Leaves from a Field Note-Book Part 18

And this impression of secret and collusive agencies was heightened by the vibration of the air above us, in which the sh.e.l.ls from the batteries made furrows that were audible without being visible, as though the whole firmament were populated with disembodied spirits. The pa.s.sivity of the toilers in the field below us, who, absorbed in their husbandry, regarded not the air above them, and the dreaming beauty of the distant city almost persuaded us that we were the victims of a gigantic illusion. But even as we gazed the city acquired a desperate and tragic reality. Voices of thunder awoke behind the ridge, the air was rent like a garment, and first one cloud and then another and another rose above the city of Ypres, till the white towers were blotted out of sight. A black pall floated over the doomed city, and from that moment the air was never still, as a rhythm of German sh.e.l.ls rained upon it. The storm spread until other villages were involved, and a fierce red glow appeared above the roofs of Vlamertinge.

Yet the clouds and flame that rose above the white towers had at that distance a flagrant beauty of their own, and it was hard to believe that they stood for death, desolation, and the agony of men. Beyond the voluminous smoke and darting tongues of fire, our field-gla.s.ses could show us nothing. But we knew--for we had seen but yesterday--that behind that haze there was being perpetrated a destruction as mournful and capricious as that which in the vision upon the Mount of Olives overtook Jerusalem. Where two were in the street one was even now being taken and the other left; he who was upon the housetop would not come down to take anything out of his house, neither would he who was in the field return to take away his clothes. The great cathedral was crumbling to dust, and saints, apostles, prophets, martyrs were being hurled from their niches of stone, the Virgin alone standing unscathed upon her pedestal contemplating the ruin and tribulation around her. And we knew that while we gazed the roads from the doomed city to Locre and Poperinghe were choked with a terror-stricken stream of fugitives, ancient men hobbling upon sticks, aged women clutching copper pans, and stumbling under the weight of feather-beds, while whimpering children fumbled among their mothers' skirts. What convulsive eddies each of the sh.e.l.ls, whose trajectory we heard ever and anon in the skies overhead, were making in that living stream were to us a subject of poignant speculation.

But as I looked immediately around me I found it ever more difficult to believe that such things were being done upon the earth. The carpenter went on hammering, stopping but for a moment to shade his eyes with his hand and gaze out over the plain, the peasants in the field continued to hoe, a woman came out of a cottage with a child clinging to her skirts, and said, "La guerre, quand finira-t-elle, M'sieu'?" From far above us the song of the lark, now lost to sight in the aerial blue, floated down upon the drowsy air.

XXV

THE DAY'S WORK

It was dinner hour in the Mess. There were some dozen of us all told--the Camp Commandant, the Deputy-a.s.sistant-Adjutant-General, the a.s.sistant-Provost-Marshal, the a.s.sistant-Director of Medical Services, the Sanitary Colonel (which adjective has nothing to do with his personal habits), the Judge-Advocate, two men of the Intelligence, a _padre_, and myself. Most of us were known by our initials--our official initials--for the use of them saves time and avoids pomposity. Our duties were both extensive and peculiar, as will presently appear, for we were in the habit of talking shop. There was, indeed, little else to talk about. When you are billeted in a small town in Flanders with no amus.e.m.e.nts and few amenities--neither theatres, nor sport, nor books--and with little prospect of getting a move on, you can but chronicle the small beer of your quotidian adventures. And these be engaging enough at times.

As we sat down to the stew which our orderly had compounded with the a.s.sistance of the ingenious Mr. Maconochie, the Camp Commandant sighed heavily. "I am a kind of receptacle for the waste products of everybody's mind," he exclaimed petulantly. "This morning I was rung up on the telephone and asked if I would bury a dead horse for the Canadian Division; I told them I hadn't a Prayer Book and it couldn't be done.

Then two nuns called and asked me to find a discreet soldier--_un soldat discret_--to escort them to Hazebrouck; I told them to take my servant, who is a married man with five children. Then an old lady sent round to ask me to come and drown her cat's kittens; I said it was impossible, as she hadn't complied with the Notification of Births Act."

The Mess listened to this plaintive recital in unsympathetic silence.

Perhaps they reflected that as the Camp Commandant is one of those to whom much, in the way of perquisites of office, is given, from him much may legitimately be expected. "Well, you may think yourself lucky you haven't my job," said the Deputy-a.s.sistant-Adjutant-General at length.

"I'm getting rather fed up with casualty lists and strength returns. I'm like the man who boasted that his chief literary recreation was reading Bradshaw, except that I don't boast of it and it isn't a recreation--it's d.a.m.ned hard work. I have to read the Army List for about ten hours every day, for if I get an officer's initials wrong there's the devil to pay. And I spent half an hour between the telephone and the Army List to-day trying to find out who 'Teddy' was. The 102nd Welsh sent him in with their returns of officers' casualties as having died of heart failure on the 22nd inst."

"Well, but who is 'Teddy,' anyhow?" asked the Camp Commandant.

"He is the regimental goat," replied the D.A.A.G. "I suppose they thought it amusing. When I tumbled to it I told their Brigade Headquarters on the telephone that I quite understood their making him a member of their mess, as they belonged to the same species."

"Wait until you've had to track down a case of typhoid in billets," said the R.A.M.C. man who looks after infectious diseases. "I've been on the trail of a typhoid epidemic at La Croix Farm, where a company of the Downshires are billeted, and it made me sad. They had their filters with them and they swore they hadn't touched a drop of impure water, and that they treasured our regulations like the book of Leviticus. And yet the trail of that typhoid was all over my spot chart, and the thing was spreading like one of the seven plagues of Egypt. At last I tracked it down to an Army cook; the rotter had had typhoid about five years ago and simply poisoned everything he touched. He was what we call a carrier."

"What did you do with him?" said the A.D.M.S.

"He won't do any more cooking; I've sent him home. The fellow's a perfect leper, and ought to be interned like an alien enemy."

"Well, I'd rather have your job than mine even if prevention is more honourable than cure," said he whom we know as "Smells," and who has a nose like a fox-terrier's. "I am the _avant-garde_ of the Staff, and you fellows can thank me that you are so merry and bright. If I didn't make my sanitary reconnaissances with my chloride of lime and fatigue parties, where would you all be?"

"We should all be home on sick-leave and very pleased to get it," said the A.P.M. ungratefully.

"The _maire_ thinks I'm mad, of course," continued 'Smells,' "and I can't make him understand that cesspools and open sewers in the street are not conducive to health."

"I expect they think we're rather too fond of spreading broad our phylacteries," said the a.s.sistant Provost Marshal. "Now I'm a sort of licensing authority, Brewster Sessions in fact, for this commune, and the _estaminet_ proprietors think I'm a Temperance fanatic," he said, as he put forth his hand for the whisky bottle. "One of them told me the other day he preferred a German occupation to a British one, because the Huns let him sell as much spirits to their men as he liked. And yet I'm sure the little finger of a French provost-marshal is thicker than my loins any day."

"Yes," said the Camp Commandant, "it's our melancholy duty to be impertinent. I'm supposed to read all you fellows' letters before I stamp them. I'd be rather glad if they were liable to be censored again at the Base or somewhere else _en route_; it would relieve me of any compunction about the first reading, the text and preamble of the envelope would be good enough for me. You fellows write abominably."

"I'm something of a handwriting expert myself," said the A.P.M., ignoring the aspersion. "They have changed the colour of the pa.s.ses again this month, and so I'm engaged in a fresh study of the A.G.'s signature; I believe he changes his style of handwriting with the colour of the pa.s.s. I wonder what is the size of the A.G.'s bank balance," he murmured dreamily; "I believe I could now forge his signature very artistically."

"I wish some one would start a school of handwriting at G.H.Q.," said the A.D.M.S. "I believe I receive more chits than any man on the staff." "Chits," it should be explained, are the billets-doux of the Army wherein officers send tender messages to one another and make a.s.signations.

"Did you hear about that chit the Camp Commandant at the Headquarters of the ----th Corps sent to the A.Q.M.G.?" asked the A.P.M. "No? Well, the A.Q.M.G. of the other Army wrote to Ferrers asking if they had made use of any Ammonal and, if so, whether the results were satisfactory.

Ferrers sent it on to the Camp Commandant for report and the Camp Commandant wrote back a chit saying plaintively, 'This is not understood. For what purpose is Ammonal used--is it a drug or an explosive?' Ferrers told him to ask the Medical Officer attached to Corps headquarters, which he did. Thereupon he wrote back another chit to Ferrers, saying that the M.O. had informed him that 'Ammonal' was a compound drug extensively used in America in cases of abnormal neurotic excitement, and that, so far as he knew, it was not a medical issue to Corps H.Q. He therefore regretted that he was unable to report results, but promised that if occasion should arise to administer it to any of the Corps H.Q. _personnel_ he would faithfully observe the effects and report the same. When the A.Q.M.G. read the reply he betrayed a quite abnormal degree of neurotic excitement; in fact, he was quite nasty about it."

"What the devil did he mean?" asked the A.D.M.S.

"Well, that points the moral of your remarks about handwriting," said the A.P.M. encouragingly. "The Camp Commandant had written what looked like an 'o' in place of an 'a.' Ammonol is a drug; ammonal is an explosive."

"Well, I wish some one would teach the Huns how to write decently." The speaker was Summersby of the Intelligence Corps. The Intelligence are a corps of detectives and have to estimate the strength, the location, and the composition of the enemy's forces. Everything is grist that comes to their mill and they will perform surprising feats of induction. They can reconstruct a German Army Corps out of a Landwehr man's bootlace, his diary, his underclothing, or his shoulder-strap--but the greatest of these is his diary. "I've been studying the diaries of prisoners until I feel a Hun myself. They remind me of the diary I used to keep at school, they are all about eating and drinking. The Hun is a glutton and a wine-bibber. But I found something to-day--'Keine Gefangene' in an officer's field note-book."

"Translate, my Hunnish friend," said the A.P.M.

"No prisoners," replied Summersby shortly.

"I hope you handed the swine over to the P.M.," said the Camp Commandant.

"Well, no," said Summersby. "You see he had a plausible explanation--by the way, what perfect English those German officers talk; I'll bet that man has eaten our bread and salt some time. He said it was a Brigade order to the men not to make the taking of prisoners a pretext for going back to the rear in large parties but to leave them to the supports when they came up. The curious thing is that that officer belongs to the 112th and we've our eye on the 112th. One of their men, a fellow named Schmidt, who surrendered on the 19th of last month, said they'd had an order to take no prisoners but kill them all. His regiment was the 112th," he added darkly.

"The filthy swine!" we cried in a chorus, and our talk grew sombre as we exchanged reminiscences.

"What pleases me about you fellows," said Ponsonby, who had been listening with a languid air, and who was formerly in the F.O. where he composed florid speeches in elegant French for Hague Plenipotentiaries, "is your habits of speech. In diplomacy we contrive to talk a lot without saying anything, whereas Army men manage to talk little and say a great deal. You've got four words in the Army which seem to be a mighty present help in trouble at H.Q. Their sustaining properties are remarkable and they seem to tide over very anxious moments. When you are in a hole you say 'd.a.m.n all,' and when you are asked for instructions you cry 'Carry on.' I suppose it's by sitting tight and using those words with discrimination that you fellows arrive at greatness and attain Brigadier rank. That seems to be the first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns."

"The first thing a third-grade staff-officer learns is to speak respectfully of his superiors," said the A.P.M., as he hurled a cushion at Ponsonby, who caught it with a bow. Ponsonby is irrepressible and, in spite of his supercilious civilian airs, much is forgiven him. He turned to the D.A.A.G. and said, "Hooper, you've forgotten to say grace. For what we have _not_ received"--he added, with a meaning glance at a Stilton cheese which the A.A.G.'s wife has sent out from home and which remained on the sideboard--"the Lord make us truly thankful." This was an allusion to the D.A.A.G.'s sacerdotal functions. For the Adjutant-General and his staff, who know the numbers of all the Field Ambulances, can lay hands--but not in the apostolic sense--upon every chaplain attached thereto; the A.G. is the Metropolitan of them all and can admonish, deprive, and suspend.

The D.A.A.G. ignored the plaintive benediction. "I think we've fixed it up with those Red Cross drivers," he said complacently. The A.G.'s department had been wrestling with the disciplinary problem presented by these birds of pa.s.sage on the lines of communication. "We've decided that they are Army followers under section 176, sub-section 10, of the Army Act, and that you 'follow' the British Army from the moment you accept a pa.s.s to H.Q. My chief called some of them together yesterday, and being in a benevolent humour told them that they were now under military law and might be sentenced to anything from seven days'

field-punishment to the punishment of death. This was _pour encourager les autres_. They looked quite thoughtful."

"That's a nice point," commented Ponsonby pensively. "Should an Army follower be hanged or is he ent.i.tled to be shot? I put it to you," he added, turning to the Judge-Advocate. "I want counsel's opinion."

"I never give abstract opinions," retorted the man of law. "But the safest course would be to hang him first and shoot him afterwards."

"Your counsel is as the counsel of Ahithophel," said Ponsonby. "I'll put you another problem. Is a carrier-pigeon an Army follower? Because Slingsby never has any appet.i.te for dinner" (this was notoriously untrue), "and I have a strong suspicion that he converts--that's a legal expression for fraud, isn't it?--his carrier-pigeons into pigeon-pie.

What is the penalty for fraudulent conversion of an Army follower?"

Slingsby, who in virtue of his aquiline features is known as _Aquila vulgaris_, has charge of the carrier-pigeons and takes large baskets of them out to the Front every day; he is supposed to be training them by an intimate use of pigeon-English not to settle when the sh.e.l.ls explode.

Unfortunately his pigeons are usually posted as "missing," and go to some bourne from which no pigeon has ever been known to return. Ponsonby glances suspiciously at Slingsby's portly figure.

But the Judge-Advocate had stolen away to study a dossier of "proceedings," and his departure was the signal for a general dispersion. "Come and have a drink," said Ponsonby to the "I" man.

"Can't, you slacker," was the reply. "I've got to go and make up an 'I'

summary. 'Notes of an Air Reconnaissance. Distribution of the enemy's forces. Copy of a German Divisional Circular. Notes on the German system of signalling from their trenches.' You know the usual kind of thing.

Just now we're trying to discover how many guns they've got in the batteries of their new formations. We've noticed that their 77-mm.

projectiles now arrive in groups of four, and we suspect that two guns have been withdrawn. But it may be only a blind."

As we turned out into the darkened street to make our way to our respective offices a supply column rumbled over the _pave_, each of the seventy-two motor-lorries keeping its distance like the ships of a fleet. Despatch-riders with blue and white armlets whizzed past on their motor-bicycles, and high overhead was the loud droning hum of the aeroplane going home to roost. The thunder of guns was clearly audible from the north-east. The D.A.A.G. turned to me and said, "It's Hill 60 again. My old regiment's up there. And to-morrow the casualty returns will come in. Good G.o.d! will it never end?"

XXVI

FIAT JUSt.i.tIA

PARQUET du Tribunal de Iere Instance d'Ypres