A Padre in France Part 14

A few others drift into the refuge, or are pressed in by the crowd outside. The Canadian sister, a competent young woman, has found her way here and settled down her helpless V.A.D. on a valise--a lumpy, uncomfortable seat. A private from a Scottish regiment is here, two Belgians and a Russian staff officer struggle in a narrow s.p.a.ce to adjust their life-belts. A brigadier, a keen-eyed, eager-faced young man, one of those to whom the war has given opportunity and advancement, joins the group. He speaks in French to the Belgians and the Russian. He helps to make the V.A.D. less utterly uncomfortable.

He offers me his flask and then a cigar.

There is one subject of conversation. Will the boat start? The Russian is hopeful. Is not England mistress of the seas? The V.A.D.

is despondent. Once before in a long-ago time of leave the boat did not start. The pa.s.sengers, and she among them, were disembarked. The Scottish private has heard from a friend of his in "the Signals" that German submarines are abroad in the Channel. The brigadier is openly contemptuous of all information from men in "the Signals." The Canadian sister is cheerful. If she were captain of the ship, she says, she would start, and, what is more, fetch up at the other side.

The captain, it appears, shares her spirit. The ship does start. The harbour is cleared and at once the tossing begins. The party between the deckhouses sways and reels. It becomes clear very soon that it will be impossible to stand. But sitting down is difficult. I have to change my att.i.tude. It is not possible for any one else to sit down if I keep my legs stretched out, and the others must sit down or else fall. The brigadier warns the Russian to be careful how he bestows himself.

"Don't put your feet on my haversack," he says. "There's a bottle of hair-wash in it."

The Russian shifts his feet.

"There'll be a worse spill if you trample on mine," I murmur.

"There's a bottle of Benedictine in it."

"Padre!" said the brigadier. "I'm ashamed of you. _I_ had the decency to call it hair-wash."

The Canadian sister laughs loud and joyously.

It is noticed that the Scottish private is becoming white. Soon his face is worse than white. It is greyish green. The Canadian sister tucks her skirts under her. The prospect is horrible. There is no room for the final catastrophe of seasickness. The brigadier is a man of prompt decision.

"Out you go," he says to the man. "Off with you and put your head over the side."

I feel that I must bestir myself for the good of the little party, though I do not want to move. I seize the helpless Scot by the arm and push him out. The next to succ.u.mb is the Russian staff officer.

His face is pallid and his lips blue. The V.A.D. is past caring what happens. The two Belgians are indifferent. The Canadian sister, the brigadier, and I take silent counsel. Our eyes meet.

"I can't talk French," I say.

"I can," said the Brigadier.

He does. He explains politely to the Russian the indecency of being seasick in that crowded s.p.a.ce. He points out that there is one course only open to the sufferer--to go away and bear the worst elsewhere.

Honour calls for the sacrifice. The Russian opens his eyes feebly and looks at the deck beyond the narrow limits of his refuge. It is swept at the moment by a shower of spray. He shudders and closes his eyes again. The brigadier persuades, exhorts, commands. The Russian shakes his head and intimates that he neither speaks nor understands French.

He is a brave and gallant gentleman. Sh.e.l.ls cannot terrify him, nor the fiercest stuttering of the field guns make him hesitate in advance, but in a certain stage of seasickness the ears of very heroes are deaf to duty's call.

A little later I take the cigar from my mouth and crush the glowing end on the deck. I am not seasick, but there are times when tobacco loses its attractiveness. The brigadier becomes strangely silent. His head shrinks down into the broad upturned collar of his coat. Only the Canadian sister remains cheerfully buoyant, her complexion as fresh, her cheeks as pink as when the rain washed them on the quay.

The throbbing of the engines ceases. For a brief time the ship wallows in the rolling seas. Then she begins to move backwards towards the breakwater of the harbour. The brigadier struggles to his feet and peers out.

"England at last," he says. "Thank goodness."

Women, officers, and men fling off the life-belts they have worn and crowd to the gangways. With shameless eagerness they push their way ash.o.r.e. The voyage is over.

Along the pier long trains are drawn up waiting for us. We crowd into them; lucky men, or foreseeing men with seats engaged beforehand, fill the Pullman cars of the train which starts first. It runs through the sweet familiar English country incredibly swiftly and smoothly. Luncheon is served to us. On this train, at least, there still are restaurant cars. We eat familiar food and wonder that we ever in the old days grumbled at railway fare. We lie back, satisfied, and smoke.

But there is in us an excitement which even tobacco will not soothe.

The train goes swiftly, but not half swiftly enough. We pa.s.s town and hamlet. Advertis.e.m.e.nt h.o.a.rdings, grotesque flat images of cows, outrageous commendations of whisky or pills, appear in the fields.

We are getting near London. Pipes are laid by. We fidget and fret.

The houses we pa.s.s are closer together, get closer still, merge into a sea of grey-slated roofs. The air is thick, smoke-laden. The train slows down, stops, starts again, draws up finally by the long platform.

Then----! To every man his own dreams of heaven hereafter. To every man his own way of spending his leave.

CHAPTER XVII

A HOLIDAY

Holidays, common enough in civil life, are rare joys in the B.E.F.

Leave is obtainable occasionally. But n.o.body speaks of leave as "holidays." It is a thing altogether apart. It is almost sacred. It is too thrilling, too rapturous to be compared to anything we knew before the war. We should be guilty of a kind of profanity if we spoke of leave as "holidays." It ought to have a picturesque and impressive name of its own; but no one has found or even attempted to find an adequate name for it. If we were pagans instead of professing to be Christians, if we danced round fountains and set up statues of Pan for our worship and knew nothing of the Hebrew spirit, we might get a name for "leave" out of the vocabulary of our religious life.

Being what we are we cannot do that, but we rightly decline to compare leave with ordinary holidays.

Only a few men in the army succeed in getting what is properly called a holiday, a day or two off work with a change of scene. I got one, thanks to M. It is one of the many things, perhaps the least of them, for which I have to thank his friendship.

M. had formed an exaggerated, I fear a totally erroneous, idea of my powers of entertaining men. It occurred to him that it would be a good thing if I gave lectures to the men of the cavalry brigade to which he was attached. What he said to the general who commanded the division I do not know, but somehow, between the general and M., the thing was worked. I found myself with a permit to travel on railways otherwise barred to me and three golden days before me.

No one can say that life in my three camps was dull. Life is never dull or monotonous for a man who has plenty of pleasant work to do and a party of good friends as fellow-workers. But a change is always agreeable, and I looked forward to my trip with impatient excitement.

It was like being a schoolboy again and going forth to the Crystal Palace with money in my pocket, an entire half-crown, to be dribbled away in pennyworths of sherbet and visits to curious side-shows. That party was an annual affair for us that came in June as a celebration of the Queen's birthday. My visit to M. was in August, but the weather was still full summer.

As a lecturing tour that expedition was a flat failure. M.'s cavalry, officers and men, were frankly bored and I realised from the very start that I was not going to justify whatever M. said to the general about me.

In every other respect the holiday was a success. I enjoyed it enormously and I gained some very interesting experience. I saw French rural life, a glimpse of it. Cavalry cannot be concentrated in large camps as infantry are. When they are not wanted for fighting they are scattered in small parties over some country district where they can get water and proper accommodation for their horses. The men are billeted in farm-houses. The officers live in chateaux and mess in the dining-halls of French country gentlemen if such accommodation is available, or take over two or three houses in a village, sleep where they can and mess in the best room which the interpreter and the billeting officer can find.

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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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 cla.s.ses. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 gra.s.s 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.