M. slept in a farm-house and secured a room adjoining his for my use. I slept on the softest and most billowy feather bed I have ever come across, with another feather bed, also very soft and billowy, over me by way of covering. My room had an earthen floor, a window which would not open, a broken chair and no other furniture of any kind. I do not think that our landlady, the wife of a farmer who was with the colours, had removed her furniture from the room to keep it out of my way. That almost bare room was just her idea of what a bedroom ought to be. Her kitchen and such other rooms as I saw in her house were equally bare.

Unlike the French women whom I met in towns, this farmer's wife was a slattern. She cared neither about her own appearance nor the look of her house. She did not wash her children. But she worked. The land was well tilled and her cattle well tended. There was no sign of neglect in the fields. Things might have been a little better, perhaps, the place more efficiently worked, if her husband had been at home, but there was not room for much improvement. Yet that woman had no one to help her except a very old man, her father-in-law, I think, who was infirm and almost imbecile.

She had four children, but they were hindrances rather than helps. The eldest of them was about eight years old. She did the whole work of the farm herself. I used to hear her getting up at 4 a.m., lighting a fire and opening doors. Peeping through the half-transparent pane of glass in my tiny window, I saw her tending her horse and cows before 5 a.m. She worked on, and worked hard, all day.

The French have not had to face the difficulty of the "one-man business" as we have, because the women of the minor bourgeoisie are willing and able to step straight into their husbands' places and carry on. I learnt that when I lived in towns. The French can go farther in calling up the men who work the land, because their peasant women can do the work of men. The land suffers, I suppose, and the harvests are poorer than in peace time. But if farms in England were left manless as those French farms are, the result would be much more serious in spite of the gallant efforts of the girls who "go on the land."

M. and I tramped about that country a great deal while I was with him. We saw the same things everywhere, cattle well cared for and land well worked by a few old men and women who looked old long before their time.

Our landlady cannot have been an old woman. Her youngest child was a baby in a cradle, but she looked fifty or more. Loss of youth and beauty is a heavy price for a woman to pay for anything. I wonder if she resented having to pay it. At least she has the satisfaction of knowing that she bought something worth while though she paid dearly. She kept her home. She fed her children. As surely as her husband in the trenches she helped to save her country.

I have been assured that the French women have not been so successful as English women in the conduct of war charities. They have not rushed into the hospitals to nurse the wounded with anything like the enthusiasm and devotion of our V.A.D.'s. In the organisation of War Work Depots and the dispatching of parcels to prisoners of war the French women have proved themselves on the whole less efficient than English women. They have not shone in the management of public business, where Englishwomen have been unexpectedly able and devoted.

On the other hand French women seem to have done better than English women in the conduct of their private affairs. This, I think, is true both of the bourgeois and peasant classes. In England the earning power on which the house depends is the man's. When he is taken away he is very badly missed and the home suffers or even collapses. In France the women are more independent economically. They can carry on the business or the farm sufficiently well without the man.

But I did not get permission to visit M.'s cavalry division that I might observe the French peasantry. I went to give lectures to the men. I did that, faithfully exerting myself to the uttermost, but I did it very badly. I suppose I am not adaptable. Certainly the conditions under which I lectured destroyed any faint chance of my succeeding, before I began.

It has been my lot to lecture under various circumstances to widely different kinds of audiences. I have been set up at the end of a drawing-room in a house of culture in the middle west of the U.S.A. I have stood beside a chairman on a platform in an English hall. Never before had I been called upon to lecture in a large open field, standing in the sunlight, while my audience reclined peacefully on the grass under a grove of trees. Never before had I watched my audience marched up to me by squadrons, halted in front of me by the stern voices of sergeants, and sitting down, or lying down, only after I had invited them to do so. It was a very hot afternoon. I do not wonder that half the men went to sleep. I should have liked to sleep too.

I lectured that same day in another field to a different body of men. There I was even more uncomfortable. Two thoughtful sergeants borrowed a table from a neighbouring house and I stood on it. That audience stayed awake, perhaps in hope of seeing me fall off the table, but made no pretence of enjoying the lecture.

Yet it was not altogether the strange conditions of the performance which worried me. I should, I think, have come to grief just as badly with those audiences if they had been collected into rooms or halls. I was out of touch with the men I was talking to. I did not understand them or how to address them. I had some experience, experience of six months or so, of soldiers; but that was no help to me. These were soldiers of a kind quite new to me. They belonged to the old army. Officers and men alike were professionals, not amateurs soldiering by chance like the rest of us.

The cavalry is, with the possible exception of the Guards, the only part of our force in which the spirit of the old army survives. Every infantry battalion has been destroyed and renewed so often since the war began that the original personality of the thing, the sense of memory, the link with the past and all its traditions, no longer survives. An infantry regiment bears an old name; but it is a new thing. Its resemblance to the regiment which bore the name before the war is superficial, a thin veneer. In spirit, outlook, tone, interest, tradition, in all but courage and patriotism, it is different. In the cavalry this great change has not taken place.

The cavalry suffered heavily in the early days of the war and has lost many men since. Large numbers of recruits have come in to make good the losses. But the number of new men has never been so great as to destroy the old regiment's power of absorption. Recruits have been digested by the original body. They have grown up in the tradition of the regiment and have been formed by its spirit. The difference between the cavalry troopers and the infantry privates of the army of to-day is difficult to define; but it is very easily felt and plain to recognise.

Perhaps it is most clearly seen in the attitude of men towards their officers. In the old army officers were a class apart. Everything that could be done was done to emphasise the distinction between officers and men. And the distinction was a real, not an artificial thing. The officer was different from the men he commanded. He belonged to a different class. He had been educated in a different way. He was accustomed before he joined the army and after he left it to live a life utterly unlike the life of the men he commanded. It can scarcely have been necessary to deepen by disciplinary means the strong, clear line between officers and men.

In the new army all that can be done by regulations is done to keep up the idea of the officer super class. But the distinction now is an artificial one, not a real one. Neither in education, social class, manner of life, wealth, nor any other accident are our new officers distinct from the men they command.

For the men of the old army the officer was a leader because he was recognisably in some sense a superior. He might be a good officer or a poor one, brave and efficient or the reverse. Whatever his personal qualities he was an officer, a natural leader.

For the men of the new army an officer is an officer more or less by accident. No one recognises any kind of divine right to leadership. Discipline may insist, does quite rightly insist, on due respect to officers as such; but everybody feels and knows that this is a mere question of expediency. Men cannot act together unless some one commands; but it does not follow that the man who gives the orders is in any permanent way the superior of the men who receive them.

What has really happened during the war is that the army has changed in the essential spirit of its organisation. It is no longer built on the aristocratic principle like the army of Louis XIV. It has been democratised and is approximating to the type of Napoleon's armies or Cromwell's Ironsides. The shell of the old organisation is there still. The life within the shell is different.

I do not know how the men of the old army regarded their generals and officers in high command. If we may trust Kipling they had, sometimes at least, a feeling of strong personal affection and admiration for certain commanders.

"He's little, but he's wise, And he does not advertise, Do you, Bobs?"

Very likely the cavalry men still have this kind of feeling for their generals. The men of the brigade I visited certainly ought to have loved their general. He did a great deal for them. But the new army does not seem to have any feeling either of respect or contempt for its generals.

Nothing surprised me more when I became intimate with the men than their attitude towards their commanding officers. I had read of the devotion of armies to their leaders. We are told how Napoleon's soldiers idolised him; how Wellington's men believed in him so that they were prepared to follow him anywhere, confident in his genius. Misled by newspaper correspondents, I supposed that I should find this sort of thing common in France. I had often read of this general and that as beloved or trusted by his men.

In fact no such spirit exists. Very often the men do not know the name of the commander of the particular army, or even the brigade, to which they belong; so little has the personality of the general impressed itself on the men. Very often I used to meet evidences of personal loyalty to a junior officer, a company commander, or a subaltern. Occasionally men have the same feeling about a colonel. They never seem to go beyond that. There was not a trace of admiration for or confidence in any one in high command. It was not that the men distrusted their generals or disliked them. Their attitude was generally neutral. They knew nothing and cared very little about generals.

Perhaps men never did idolise generals, and historians, like newspaper correspondents, are simply inventing pretty myths when they tell us about the hero worship paid to Napoleon, Wellington, and the rest.

Perhaps the fact is that the conditions of modern warfare tend to obscure the glory of a general. He can no longer prance about on a horse in front of lines of gaping men, proudly contemptuous of the cannon balls which come bounding across the field of battle from the enemy's artillery. His men are inclined to forget his existence, usually do remain ignorant of his name because they do not see him. One is tempted to wonder whether the formal—and very wearisome—inspections which are held from time to time behind the lines, generally on cold and rainy days, are not really pathetic efforts of kings and generals to assert themselves, to get somehow into the line of vision of the fighting men.

Perhaps it may be that generals, through no fault of their own, have lost that "plaguy trick of winning victories" which bound the heart of Dugald Dalgetty to Gustavus Adolphus. Victories, so far as we can see, are things which do not occur in modern warfare, or, at all events, do not occur on the western front. If any one did win a victory of the old-fashioned kind it is quite possible that he might become the hero of the soldier.

It would be very interesting to know what the feelings of soldiers of other armies are towards their generals. The German people seem to idolise von Hindenburg. Have the German soldiers any kind of confidence in his star? Von Mackensen has some brilliant exploits to his credit. Does Fritz, drafted into a regiment commanded by him, march forward serenely confident of victory?

Our men do no such thing. They have unshaken confidence in themselves. They are sure that their company commanders will not fail them or their colonels let them down. But they have no kind of feeling, good or bad, about their generals.



CHAPTER XVIII

PADRES

The name "padre" as used in the army describes every kind of commissioned chaplain, Church of England, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, or Nonconformist. The men lump them all together. I have heard a distinction made between "pukka" padres and those who have not enjoyed the advantages of episcopal ordination. But such denominational feeling is extremely rare. As a rule a padre is a padre, an officially recognised representative of religion, whatever church he belongs to. The same kind of character, the same general line of conduct, are expected in all padres. We shall get a side light, if no more, on the much-discussed question of the religion of the army if we can arrive at an understanding of the way in which the padre strikes the average man.

The statistical method of arriving at knowledge is chiefly useful for purposes of controversy. Any one with access to official records might set out for admiration the hierarchy of padres, ranging from the Chaplain-General to the humble C.F. Fourth Class, might enumerate the confirmations held, the candidates presented, the buildings erected, perhaps the sermons preached. It would then be possible to prove that the Church is doing her duty by the soldiers or that the Church is failing badly, whichever seemed desirable to prove at the moment.

That is the great advantage of the statistical method. It establishes beyond all possibility of contradiction the thing you want to establish. But if you do not want to establish anything, if you merely want to find out something, statistics are no use at all. You are driven to other ways of getting at the truth, ways much less definite and accurate.

I wish there were more pictures of army chaplains. There are a few. I do not recollect that Bairnsfather ever gave us one, but they turn up from time to time in the pages of Punch. There was one in which a senior curate in uniform—the story is told in France of a much more august person—is represented waving a farewell to a party of French soldiers, expressing the hope que le bon Dieu vous blesserait toujours. We need not concern ourselves with his French. Staff officers and even generals have made less excusable blunders.

What is interesting is the figure and face of the young man. He is alert and plainly very energetic. He is full of the spirit of comradeship. One glance at him convinces you that he means to be helpful in every possible way to every human being he comes across. He is not going to shirk. He is certainly not going to funk. You feel sure as you look at him that he will keep things going at a sing-song, that a canteen under his management will be efficiently run. He is a very different man indeed from that pre-war curate of Punch's whose egg has become proverbial, or that other who confided to an admiring lady that, when preaching, he liked every fold of his surplice to tell. He is not intellectual, but he is not, in practical matters, by any means a fool.

His sermons will be commonplace, but—you congratulate yourself on this—they will certainly be short, and he will neither be surprised nor hurt if nobody listens to them. There will be nothing mawkish about his religion and he will not obtrude it over much, but when he starts the men singing "Fight the good fight," that hymn will go with a swing. In the officers' mess, when the shyness of the first few days has worn off, he will be recognised as "a good sort." The men's judgment, expressed in the canteen after a football match, will differ from the officers' by one letter only. The padre will be classed as "a good sport."

There are other sketches of padres, and they do not always represent men of the senior-curate age. There is one, for instance, which serves as an advertisement of a tobacco, in which the chaplain is a man of forty or forty-five. Before the war he must have been vicar of a fair-sized parish, very well organised. And it is not always the "good sort" qualities which the artist emphasises. There is a suggestion occasionally of a certain stiffness, a moral rigidity as of a man not inclined to look with tolerant eyes on the "cakes and ale" of life.

Sometimes we get a hint of a consciousness of official position. It is not that the padre of these pictures is inclined to say "I'm an officer and don't you forget it." He is not apparently suspected of that. But he is a man who might conceivably say "I'm a priest and it won't do for me to let any one forget that."

Yet, even in these pictures, we are left with the feeling that the men who sat for them were competent and in their way effective. There is no suggestion of feebleness, the characteristic of the pre-war cleric which most commonly struck the artist. And we recognise that the clergy have discarded pose and affectation along with the dog collars which most of them have left behind in England. Freed from the society of elderly women, the British cleric has without difficulty made himself very much at home in the company of men.

That is the impression we get of the padre from the artists who have drawn pictures of him. But there are not nearly enough of these pictures to make us sure that it is in just this way that the men in France regard the clergy who have gone on active service. The fact is that the artists who have sketched generals and staff officers in hundreds, subalterns in thousands, and men of the ranks in uncountable numbers, have not taken very much notice of the padres. They felt perhaps that the clergy did not really count for much in army life.

Fortunately it is not only in the drawing of artists that the general opinion finds expression. The average man, a very sure and sane judge of worth, cannot use pencil, brush, or paint; but he has other ways of expressing himself. For instance he labels whole classes with nicknames.

Consider the various names for the enemy which are current in the trenches. "Hun" was not the invention of the army. It came from the newspapers. The soldier uses it, but not with delight. He prefers "Boche"; but that was not his own word either. It originated with the French. And there is a noticeable difference between the way a Frenchman and an Englishman say "Boche." The Frenchman hisses it. In his mouth it is eloquent of a bitter hatred for something vile. An Englishman says "Boche" quite differently. You feel as you listen to him that he regards his enemy as brutal and abominable, but also as swollen, flatulent, and somewhat ridiculous.

"Fritz" and not "Boche" is our own invention in the way of a name for the enemy. It expresses just what the men feel. "Fritz" whom we "strafe" continually is in the main a ridiculous person, and any healthy-minded man wants to rag him. There is an inflated pomposity about Fritz; but given the necessary hammering he may turn out to be a human being like ourselves. He wants to get home just as we do. He likes beer, which is very hard to come by for any of us, and he enjoys tobacco.

Or take another nickname. Generals and staff officers are called "Brass Hats." The name was fastened on them early in the war and it still sticks. Perhaps if we were starting fresh now we should give them another name, a kindlier one. For a "Brass Hat," if such a thing existed, would be more ornamental than useful. It would occupy a man's time in polishing it, would shine, no doubt agreeably, on ceremonial occasions, but would be singularly uncomfortable for daily wear. Is that the sort of way the fighting men thought of the staff after Neuve Chapelle? The name suggests some such general opinion and the name passed into general use.

"Padre" is another nickname; but a friendly one. I should much rather be called a padre than a Brass Hat. I should much rather be called a padre than a parson. It is an achievement, something they may well be proud of, that the old regular chaplains were spoken of by officers and men alike as padres. I, who had no part in winning the name, feel a real satisfaction when I open a letter from man or officer and find that it begins "Dear Padre."

And yet—there is a certain playfulness in the name. A padre is not one of the serious things in army life. No such nickname attaches or could attach to a C.O. or a sergeant-major. They matter. A padre does not matter much. Religion, his proper business, is an extra, like music lessons at a public school. Music is a great art, of course. No one denies it, chiefly because no normal boy thinks about it at all. The real affairs of life are the Latin grammar and the cricket bat. There is a master who gives music lessons to those who want such things. He may be an amiable and estimable man; but compared to a form master or the ex-blue who is capable of making his century against first-class bowling, he is nobody.

Some feeling of that kind finds expression in the nickname "padre." It is not contempt. There is not room for real contempt alongside of the affection which the name implies. It's just a sense that, neither for good nor evil, is the padre of much importance. It is impossible to imagine King Henry speaking of Thomas a Becket as the padre. He hated that archbishop, and he also feared him, so he called him, not a padre, but a turbulent priest.

Is the kingdom of heaven best advanced by men who strike the world as being "padres" or by "turbulent priests"? It is a very nice question.

There is yet another way in which we get at that most elusive thing, popular opinion. Stories are told and jokes passed from mouth to mouth. It is not the least necessary that the stories should be true, literally. They are indeed much more likely to give us what we want, a glimpse into the mind of the average man, if they are cheerily unconnected with sordid facts. No one supposes that any colonial colonel ever begged his men not to address him as "Sam" in the presence of an English general. But the story gives us a true idea of the impression made on the minds of the home army by the democratic spirit of the men from overseas.

I only know one padre story which has become universally popular. It takes the form of a dialogue.

Sentry: "Who goes there?"

Padre: "Chaplain."

Sentry: "Pass, Charlie Chaplin, and all's well."

It is not a very instructive story, though the pun is only fully appreciated when we realise that it depends for its value on the contrast between a man whose business is the comedy of grimace and one who is concerned with very serious things. That in itself is a popular judgment. Religion is a solemn business, and the church stands against the picture house in sharp contrast; the resemblance between chaplain and Chaplin being no more than an accident of sound.

There are other stories—not "best sellers," but with a respectable circulation—which throw more light on the way the padre is regarded. For instance, a certain fledgling curate was sent to visit a detention camp. He returned to his senior officer and gave a glowing account of his reception. The prisoners, no hardened scoundrels as he supposed, had gathered round him, had listened eagerly while he read and expounded a chapter of St. John's Gospel, had shown every sign of pious penitence. Thrusting his hand in his pocket while relating his experience, this poor man found that his cigarette case, his pipe, his tobacco pouch, his knife, his pencil, and some loose change had been taken from him while he discoursed on the Gospel of St. John.

I like to think that men will tell a story like that about their clergy. The padre, an ideal figure, who is the hero of it, will fail to win respect perhaps. He will, if he preserve his innocence, win love. There will come a day when even those prisoners will——. See Book I of Les Miserables and the Gospel generally.

A chaplain, this time no mere boy, but a senior man of great experience, was called on to hold a service for a battalion which was to go next day into the firing-line. This particular battalion was fresh from England and had never been under fire. It wanted a religious service. The chaplain preached to it on tithes considered as a divine institution.

I am sure that story is not true. It cannot be. No human being is capable of so grotesque an action. But consider the fact that such a story has been invented and is told. It seems that men—in this case hungry sheep who look up—actually find that the sermons preached to them have no conceivable connection with reality. About to die, they ask for words of life—they are given disquisitions on tithes.

"Well, sir"—I have had this said to me a hundred times—"I am not a religious man." If religion is really presented to the ordinary man as "tithes," or for that matter as a "scheme of salvation," or "sound church teaching," it is no wonder that he stands a bit away from it. I in no way mean to suggest that all religion in the army is of this kind. But the broadly indisputable result of the preaching to which our men have been subjected is this: They have come to regard religion as an obscure and difficult subject in which a few people with eccentric tastes are interested, but which simple men had better leave alone. And the tragedy lies in the fact that the very men who think and speak thus about religion have in them something very like the spirit of Christ.

The padres themselves, the best and most earnest of them, are painfully aware that the ordinary pulpit sermon is remote, utterly and hopelessly, from the lives of the men, is in fact a so many times repeated essay on tithes. And the padres, again the best of them, are not content to be just padres. They feel that they ought to have a message to deliver, that they have one if only they can disentangle it from the unrealities which have somehow got coiled up with it. All the odd little eccentricities in the form of service and the recent fashion of spicing sermons with unexpected swear-words are just pathetic efforts to wriggle out of the clothes of ecclesiastical propriety.

But something more is wanted. It is of little avail to hand round cigarettes before reading the first lesson, or to say that God isn't a bloody fool, unless some connection can be established between the religion which the men have and the religion which Christ taught.

There is another story which should be told for the sake of the light it gives on the way men regard the padres, or used to regard them. They are less inclined to this view now.

A chaplain, wandering about behind the lines, found a group of men and sat down among them. He chatted for a while. Then one of the men said "Beg pardon, sir, but do you know who we are?" The chaplain did not. "I thought not, sir," said the man. "If you did you wouldn't stay. We're prisoners, sir, waiting to be sent off for Field Punishment No. 1."

The story often finishes at that point, leaving it to be supposed that the padre was unpleasantly surprised at finding himself on friendly terms with sinners, but there is a version sometimes told which gives the padre's answer. "It's where I ought to be."

I am not, I hope, over-sanguine, but I think that men are beginning to realise that the padre is not a supernumerary member of the officers' mess, nor concerned only with the small number of men who make a profession of religion; that he is neither a member of the upper, officer, class, nor a mild admirer of the goody-goody, but—shall we say?—a friend of publicans and sinners.

It is a confusing question, this one of the religion of the soldier, who is nowadays the ordinary man, and his relation to the Church or the churches. But we do get a glimpse of his mind when we understand how he thinks of the clergy. He knows them better out in France than he ever did at home, and they know him better. He has recognised the "—— parson" as a padre and a good sport. That is something. Will the padre, before this abominable war is over and his opportunity past, be able to establish his position as something more, as perhaps the minister and steward of God's mysteries?



CHAPTER XIX

CITIZEN SOLDIERS

I stood, with my friend M. beside me, on the top of a hill and looked down at a large camp spread out along the valley beneath us. It was growing dark. The lines of lights along the roads shone bright and clear. Lights twinkled from the windows of busy orderly-rooms and offices. Lights shone, browny red, through the canvas of the tents. The noise of thousands of men, talking, laughing, singing, rose to us, a confused murmur of sound. As we stood there, looking, listening, a bugle sounded from one corner of the great camp, blowing the "Last Post." One after another, from all directions, many bugles took up the sound. Lights were extinguished. Silence followed by degrees. We scrambled down a steep path to our quarters.

"This," I said, "is not an army. It is an empire in arms."

M. would never have made a remark of that kind. He has too much common sense to allow himself to talk big. He is, of all men known to me, least inclined to sentimentality. He did not even answer me. If he had he would probably have pointed out to me that I was wrong. What lay below us, a small part of the B.E.F., was an army, if discipline, skill, valour, and unity are what distinguish an army from a mob.

Yet what I said meant something. I had seen enough of the professional soldiers of the old army, officers and N.C.O.'s, to know that the men who are now fighting are soldiers with a difference. They do not conform to the type which we knew as the soldier type before the war. Neither officers nor men are the same. Only in the cavalry, and perhaps in the Guards, do we now find the spirit, or, if spirit is the wrong word, the flavour of the old army. The professional soldier, save among field officers and the older N.C.O.'s, is becoming rare. The citizen soldier has taken his place.

To say this is to repeat a commonplace. My remark was a commonplace, stale with reiteration. But it is the nature of commonplaces and truisms that they only become real to us when we discover them for ourselves. I was familiar with the idea of the citizen soldier, with the very phrase "an empire in arms," long before I went to France. Yet my earliest experiences were a surprise to me. I had believed, but I had not realised, that our ranks indeed contain "all sorts and conditions of men."

I remember very well the first time that the truism began to assert itself as a truth to me. I was in a soldiers' club, one of those excellent places of refreshment and recreation run by societies and individuals for the benefit of our men. It was an abominable evening. Snow, that was half sleet, was driven across the camp by a strong wind. Melting snow lay an inch deep on the ground. The club, naturally under the circumstances, was crammed. Men sat at every table, reading papers, writing letters, playing draughts and dominoes. They stood about with cups of tea and cocoa in their hands. They crowded round the fires. The steam of wet clothes and thick clouds of tobacco smoke filled the air and dimmed the light from lamps, feeble at best, which hung from ceiling and wall.

In one corner a man sat on a rickety chair. His back was turned to the room. He faced the two walls of his corner. The position struck me as odd until I noticed that he sat that way in order to get a little light on the pages of the book he read. It was Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. It was, I suppose, part of my business to make friends of the men round me. I managed with some difficulty to get into conversation with that man. He turned his chair half round and, starting from Oscar Wilde, gave me his views on prison life. The private soldier, coming under military discipline, is a prisoner, so this man thought. He did not deny that it may be worth while to go to prison for a good cause. But prison life is as galling and abominable for a martyr as for a criminal.

There is a stir among the men. A lady, heavily cloaked and waterproofed, made a slow progress through the room, staring round her with curious eyes. She was a stranger, evidently a distinguished stranger, for she was escorted by a colonel and two other officers. My friend nodded towards her.

"Do you know her?" he asked.

I shook my head. He named a very eminent novelist.

"Doing a tour of the Expeditionary Force, I expect," he said. "I used to review her books before the war. I'd rather like to review the one she'll write about this. Once"—he added this reminiscence after a pause—"I dined in her company in London."

He was a journalist before he enlisted. If he survives he will no doubt write a book, a new De Profundis, and it ought to be worth reading.

I went one afternoon to a railway station to say good-bye to some friends of mine who were off to the firing-line. Troops usually left the base where I was then stationed at 10 or 11 o'clock at night and we did not go to see them off. This party—they were Canadians—started in the afternoon and from an unusual station. The scene was familiar enough. There was a long train, for the most part goods waggons. There were hundreds of laughing men, and a buffet where ladies—those ladies who somehow never fail—gave tea and cocoa to waiting crowds. Sergeants served out rations for the journey. Officers struggled to get their kit into compartments already overfull.

I made my way slowly along the platform, looking for my friends. In halting European French I answered inquiries made of me in fluent Canadian French by a soldier of Quebec. I came on a man who must have been a full-blooded Indian standing by himself, staring straight in front of him with wholly emotionless eyes. On every side of me I heard the curious Canadian intonation of English speech.

I found my friends at last. They were settling down with others whom I did not know into a waggon labelled "Chevaux, 8; Hommes, 40." I do not know how eight horses would have liked a two-days journey in that waggon. The forty men were cheerfully determined to make the best of things. I condoled and sympathised.

From a far corner of the waggon came a voice quoting a line of Virgil. "Forsitan et illis olim meminisse juvabit." It is a common tag, of course, but I did not expect to hear it then and there. The speaker was a boy, smooth-faced, gentle-looking. In what school of what remote province did he learn to construe and repeats bits of the AEneid? With the French-Canadians, the Indian, and all the rest of them, he, with his pathetic little scrap of Latin, was a private in the army of the empire.

It was my exceptional good fortune to be stationed for many months in a large convalescent camp. I might have been attached to a brigade, in which case I should have known perhaps Irish, or Scots, or men from some one or two parts of England; but them only. That camp in which I worked received men from every branch of the service and from every corner of the empire. A knowledge of the cap badges to be seen any day in that camp would have required long study and a good memory. From the ubiquitous gun of the artillery to the FIJI of a South Sea Island contingent we had them all at one time or another.

And the variety of speech and accent was as great as the variety of cap badges. It was difficult to believe—I should not have believed beforehand—that the English language could be spoken in so many different ways. But it was the men themselves, more than their varied speech and far-separated homes, who made me feel how widely the net of service has swept through society and how many different kinds of men are fighting in the army.

I happened one day to fall into conversation with a private, a young man in very worn and even tattered clothes. He had been "up against it" somewhere on the Somme front, and had not yet been served out with fresh kit. The mud of the ground over which he had been fighting was thickly caked on most parts of his clothing, and he was endeavouring to scrape it off with the blade of a penknife. He smiled at me in a particularly friendly way when I greeted him, and we dropped into a conversation which lasted for quite a long time. He showed me, rather shyly, a pocket edition of Herodotus which he had carried about in his pocket and had read at intervals during the time he was fighting on the Somme.

A private who quotes Latin in the waggon of a troop train. A battered soldier who reads Greek for his own pleasure in the trenches, is more surprising still. The Baron Bradwardwine took Livy into battle with him. But there must be ten men who can read Livy for every one who can tackle Herodotus without a dictionary.

A piano is an essential part of the equipment of a recreation hut in France. The soldier loves to make music, and it is surprising how many soldiers can make music of a sort. Pity is wasted on inanimate things. Otherwise one's heart's sympathy would go out to those pianos. It would be a dreadful thing for an instrument of feeling to have "Irish Eyes," "The Only Girl in the World," and "Home Fires," played on it every day and all day long. I am not, I am often thankful for it, acutely musical. But there have been times in Y.M.C.A. huts when I felt I should shriek if I heard the tune of "Home Fires" again.

I was playing chess one afternoon with a man who was beating me. I became so much absorbed in the game that I actually ceased to hear the piano. Then, after a while I heard it again, played in quite an unusual manner. The player had got beyond "Irish Eyes" and the rest of those tunes. He was playing, with the tenderest feeling, one of Chopin's Nocturnes. He asked me afterwards if I could by any means borrow for him a volume of Beethoven, one which contained the "Waldstein" if possible. He confessed that he could not play the "Waldstein" without the score. He was an elderly man, elderly compared to most of those round him. He was in the R.E., a sapper. There must be scores of musicians of taste and culture in the army. I wonder if there was another employed in laying out roads behind the Somme front.

I gained a reputation, wholly undeserved, as a chess player while I was in that camp, and I was generally able to put up some sort of fight against my opponents even if they beat me in the end.

But I was utterly defeated by one man, a Russian. He could speak no English and very little French. He belonged to a Canadian regiment, but how he got into it or managed to live with his comrades I do not know. He and I communicated with each other only by moving the pieces on the chess board. I suppose he was a member of the Russian Church, but on Sundays he attended the services which I conducted. He used to sit as near me as he could and I always found his places for him. He could not read English any more than he could speak it, so the Prayer Book cannot have been much use to him. But there was no priest of his own church anywhere within reach, and he was evidently a religious man. I suppose he found the Church of England service better than none at all.

There was always one difficulty about the Church of England services in that camp. We had to trust to chance for a pianist who could play chants, responses, and hymns, and for a choir who could sing them. The choir difficulty was not serious. It was nearly always possible to get twenty volunteers who had sung in church choirs at home. But a pianist who was familiar with church music was a rare person to find. When found he had a way, very annoying to me, of getting well quickly and going back to his regiment.

I was let down rather badly once or twice by men who were anxious to play for the service, but turned out to be capable of no more than three or four hymns, played by ear, sometimes in impossible keys. I became cautious and used to question volunteers carefully beforehand. One man who offered himself seemed particularly diffident and doubtful about his ability to play what I wanted. I asked him at last whether he had ever played any instrument, organ or harmonium, at a Church of England service.

"Oh yes, sir, often," he said. "Before the war I was assistant organist at ——."

He named a great English cathedral, one justly famous for its music. The next Sunday and for several Sundays afterwards our music was a joy. My friend was one of those rare people who play in such a way that every one present feels compelled to sing.

Looking back over the time I spent in France, it seems as if a long procession of interesting and splendid men passed by me. They came from every rank of society, from many processions and trades.

There were rich men among them, a few, and very many poor men. I have witnessed the signature of a private in a north of England regiment to papers concerned with the transfer of several thousand pounds from one security to another. I have helped to cash cheques for men with large bank balances. I have bought crumpled and very dirty penny stamps from men who otherwise would not have been able to pay for the cup of cocoa or the bun they wanted.

There were men in trouble who came to me with letters in their hands containing news from home which brought tears to their eyes and mine. There were men—wonderfully few of them—with grievances, genuine enough very often, but impossible to remove.

There were men with all sorts of religious difficulties, with simple questions on their lips about the problems which most of us have given up as insoluble on this side of the grave. We met. There was a swiftly formed friendship, a brief intimacy, and then they passed from that camp, their temporary resting-place, and were caught again into the intricate working of the vast machine of war.

We were "ships that pass in the night and speak one another in passing." The quotation is hackneyed almost beyond enduring, but it is impossible to express the feeling better. Efforts to carry on a correspondence afterwards generally ended in failure. A letter or two was written. Then new friends were made and new interests arose. It became impossible to write, because—oddest of reasons—after a time there was nothing to say. The old common interests had vanished.

From time to time we who remained in a camp—workers there—got news of one friend or another, heard that some boy we knew had won distinction for his gallantry. Then we rejoiced. Or, far oftener, we found a well-known name in the casualty lists, and we sorrowed.

Sometimes our friends came back to us, wounded afresh or ground down again to sickness by the pitiless machine. They emerged from the fog which surrounded for us the mysterious and awful "Front," and we welcomed them. But they told us very little. The soldier, whatever his position or education was in civil life, is strangely inarticulate. He will speak in general terms of "stunts" and scraps, of being "up against it," and of "carrying on"; but of the living details of life in the trenches or on the battlefield he has little to say. Still less will he speak of feelings, emotions, hopes, and fears. I suppose that life in the midst of visible death is too awful a thing to talk of and that there is no language in which to express the terrific waves of fear, horror, hope, and exaltation.

Perhaps we may find in the very monstrousness of this war an explanation of the soldier's unceasing effort to treat the whole business as a joke, to laugh at the very worst that can befall him. With men of other nations it is different no doubt. The French fight gloriously and seem to live in a high, heroic mood. The men of our empire, of all parts of it, jest in the presence of terror, perhaps because the alternative to jesting is either fear or tears. Others may misunderstand us. Often we do not understand ourselves. It is not easy to think of Sam Weller or Mark Tapley as the hero of a stricken field. Yet it is by men with Sam Weller's quaint turn of wit and Mark Tapley's unfailing cheerfulness that the great battles in France and Belgium are being won.



TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Minor changes have been made to correct typesetters' errors; otherwise, every effort has been made to remain true to the author's words and intent.

THE END