. He had beaten the German shell, after all.

Returning by the same road by which we came a motor car ran swiftly by, the only kind of car allowed on that road. We had a glimpse of the big painted red cross on an ambulance side, and at the rear, where the curtains were rolled up for ventilation, of four pairs of soldier boot-soles at the end of four stretchers, which had been slid into place at the estaminet by the sturdy, kindly, experienced medical corps men.

Only one ambulance, dust-covered, of the colour of the road itself came along, clear of any blast of shells; nothing at the front sends the same chill down the spine as the thought of a man wounded by a shell being hit a second time by a shell. It rarely happens, so prompt and so shrewd is the work of the Royal Army Medical Corps.

Before we reached the village the ambulance passed us on the way back to the estaminet. Very soon after the shell-burst, a telephone bell had rung down the line from the extreme front calling for an ambulance and stating the number of men hit, so that everybody would know what to prepare for. At the village, which was outside the immediate danger zone, was another clearing station. Here the stretchers were taken into a house—taken without a jolt by men who were specialists in handling stretchers—for any redressing if necessary, before another ambulance started them on a journey, with motor trucks and staff automobiles giving right of way, to a spotless white hospital ship which would take them home to England the next night.

It had been an incident of life at the front and of the organisation of war, causing less flurry than an ambulance call to an accident in a great city.