Leaves from a Field Note-Book Part 19

At last I had found it. I had spent a mournful morning at Ypres seeking out the _procureur du roi_, and I had sought in vain. He was nowhere to be found. Ypres was a city of catacombs, wrapt in a winding-sheet of mortar, fine as dust, which rose in clouds as the German sh.e.l.ls winnowed among the ruins. The German guns had been threshing the ancient city like flails, beating her out of all recognition, beating her into shapes strange, uncouth, and lamentable. The Cloth Hall was little more than a deserted cloister of ruined arches, and the cathedral presented a spectacle at once tragic and whimsical--the bra.s.s lectern still stood upright in the nave confronting a congregation of overturned chairs as with a gesture of reproof. The sight of those scrambling chairs all huddled together and fallen headlong upon one another had something oddly human about it; it suggested a panic of ghosts. Ypres is an uncanny place.

We returned to Poperinghe, our way choked by a column of French troops, pale, hollow-eyed, their blue uniforms bleached by sun and rain until all the virtue of the dye had run out of them. Before resuming our hunt for the _procureur du roi_--who, we now found, had removed from Ypres to Poperinghe--we entered a restaurant for lunch. It was crowded with French officers, with whom a full-bosomed, broad-hipped Flemish girl exchanged uncouth pleasantries, and it possessed a weird and uncomely boy, who regarded A----, the Staff officer accompanying me, with a hypnotic stare. He peered at him from under drooping eyelids, flanking a nose without a bridge, and my companion didn't like it. "He is admiring you," I remarked by way of consolation, as indeed he was. "What do you call it?" said A---- petulantly to a R.A.M.C. officer who was lunching with us. The latter looked at the boy with a clinical eye.

"Necrosis--syphilitic," he said dispa.s.sionately. "And he's handing us the cakes!" A---- exclaimed with horror. "Fetch me an ounce of civet."

We declined the cakes, and, having paid our _addition_, hastily departed to resume our quest of the _procureur_.

Eventually we found the legend set out above. It was a placard stuck on the door of a private house. We entered and found ourselves in a kitchen with a stone floor; j.a.panned tin boxes, calf-bound volumes, and fat registers, all stamped with the arms of Belgium, were grouped on the shelves of the dresser. A courteous gentleman, well-groomed and debonair, with waxed moustaches, greeted us. It was the _procureur du roi_. With him was another civilian--the _juge d'instruction_. They politely requested us to take a seat and to excuse a judicial preoccupation. The _juge d'instruction_ was interrogating an inhabitant of Poperinghe. The _procureur_ explained to me that the _prevenu_ (the accused), who was not present but was within the precincts, was charged with _calomnie_[27] under Section 444 of the _Code Penal_. "But," I exclaimed in astonishment, "are you still administering justice?"

"Pourquoi non?" he asked in mild surprise. It was true, he admitted, that his office at Ypres had been destroyed by sh.e.l.l-fire, the _maison d'arret_--in plain English, the prison--was open to the four winds of heaven, and warders and gendarmes had been called up to the colours. But justice must be done and the majesty of the King of the Belgians upheld.

The King's writ still ran, even though its currency might be limited to the few square miles which were all that remained of Belgian territory in Belgian hands. All this he explained to me with such gravity that I felt further questions would be futile, if not impertinent. I therefore held my tongue and determined to follow the proceedings closely, being not a little curious to observe how the judgment would be enforced.

The witness took the oath to say the truth and nothing but the truth ("rien que la verite"), concluding with the solemn invocation, "Ainsi m'aide Dieu." The parties had elected to have the proceedings taken in French.

"Your name?" said the judge, as he studied the proces-verbal prepared by the _procureur_.

"Jules F----."

"Age?"

"Cinquante-cinq."

"Profession?"

"Cordonnier."

"Residence?"

"Rue d'Ypres 32."

This preliminary catechism being completed, the prosecutor unfolded his tale. He had been drinking the health of His Majesty the King of the Belgians and confusion to his enemies in an _estaminet_ at the crowded hour of 7 P.M. The accused had entered, and in the presence of many of his neighbours had said to him, "Vous etes un Bosche." "Un Bosche!"

repeated the witness indignantly. "It is a gross defamation." With difficulty had he been restrained from the shedding of blood. But, being a law-abiding, peaceful man and the father of a family, he volubly explained, he had laid this information ("denonciation") before the _procureur du roi_.

The judge looked grave. But he duly noted down the testimony, after some perfunctory cross-examination, and, it being read over to the witness, the judge added "Lecture faite," and the persisting witness signed the deposition with his own hand. The prosecutor having retired, two other witnesses, whom he had vouched to warranty, came forward and testified to the same effect. And they also signed their depositions and withdrew.

The magistrate ordered the usher to bring in the accused, who had been summoned to appear by a _mandat d'amener_. He was a stout, dark, convivial-looking soul, with a merry eye, not altogether convinced of the enormity of his delict, and inclined at first to deprecate these proceedings. But the dialectical skill of the magistrate soon tied him into knots, and reduced him to a state of extreme penitence.

"Where were you on the 3rd of April at 7 P.M.?" began the magistrate, making what gunners call a ranging shot. The accused appeared to have been everywhere in Poperinghe except at the _estaminet_. He had been to the butcher's, the baker's, and the candlestick-maker's.

"At what hour did you enter the Cafe a l'Harmonie?"

The accused tried to look as if he now heard of the Cafe "a l'Harmonie"

for the first time, but under the searching eye of the magistrate he failed. He might, he conceded, have looked in there for a thirsty moment.

"Do you know Jules F----?" the magistrate persisted. The accused grudgingly admitted the existence of such a person. "Is he a German?"

asked the magistrate pointedly. The accused pondered. "Would you call him a Bosche?" persisted the magistrate. "I never _meant_ to call him 'a Bosche,'" the accused said in an unguarded moment. The magistrate pounced on him. He had found the range. After that the result was a foregone conclusion. The duel ended in the accused tearfully admitting he thought he must have been drunk, and throwing himself on the mercy of the magistrate.

"It is a grave offence," said the magistrate severely, as he contemplated the lachrymose delinquent. "An _estaminet_ is a public place within the meaning of Section 444 of the Code Penal. Vous avez mechamment impute a une personne un fait precis qui est de nature a porter atteinte a son honneur." "And calculated to provoke a breach of the peace," he added. "It is punishable with a term of imprisonment not exceeding one year." The face of the accused grew long. "Or a fine of 200 francs," he pursued. The lips of the accused quivered. "You may have to go to a _maison de correction_," continued the magistrate pitilessly.

The accused wept.

I grew more and more interested. If this was a "correctional" offence, the magistrate must in the ordinary course of things commit the prisoner to a _chambre de conseil_, thereafter to take his trial before a Tribunal Correctionnel. But chamber and tribunal were scattered to the four corners of the earth.

Here, I felt sure, the whole proceedings must collapse and the magistrate be sadly compelled to admit his impotence. The magistrate, however, appeared in nowise perturbed, nor did he for a moment relax his authoritative expression. He was turning over the pages of the _Code d'Instruction Criminelle_, glancing occasionally at a now wholly penitent prisoner trembling before the majesty of the law. At last he spoke. "I will deal with you," he said with an air of indulgence, "under Chapter VIII. of the Code. You will be bound over to come up for judgment at the end of the war if called upon. You will deposit a _cautionnement_ of twenty francs. And now, gentlemen, we are at your service."

"Fiat just.i.tia ruat coelum," whispered A---- to me, as the prisoner, deeply impressed, opened a leather purse and counted out four greasy five-franc notes.

FOOTNOTE:

[27] Defamation. It is a misdemeanour according to Belgian law.

XXVII

HIGHER EDUCATION

British Headquarters must, I think, be the biggest Military Academy in the world. It has its Sandhurst and its Woolwich and even its Camberley.

It ought long ago to have been incorporated by Order in Council as a University with Sir John French as Chancellor. It has more schools in the Art of War than I can remember, and every School has an Instructor who deserves to rank as a full-time Professor. To graduate in one of those schools you must get a fortnight's leave from your trenches or your battery, at the end of which time you return to do a little post-graduate work of a very practical kind with the aid of a machine-gun or a trench-mortar. At the beginning of the war higher education at G.H.Q. was somewhat neglected, and the company officer who desired to improve himself in the lethal arts had to be content with private study. Company officers went in for applied chemistry by making flares out of a test-tube full of water, delicately balanced in a bully-beef tin containing sodium. The tins were tied to the barbed-wire entanglements in front of our trenches, and when the stealthy Hun, creeping on his stomach, b.u.mped against the wire the test-tube overflowed into the tin and a lurid patch of greenish flame revealed the clumsy visitor to our look-outs. That was before we were supplied with calcium flares. Then, too, the sappers went in for experimental research by making trench-mortars out of old stove-pipes.

To-day all that is changed. A chemical corps has come out to join the sappers, and the gunners have received some highly finished trench-mortars from Vickers's. A trench mortar is a kind of toy howitzer and very useful when you want to try conclusions with a neighbouring trench at short range. The mortars are not exactly things to play with, and so two "schools" of mortars have been inst.i.tuted to teach R.G.A. men how to handle them. Every morning at nine o'clock two young subalterns meet their cla.s.s of fifty pupils in a chateau, and explain with the aid of a diagram on a blackboard the internal economy of the mortar and its 50-lb. bomb, the adjustment of angles of elevation to ranges, and the respective offices of fuse, charge, and detonator. When the cla.s.s have had enough of this they go off to a neighbouring field to simulate trench warfare and hold a demonstration. This is real sport. They have dug a sector of trenches, duly traversed, and at some two or three hundred yards distance have dug another sector and decorated it realistically with barbed-wire entanglements. Thither one afternoon we conveyed the mortar to the first trenches on an improvised carriage, placed it behind one of the traverses, and duly clamped it down. The subaltern took up a periscope and got the thread-line on the target--you find the range without instruments and by your own intuitions. "Three hundred, I think," he remarked pensively. A pupil adjusted the range indicator at 7130 to get the elevation, and his a.s.sistant took up what looked like a huge jar of preserved ginger. It was the bomb. Having put the tail to it he inserted the detonator. "Fuse at 27." He set the indicator with as much care as if he were setting the hands of his watch. The man took the fuse delicately, put in the test-tube and attached the lanyard. These operations had been closely followed by the cla.s.s, who made a circle round the bomb like a football "scrum." It was now time to line the trenches, for the "tail" of the bomb is apt to kick viciously when the thing is fired. As they spread out, the man removed the two safety-pins in the top of the fuse and pulled the lanyard. There was a voice of thunder and a sheet of flame, followed by what seemed an interminable pause. We scanned the brown furrows in front of us and suddenly the earth shot skywards in a fan; a cloud of dirty-black smoke floated over our target. The whole cla.s.s leapt the parapet and streamed away across the furrows like a pack of hounds in full cry, until they suddenly disappeared below the surface of the earth. We followed and found them standing in a huge crater whose sides were hollowed out as neatly as those of a cup. "Done it again," said the subaltern complacently, "we've never had a blind."

At the Machine-gun School they do things on a larger scale, and Wren's could teach them nothing in the art of cramming. The Instructor reckons to put his cla.s.s of 200 officers and men through a six months' course in a fortnight. There is need for it. The Germans started this war with eleven machine-guns (it is now anything from twenty to forty) to a battalion. We started with two. For years they have enlisted, trained, and paid a special cla.s.s of men to man them. Consequently we had a great deal of leeway to make up. We are making it up, hand over fist, thanks to the Instructor, one of the most brilliant and devoted officers I know, and a man who spends his nights in inventing or perfecting improvements. He has got a pocket edition of a machine-gun made of tempered steel and weighing only 27 lb., as against our old one, which is of gun-metal and weighs 58 lb.--a material difference when it is a question of an advance. The new one, he explains somewhat illogically, with paternal pride, can be carried into action "like a baby." Having decided to give it a trial we carried it tenderly to a quarry and proceeded to "feed" it with a belt of cartridges. The Instructor set up a small stick against the bank of a gravel quarry and returned and adjusted the tangent-sight at 100 on the standard. He got the fore-sight and back-sight in a line on the stick, seized the traversing-handles, released the safety-catch, and pressed the b.u.t.ton with his right thumb with the persistency of a man who cannot make the waiter answer the electric bell. "Tap--tap--tap." There was a series of explosions as though the sparking plug of a motor-bicycle was playing tricks. The target danced like a thing possessed. It hopped and skipped and curtsied under that deadly stream of bullets. Then he slowly swept that gravel bank with the traversing handles till the pebbles jumped like hailstones. "I think she'll do," he remarked appreciatively as he folded up the tripod.

The R.E. is the Army's school of technology. To do a survey or make a bridge or lay a telephone is all in the day's work. But your sapper is a man of ideas, and is for ever seeking out new inventions. So he has turned his attention to chemistry, and "R.E." has a chemical corps which has put aside the blow-pipe and the test-tube at home to come out and study the applied chemistry of war. Just now they are engaged in discovering the most effective method of laying noxious gases. Copper vessels of ammonia in a trench to disperse the gas when it gets there are all very well, but by that time you may have more pressing attentions of the enemy to engage you; the thing is to prevent the gas getting there. Hence ingenious minds are considering how to project with a spray something upon the advancing fog which will bring it to earth in the form of an innocuous compound. Spray that something over the parapet, and if you can spray it far enough and wide enough you may precipitate the deadly green and brown mists into chlorides or bromides which will be as harmless as bleaching-powder and not less salubrious.

Others have turned their attention to automatic flares. You can get a startling illuminant if you suspend a test-tube containing sulphuric acid in a vessel of chlorate of potash, and it will be all the better if you add a little common sugar and salt. You balance your test-tube in the hollow of a bamboo stick and fill the top knot of the stick with the chlorate of potash; then you plant your sticks, not too securely, outside your barbed-wire entanglements, and string them together with a trip-wire. As for the patrolling Hun who b.u.mps against that trip-wire, it were better for him that a millstone were hung round his neck.

This is Higher Education and post-graduate research. But elementary education is not neglected. At the H.Q. of the --th Corps is an O.T.C.

where privates in the H.A.C. and the Artists practise the precepts of the _Infantry Manual_ and study night operations in the meadows within sound of the guns.

Truly it is, in the words of the stout Puritan, a nation not slow and dull but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.

XXVIII

THE LITTLE TOWNS OF FLANDERS AND ARTOIS

The little towns of Flanders and Artois are Aire, Hazebrouck, Bethune, Armentieres, Bailleul, Poperinghe, and Ca.s.sel. They are known in the Army vernacular as Air, Hazybrook, Betoon, Arm-in-tears, Ballyhool (occasionally Belial), Poperingy, and Ka.s.sel. The fairest of these is Ca.s.sel. For Ca.s.sel is set upon a hill which rises from the interminable plain, salient and alluring as a tor in Somerset, and seems to say to the fretful wayfarer, "Come unto Me all ye that are weary, and I will give you rest." For upon the hill of Ca.s.sel the air is sweet and fresh, the slopes are musical with a faint lullaby of falling showers, as the wind plays among the birches and the poplars, and over all there is a great peace. The motor-lorries avoid the declivities of Ca.s.sel, and the hors.e.m.e.n pa.s.s by on the other side. Some twenty windmills--no less and perhaps more--are perched like dovecots on the hill, lifting their sails to the blue sky. Some day I will seek out a notary at Ca.s.sel and will get him to execute a deed of conveyance a.s.signing to me, with no restrictive covenants, the freehold of one of those mills, for I have coveted a mill ever since I succ.u.mbed to the enchantments of _Lettres de mon moulin_. True, Flanders is not Provence, and the croaking of the frogs, croak they never so amorously, among the willows in the plains below is a poor exchange for the chant of the _cigale_. But these mills look out over a landscape that is now dearer to me than Abana and Pharpar, for many a gallant friend of mine lies beneath its sod.

Ca.s.sel is approached by a winding road that turns and returns upon itself like a corkscrew, and is bordered by an avenue of trees. It has a bandstand--what town in Flanders and Artois has not?--and a church.

Cheek by jowl with the church is a place of convenience, which seems to me profane in more senses than one. I have never been able to make up my mind whether such secularisation of a church wall is the expression of anti-clerical antipathies, or of a clerical common-sense peculiarly French in its practical and unblushing acceptance of the elementary facts of life. But about Ca.s.sel I am not so sure. The sight of that shameless annexe is too familiar in France to please our fastidious English tastes--it seems to express a truculent nonconformity, it is too like a dissenting chapel-of-ease.

Wherever G.o.d erects a house of prayer The devil always builds a chapel there.

I have never had the courage to solve my uncertainties by b.u.t.tonholing a Frenchman and asking him what is the truth of the matter. I am sure Anatole France could supply me with any number of whimsical explanations, all of them suggestive, and not one of them true.