A WAR MESS
More amusement is usually to be derived from the Battery Mess than from any other side of the not uninteresting life of the campaign. Let half-a-dozen officers of varying ages, temperaments and ideas be collected at random from half the civilized globe, and set them down in a situation where their only relaxation must be found in one another's company, and watch the result. It can readily be imagined that there are endless piquant possibilities, a vast field of quiet entertainment for the student of the lighter side of existence.
As a rule, for the care of its material side, some heavenborn genius arises from amongst the ruck of his fellows, whose well-ordered brain revels in the details of cooks, and ration beef and the most convenient hour for dinner. Happy is the mess in its possession of him, how willingly its members forego any say in the matters pertaining to sustenance, in how docile a spirit do they submit to his autocratic ruling that marmalade is to be kept for breakfast alone, that lunch shall consist of bully-beef and cheese! Our own battery was blessed beyond its fellows in a tyrant of dazzling capabilities, who coaxed mysterious dishes, of course with the collusion of the mess-cook, from the most unpromising materials, who fed us bountifully from secret stores of his own such time as we wandered forlorn over the face of the land, who allowed no comment upon the quality of the bacon or the resilience of the bread. We all looked blindly to him for our daily needs, much as the Children of Israel looked to Moses in the wilderness, and we were never disappointed. May his memory be for ever associated with these precious words—he fed us well!
Mess premises may be divided into two classes, the first being found in cases where the battery position is in a locality where the inhabitants are still in occupation of their houses, and consisting of some room in an estaminet or farmhouse, the second being improvised in a ruin or dug-out. Both are capable of providing both trouble and comfort, in both a stern resolution to take things cheerfully as they come results wonderfully quickly in the discovery that one is getting on very well considering. I have a vivid picture in my memory of a mess of the first type, once the public room of an estaminet, now given over for our use. A few chairs and a table furnished it, its doors opened upon a courtyard of extraordinary capabilities in the way of mud, wherein stood the battery car, a horse or two, and several fowls, one or more of which items one invariably fell over in the dark. Next to the mess-room was the kitchen, of whose stove we had the use, and wherein perpetually madame and the two mess servants bickered for space for their culinary operations. And yet perhaps we were even more comfortable in a home that we made for ourselves in an abandoned miner's cottage. We glazed the windows, repaired the shell-holes in the roof, stole doors and a stove, and made the place thoroughly weatherproof and comfortable. And then, the furnishing and decoration! No newly-engaged couple, who, if we may believe the posters, spend their hours of bliss in arguing whether they shall confide their savings to Messrs. Deal & Glue or to the Houndsditch Furnishing Co., ever furnished with such a zest as did we. Abandoned villages lay all around us, ours was the freedom to loot as we would. The only trouble was that we were by no means the first comers—"our wants had all been felt, our errors made before"—and it required diligent search to find anything of any use. Our wheeler mended a broken table, two triumphant servants struggled in with a gigantic sideboard, the roofless and abandoned church was raided for cane-seated chairs, we descended like vultures upon a rival mess when the battery that owned it, being ordered to another position, abandoned it. Growing ambitious, we refused to be contented with mere use, our cultivated taste demanded ornament, decoration of the bare walls, and our craving was gratified. Out of every house we took the marvellous examples of the photographer's art that we found there, wonderful enlargements of the owner, his wife, his children, in their Sunday best, and hung them indiscriminately, the more prepossessing "on the line," the rest grouped with artistic abandon. Should their exiled owners ever return to them, what delight will be theirs to find those two old enemies Monsieur Malbranque and Madame Rietz hanging lovingly side by side, or that stern old maid, Mademoiselle Dalbine, surrounded by a group of miscellaneous children! What litigation may not ensue when Madame Apelghem finds her mahogany chest-of-drawers in Madame Puchon's cellar, or Monsieur Verlane his brand-new cooking-stove firmly cemented into the bedroom of that doubtful lady Ma'm'selle Frisson! With what regret did we leave this home-like mess to take the road once more, and with what true instinct did the senior subaltern insist upon the loading into the last lorry of the best loved of the portraits, so that it might follow the battery in all its wanderings as a perpetual memory of happy days! It was a truly fearsome enlargement of a terribly ugly little girl, her face, with the mouth hanging open, bearing an expression of acute agony, her hands crossed over the region where the pain might be expected to be, her toes turned in despondently. "The Flatulent Child" we christened her, yet perhaps none of us, gazing into those inexpressive eyes, can fail to remember days whose happiness will always be a precious memory to us all.
The food question practically solves itself; rations of surpassing quality are provided in quantities that tax the keenest appetite to consume, all that remains is to cook them and to provide such delicate extras as may be desired. And in that same provision of extras there lies many a snare. France is not a desert and savage land, as, judging by the preparations that a conscientious mess secretary makes before he embarks, one might expect to find it, and nearly everything that one wants can be obtained in the towns behind the line at very reasonable prices. We had arranged with a large firm in England to send us fortnightly supplies, and there our troubles began. The firm played their part nobly, and beginning with the day we set out upon our adventures, sent regularly the fortnightly consignments. But heavy artillery owes no allegiance to division or army corps, but wanders like some distended bumblebee about the line, sipping honey in the shape of rations now from this point, now from that, until the Military Forwarding Officers, the Railway Transport Officers, and all the host of curiously termed people whose business it is to play trains in this distracted land, lose all count of the whereabouts of any particular battery. The result of this to us was that for six weeks after our arrival in France we heard nothing of our long-expected delicacies, despite frantic journeys to railhead after railhead, and piteous applications to supply officers all over the country. By this time we had learnt that we could get what we wanted close at hand, and had ceased to worry about them, when one day we received a message that some stores were awaiting us at a certain station forty miles away. Seizing a favourable opportunity, we dashed over there in the battery car and secured the first consignment, and being by that time fairly well settled, we left instructions for the forwarding of any subsequent lots that might turn up. Then the accumulation of the fruitless weeks began to pour in upon us. At every tactical crisis the ration-lorry would dash up to the battery, amidst a tempest of shot and shell, and unload numberless cases of things of which we already had a superfluity. Box after box was dumped upon us, packed tight with tins of cold and sodden fruit, of strange cereal foods, of desiccated and strange-tasting soups. Who, in a country where food is treated as a fine art, would wish to live upon such things? Yet our stern tyrant, his mind rebelling at the mere thought of waste, ordained that it must be so, and so it was. Alas, for the flesh-pots of France, the omelettes and coffee of Madame! How tragic that you must vanish to appear no more!
Of sleeping quarters much might be written. What in theory could be more delightful than to sleep in one's valise in the open air—the thing is supposed to be waterproof—to wake up fresh in the early morning and roll on the dewy grass by way of a bath? What indeed? The romance of the proceeding appeals to the man allured by the specious prospect of campaigning, and he invariably attempts it for a few nights, until he grows strangely silent towards bed-time and furtively steals away to some billet he has found. After that he fluctuates between spreading his valise in a chicken-run (it was night when we spread out our valises, and the major's language on discovering in the morning that he had been trying to hatch out a likely-looking brood of chickens was, to put it respectfully, bracing) and crawling luxuriously, in the full glory of pyjamas, between real sheets. The valise itself is all right, there is nothing more comfortable, the only trouble is that it is bed and portmanteau combined, so that one's night's rest is shared by all one's belongings, including one's spare pair of boots. And I never met a pair of boots in such circumstances that had not the power of being in several places at once, till one's valise, whichever way one turned, did not seem to be as closely packed with boots as a cobbler's shop. I repeat, the valise is all right, that is if one's servant knows how to fold the blankets in it, and how to dispose the softer of its contents under one's head. But the occasional luxury of a real bed is very welcome, only—treat the casual mattress with caution until you know it thoroughly. If etymology means in Flanders the study of the language of the trenches, entomology is likewise the study of a doubtful mattress, and both sciences are often more extensive than it would appear. Better in most billets is the bare floor with a valise upon it than the most tempting bed. Usually, however, one has to use both. For many nights two of us occupied a room exactly six feet by eight, more than half of which was occupied by the bed. Our process of turning-in was interesting and extremely scientific. We had tossed up for the bed, and my friend had won it, so he retired to rest first. When he was safely in bed, I came in, put all the remaining furniture outside the door, shut it, laid down my valise, and crawled into it, my head jammed against the door, and my feet up the stove pipe, like Alice in the house of the White Rabbit. He slept with his feet out of the window, until early one morning a passing horse, of inquisitive temperament, seeing the blanket, gave it a sharp tug. My friend woke up convinced the Huns were upon us.
My most comfortable nights were spent in a coal cellar, which two of us had cleared out and adapted to our uses. My stable companion, being something of a sybarite, looted an iron bedstead on which to spread his valise—it was a new and improved type, and when extended in all its glory had a curious canopy of its own, the effect of the whole being like nothing so much as Noah's Ark. Into this, with much difficulty and objurgation he would crawl, when the mysterious concern would promptly convert itself into a portable washingstand or some other fitment of extreme utility, whence it had to be coaxed into the Ark-like form again. I, less ambitious, supported a shutter on some bricks, and laid my very ordinary valise on that. It was far less ostentatious, and I had fewer adventurous nights. It was cold in that cellar, so we raided a stove that we lit every evening, finding plenty of broken rafters in the ruined houses round us to serve for fuel. We shall neither of us know again such nights as those, lulled to sleep as we were by the sleepless batteries around us, although in profound peace we might rest in the most sumptuous bed that Tottenham Court Road ever produced.
In this ideal spot we had a bathroom with a huge stove in it, on which to boil many gallons of water in petrol cans, and no luxury could equal the luxury of those hot baths. There was a tragedy connected with it, though. One young officer was wallowing in a glorious sea of foaming lather, when a shell burst a few yards from the door. Not being sure where and when to expect the next, he dashed as he was through the battery to his dug-out, the soap-suds flying from him as foam from the limbs of some swift-footed sea-god. Nor was the major more fortunate. Condemned to spend many weary days and nights in his O.P., and missing the bathroom, he constructed one on the same plan, but less the stove, in the house he used for the purpose. But unfortunately there was only a wooden partition between him and the enemy, and one day stray bullets began to come through this with alarming frequency. He, too, was compelled to beat a hurried retreat.
Strange, too, are the messes that two or three officers, alone together on detachment, establish for their own convenience. I know of one in the dark low hall of an old farmhouse, that is in itself mess-room, kitchen and sleeping apartment for the servants of the two officers who lived in the little room opening off it. Life there was very much as we imagine it in mediÆval times, the officers had their meals with their servants standing behind their chairs—not from a desire for wanton display, but because there was nowhere else to go—by the light of two candles and the red glow of the stove in the background. Upon the oaken beams of the ceiling hung strange shapes that were the implements of war, looted German rifles and bayonets, haversacks, water-bottles, binoculars, sextants and other lethal weapons. A dripping oilskin dried by the fire, the faint smell of warm wet gum-boots mingled with that of the boiling cabbage. Perhaps the telephone that buzzed incessantly introduced a modern element, but everything else, seen in the gloom of the shaded candles, looked ghostly, unreal, a scene from some forgotten haunt of a robber baron. And the rats ran fearlessly across the floor, or sat very still in the corners, their fierce eyes shining as the light caught them. Tea was the meal of the day in that mess, for then one of the two came in from his observation post at Suicide Corner, for which he had set out at half-past five in the morning, tired and hungry, and tea when the light has failed and the rising mist of late autumn foretells a white frost is a worthy meal. Suicide Corner was a bleak spot, too, and eight hours in such a place with nothing but bully-beef sandwiches for lunch gives one an amazing appetite. And if one's companion is Scotch with an apparently limitless acquaintance who send him shortbread and oat-cake, then one's cup of delight is full indeed.
Suicide Corner is not the name of that cross-roads where the observation post stands, but, as it stands there still, or part of it does at all events, its real name is best left unsaid. A feeble imitator of the immortal "Ruthless Rhymes" in his intervals of observation produced the following—
To a cross-roads that I know
Careful Colonels rarely go.
'Tis a pity; if the sniper
Potted men whose years were riper,
Our artillery promotion
Would be quicker, I've a notion!
and was wounded in that very spot on the next morning, which possibly he richly deserved. Yet close by was the Hidden Garden, a little plot of a few square feet hidden from prying eyes by a thick hedge, wherein grew chrysanthemums that were a never-failing delight to a pair of eyes tired of the ugliness of war's destruction, and a bush of rosemary that smelt of our own West Country. What loving hand had planted it, and will the owner of that hand return some day to find all the familiar houses in heaps of blackened ruins, the well-known trees cut down or mutilated by shell-fire, the peaceful fields furrowed with long trenches and strewn with fragments of shell? If so, perhaps the little garden will still show signs of the unknown who, in return for the beauty with which it gladdened his heart, tore up the weeds that bid fair to choke it and tended the flowers as best he could. And perhaps the very hand that planted the flowers will, on a more peaceful November 1, lay a bunch of them on each of the nameless graves that lie near by. And perhaps Suicide Corner will again become the centre of a wayside village, and the troubled air will forget the ceaseless song of the sniper's bullet and the sharp crack of rifle and roar of bursting shell. Only the thickly strewn graves will remain, witnesses that over this quiet spot was once the hunting-ground of Death.
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