A Padre in France Part 6

This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served.

Dripping cups and sticky buns are pa.s.sed to them with inconceivable rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for, something the value of which to them is above all measuring with pennies--the friendly smile, the kindly word of a woman. We can partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this work--servile, sticky, dull work--for men who are neither kith nor kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do; without praise, pay, or hope of honour, often without thanks. If "the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom," surely these deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance of surpa.s.sing sweetness.

Perhaps, after all, the hut is well named "Woodbine," and others might be called "Rose," "Violet," "Lily." The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies.

The British part of the war area in France is dotted over with huts more or less like the "Woodbine." They are owned, I suppose, certainly run, by half a dozen different organisations. I understand that the Church Army is now very energetic in building huts, but when I first went to France by far the greater part of the work was done by the Y.M.C.A.

The idea--the red triangle is supposed to be symbolical--is to minister to the needs of the three parts of man--body, mind, and soul. At the bar which stands at one end of the hut men buy food, drink (strictly non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body of the room men play draughts, chess, anything except cards, read papers and write letters. Often there are concerts and lectures. Sometimes there are cla.s.ses which very few men attend. So the mind is cared for.

The atmosphere is supposed to be religious, and the men recognise the fact by refraining from the use of their favourite words even when no lady worker is within earshot. The talk in a Y.M.C.A. hut is sometimes loud. The laughter is frequent. But a young girl might walk about invisible among the men without hearing an expression which would shock her, so long as she remained inside the four walls.

There are also supposed to be prayers every night and there is a voluntary service, of a very free and easy kind, on Sunday evenings.

Those evening prayers, theoretically a beautiful and moving ending to the day's labour, were practically a very difficult business. I have been in huts when the first hint of prayers, the production of a bundle of hymn-books, was the signal for a stampede of men. By the time the pianist was ready to play the hut was empty, save for two or three unwilling victims who had been cornered by an energetic lady.

In the early days the "leader" of the hut was generally a young man of the kind who would join a Christian a.s.sociation in the days before the war, and the lady workers, sometimes, but not always, were of the same way of thinking. They were desperately in earnest about prayers and determined, though I think unfair ways were adopted, to secure congregations. A concert drew a crowded audience, and it seemed desirable to attach prayers to the last item of the performance so closely that there was no time to escape.

I remember scenes, not without an element of comedy in them, but singularly unedifying. A young lady, prettily dressed and pleasant to look at, recited a poem about a certain "nursie" who in the course of her professional duties tended one "Percy." In the second verse nursie fell in love with Percy, and, very properly, Percy with her.

In the third verse they were married. In the fourth verse we came on nursie nursing (business here by the reciter as if holding a baby) "another little Percy." The audience shouts with laughter, yells applause, and wants to encore. The hut leader seizes his opportunity, announces prayers, and the men, choking down their giggles over nursie, find themselves singing "When I survey the wondrous cross."

My own impression is that prayers cannot with decency follow hard on a Y.M.C.A. concert. The mind and soul sides of the red triangle seem to join at an angle which is particularly aggressive. The body side, on the other hand, works in comparatively comfortably with both. Tea and cake have long had a semi-sacramental value in some religious circles, and the steam of cocoa or hot malted milk blends easily with the hot air of a "Nursie-Percy" concert or the serener atmosphere of "Abide with Me."

Yet I am convinced that the evening-prayers idea is a good one and it can be worked successfully for the benefit of many men. I have seen the large hall of one of those Y.M.C.A. huts well filled night after night for evening prayers, and those were not only men who remained in the hall drinking tea or playing games, but many others who came in specially for prayers. A choir gathered round the piano, eager to sing the evening hymn. The hush during the saying of a few simple prayers was unmistakably devotional. It was impossible to doubt that when the benediction fell upon those bowed heads there did abide something of the peace which pa.s.seth all understanding and that hearts were lifted up unto the Lord.

There was, unfortunately, a certain amount of jealousy at one time between the Y.M.C.A. workers and the recognised army chaplains. I think that this is pa.s.sing away. But when I first went to France the relations between the two organisations in no way suggested the ointment which ran down Aaron's beard to the skirts of his garment, the Psalmist's symbol of the unity in which brethren dwelt together.

The Y.M.C.A. workers were perhaps a little p.r.i.c.kly. The men among them, often Free Church ministers, seemed on the lookout for the sort of snubs which Nonconformists often receive from the Anglican clergy at home. The chaplains, especially the Church of England chaplains, appeared to think that they ought to conduct all religious services in the Y.M.C.A. huts. This was unreasonable. If the Church of England had been awake to her opportunity in the early days of the war she could have built church huts all over northern France and run them on her own lines. She missed her chance, not having among her leaders any man of the energy and foresight of Sir A. Yapp.

The Church Army has done much during the last years; but it has been the making up of leeway. The Church once might have occupied the position held by the Y.M.C.A. She failed to rise to the occasion. Her officers, the military chaplains, had no fair cause of complaint when they found that they could not straightway enter into the fruits of other men's labour.

But the little jealousy which existed between the chaplains and the Y.M.C.A. was pa.s.sing away while I was in France, has now, perhaps, entirely disappeared. The war has done little good, that I ever could discover, to any one, but it has delivered the souls of the Church of England clergy who went out to France from the worst form of ecclesiastical sn.o.bbery. There are few of those who tried to work in the army who preserve the spirit of social superiority which has had a good deal to do with the dislike of the Church, which has been I imagine, a much more effective cause of "our unhappy divisions" than any of the doctrines men have professed to quarrel about.

And the Y.M.C.A. workers are less aggressively p.r.i.c.kly than they used to be. The army authorities have weeded out a good many of the original men workers, young students from Free Church theological colleges, and put them into khaki. Their places have been taken by older men, of much larger experience of life, less keen on making good the position of a particular religious denomination. They are often glad to hand over their strictly religious duties to any chaplain who will do them efficiently.

The women workers, a far more numerous cla.s.s, never were so difficult, from the Church of England chaplain's point of view, as the men. They are, in the fullest sense, voluntary workers. They even pay all their own expense, lodging, board, and travelling. They must be women of independent means. I do not know why it is, but well-off people are seldom as eager about emphasising sectarian differences as those who have to work for small incomes. Perhaps they have more chance of getting interested in other things.

It is, I fear, true that the decay of the sectarian--that is to say undenominational--spirit in the Y.M.C.A. has resulted in a certain blurring of the "soul" side of the red triangle. This has been a cause of uneasiness to the society's authorities at home, and various efforts have been made to stimulate the spiritual work of the huts and to inquire into the causes of its failure. I am inclined to think that the matter is quite easily understood. There is less aggressive religiosity in Y.M.C.A. huts than there used to be, because the society is more and more drawing its workers from a cla.s.s which instinctively shrinks from slapping a strange man heartily on the back and greeting him with the inquiry--"Tommy, how's your soul?"

There is no need for anxiety about the really religious work of the huts. That in most places is being done.

CHAPTER IX

Y.S.C.

"Y.S.C." stands for Young Soldiers' Club, an inst.i.tution which had a short, but, I think, really useful existence in the large camp where I was first stationed. There were in that camp large numbers of boys--at one time nearly a thousand of them--all enlisted under age in the early days of the recruiting movement, all of them found by actual trial or judged beforehand to be unfit for the hardship of life in the trenches. They were either sent down from their battalions to the base or were stopped on the way up. For some time their number steadily increased. Like the children of Israel in Egypt, who also multiplied rapidly, they became a nuisance to the authorities.

Their existence in the camp was a standing menace to discipline.

Officially they were men to be trained, fed, lodged, if necessary punished according to the scheme designed for and in the main suitable to men. In reality they were boys, growing boys, some of them not sixteen years of age, a few--the thing seems almost incredible--not fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at home ever managed to send a child of less than fifteen out to France as a fighting man remains mysterious. But they did.

These were besides boys of a certain particularly difficult kind. It is not your "good" boy who rushes to the recruiting office and tells a lie about his age. It is not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy who is so enthusiastic for adventure that he will leave his home and endure the hardships of a soldier's life for the sake of seeing fighting. These boys were for the most part young scamps, and some of them had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but they had the makings of men in them if properly treated.

The difficulty was to know how to treat them. No humane C.O. wants to condemn a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punishment No. 1. Most C.O.'s., even most sergeants, know that punishment of that kind, however necessary for a hardened evildoer of mature years, is totally unsuitable for a boy. At the same time if any sort of discipline is to be preserved, a boy, who must officially be regarded as a man, cannot be allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to refuse to obey orders. That was the military difficulty.

The social and moral difficulty was, if anything, worse. Those boys were totally useless to the army where they were, stuck in a large camp. They were learning all sorts of evil and very little good. They were a nuisance to the N.C.O.'s and men, among whom they lived, and were bullied accordingly. They were getting no education and no suitable physical training. They were in a straight way to be ruined instead of made.

It was an Irish surgeon who realised the necessity for doing something for these boys and set about the task. I do not suppose that he wants his name published or his good deeds advertised. I shall call him J. He was a typical Irishman--in looks, manner, and character one of the most Irishmen I have ever met. He had a wonderful talent for dealing with young animals. The very first time I met him he took me to see a puppy, a large, rather savage-looking creature which he kept in a stable outside the camp. One of the creature's four grandparents had been a wolf. J. hoped to make the puppy a useful member of society.

"I am never happy," he said, "unless I have some young thing to train--dog, horse, anything. That's the reason I'm so keen on doing something for these boys."

J. had no easy job when he took up the cause of the boys. It was not that he had to struggle against active opposition. There was no active opposition. Every one wanted to help. The authorities realised that something ought to be done. What J. was up against was system, the fact that he and the boys and the authorities and every one of us were parts of a machine and the wheels of the thing would only go round one way.

Trying to get anything of an exceptional kind done in the army is like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud--one is inclined sometimes to say sticky muddle--surrounded by dense entanglements of barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually give the permission you require, lies just beyond. If you are enormously persevering, and, nose to scent, you hunt on for years, you find yourself at last back with the man from whom you started, having made a full circle of all the authorities there are. Then, if you like, you can start again.

I do not know how J. managed the early stages of the business. He had made a good start long before I joined him. But only an Irishman, I think, could have done the thing at all. Only an Irishman is profane enough to mock at the great G.o.d System, the golden image before which we are all bidden to fall down and worship "what time we hear the sound of" military music. Only an Irishman will venture light-heartedly to take short cuts through regulations. It is our capacity for doing things the wrong way which makes us valuable to the Empire, and they ought to decorate us oftener than they do for our insubordination.

There was an Irishman, so I am told, in the very early days of the war who created hospital trains for our wounded by going about the French railways at night with an engine and seizing waggons, one at this station, one at that. He bribed the French station masters who happened to be awake. It was a lawless proceeding, but, thanks to him, there were hospital trains. An Englishman would have written letters about the pressing need and there would not have been hospital trains for a long time. J. did nothing like that. There was no need for such violence. Both he and the boys had good friends.

Every one wanted to help, and in the end something got done.

A scheme of physical training was arranged for the boys and they were placed under the charge of special sergeants. Their names were registered. I think they were "plotted" into a diagram and exhibited in curves, which was not much use to them, but helped to soothe the nerves of authorities. To the official mind anything is hallowed when it is reduced to curves. The boys underwent special medical examinations, were weighed and tested at regular intervals. Finally a club was established for them.

At that point the Y.M.C.A. came to our aid. It gave us the use of one of the best buildings in the camp, originally meant for an officers'

club. It was generous beyond hope. The house was lighted, heated, furnished, in many ways transformed, at the expense of the Y.M.C.A.

We were supplied with a magic-lantern, books, games, boxing gloves, a piano, writing-paper, everything we dared to ask for. Without the help of the Y.M.C.A. that club could never have come into existence.

And the a.s.sociation deserves credit not only for generosity in material things, but for its liberal spirit. The club was not run according to Y.M.C.A. rules, and was an embarra.s.sing changeling child in their nursery, just as it was a suspicious innovation under the military system.

We held an opening meeting, and the colonel--one of our most helpful friends--agreed to give the boys an address. I wonder if any other club opened quite as that one. In our eagerness to get to work we took possession of our club house before it was ready for us. There was no light. There was almost no furniture. There was no organisation. We had very little in the way of settled plan. But we had boys, eight or nine hundred of them, about double as many as the largest room in the building would hold.

They were marched down from their various camps by sergeants. For the most part they arrived about an hour before the proper time. The sergeants, quite reasonably, considered that their responsibility ended when the boys pa.s.sed through the doors of the club. The boys took the view that at that moment their opportunity began.

They rioted. Every window in the place was shattered. Everything else breakable--fortunately there was not much--was smashed into small bits. A Y.M.C.A. worker, a young man lent to us for the occasion, and recommended as experienced with boys' clubs in London, fled to a small room and locked himself in. The tumult became so terrific that an officer of high standing and importance, whose office was in the neighbourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats. It was one of the occasions on which it is good to be an Irishman. We have been accustomed to riots all our lives, and mind them less than most other people. We know--this is a fact which Englishmen find it difficult to grasp--that cheerful rioters seldom mean to do any serious mischief.

Yet, I think, even J.'s heart must have failed him a little. Very soon the colonel, who was to open the club with his address, would arrive. He was the best and staunchest of friends. He had fought battles for the club and patiently combated the objections in high quarters. But he did like order and discipline.

It was one of our fixed principles, about the only fixed principle we had at first, that the club was to be run by moral influence, not by means of orders and threats. Our loyalty to principle was never more highly tried. It seems almost impossible to bring moral influence to bear effectively when you cannot make yourself heard and cannot move about. Yet, somehow, a kind of order was restored; and there was no uncertainty about the cheers with which the colonel was greeted when he entered the room. The boys in the other rooms who could not see him cheered frantically. The boys on the balcony, the boys standing in the window frames, all cheered. They asked nothing better than to be allowed to go on cheering.

With the colonel were one or two other officers, our benefactor, the local head of the Y.M.C.A., and a solitary lady, Miss N. I do not know even now how she got there or why she came, but she was not half an hour in the room before we realised that she was the woman, the one woman in the whole world, for our job. Miss N. was born to deal with wild boys. The fiercer they are the more she loves them, and the wickeder they are the more they love her. We had a struggle to get Miss N. Oddly enough she did not at first want to come to the club, being at the time deeply attached to some dock labourers among whom she worked in a slum near the quay. The Y.M.C.A.--she belonged to them--did not want to part with her. But we got her in the end, and she became mistress, mother, queen of the club.

The colonel's speech was a success, a thing which seemed beforehand almost beyond hope. He told those boys the naked truth about themselves, what they were, what they had been, and what they might be. They listened to him. I found out later on that those boys would listen to straight talk on almost any subject, even themselves. Also that they would not listen to speech-making of the ordinary kind. I sometimes wonder what will happen when they become grown men and acquire votes. How will they deal with the ordinary politician?

I cherish vivid recollections of the early days of the club. I think of J., patient and smiling, surrounded by a surging crowd of boys all clamouring to talk to him about this or that matter of deep interest to them. J. had an extraordinary faculty for winning the confidence of boys.

There were evenings, before the electric light was installed and before we had any chairs, when Miss N. sat on the floor and played draughts with boys by the light of a candle standing in its own grease. I have seen her towed by the skirt through the rooms of the club by a boy whom the others called "Darkie," an almost perfect specimen of the London gutter snipe. There was a day when her purse was stolen. But I think the rest of the club would have lynched the thief if they could have caught him.

There were wild boxing bouts which went on in pitch darkness, after the combatants had trampled on the candle. There was one evening when I came on a boy lying flat on his back on the floor hammering the keys of the piano, our new piano, with the heels of his boots. The tuner told me afterwards that he broke seventeen strings.

But we settled down by degrees. We had lectures every afternoon which were supposed to be--I think actually were--of an educative kind.

Attendance at these lectures was compulsory. The boys were paraded and marched to the club. As we had not s.p.a.ce in our lecture room for more than half our members, we had one set of boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, another on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sat.u.r.days. Each lecturer delivered himself twice.