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A Padre in France, a non-fiction book by George A. Birmingham |
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Chapter 19. Citizen Soldiers |
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_ 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. [THE END] _ |
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