Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front Part 8

How many preferred a really good novel is another and a more invidious matter; but nothing was more refreshing than the way the older masters held their own. d.i.c.kens was in constant demand, especially among the older men; and they really read him, judging by the days the immortal works stayed out. Again, it was worth noting that here in France _A Tale of Two Cities_ had twice as many readers as _Pickwick_, which came next in order of popularity. Thackeray was not fully represented, but we had all his best and they were always out. Of the Brontes we had next to nothing, of Reade and Trollope far too little; but _It is Never too Late to Mend_ enchanted a Sapper, a Machine Gunner, and a Red Cross man in turn, while _Orley Farm_ would have headed our first day's list had it been there in time. George Eliot was never without readers, but Miss Braddon had more, and _The Woman in White_ only one! After d.i.c.kens, however, the most popular Victorian was the first Lord Lytton.

I confess it rejoiced my heart to hand out the protagonists of a belittled age at least as freely as their 'opposite numbers' of the present century. But I had my surprises. Scott (Sir Walter!) was a firm wall-flower for the first fortnight; probably the Jocks knew him off by heart; and, of course, the same thing may apply to their unnatural neglect of the so-called Kaleyard School of other days. There was, at any rate, nothing clannish about their reading. It was a Jock who took _The Unspeakable Scot_ for its only airing; and more than three-fourths of my Stevensonians were Sa.s.senachs. But one could still conjure with the name of Stevenson, as with many another made in his time. Mr.

Kipling's soldiers are adored by legions created in their image. Sir H.

Rider Haggard was never on the Rest House shelf. Messrs. Holmes and Watson were the most flourishing of old firms, and Gerard the only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter. Ruritania, too, got back some of its own trippers from the Five Towns; for though you would have thought there was adventure enough in the air we breathed, there was more realism, and it was against the realism we all reacted. Mr.

Bennett, to be sure, did not occupy nearly enough s.p.a.ce in our capricious catalogue; neither, for that matter, did Mr. Weyman, Mr.

Galsworthy, Mr. Vach.e.l.l, nor yet Miss Marie Corelli or Sir Thomas Hall Caine. The fault was not mine, I can a.s.sure them.

Mr. H. G. Wells, on the other hand, utilised a better chance by tying with the author of _a.r.s.ene Lupin_, and just beating Mr. Phillips Oppenheim, for a place it would be unprofitable to compute. Even they could not live the pace of Mr. Charles Garvice, who in his turn succ.u.mbed to the lady styled the Baroness Horsy by her fondest slaves; to these two and to Miss Ethel Dell, among others I have or have not presumed to mention, I could wish no greater joy than my job at that counter when their books were coming in, and 'another by the same author, if you've got one,' being urgently demanded in their place. The most enthusiastic letter ever written for an autograph could not touch the eager tone, the live eye, the parted lips of those unconscious tributes. It is not the look you see in Mudie's as you wait your turn; but I have seen it in small boys chasing pirates with 'Ballantyne the Brave,' and in one old lady who fell in love every Sunday of her dear life with the hero of _The Family Herald Supplement_. It was even better worth seeing in a soldier with _Just a Girl_ in his ruthless hand, and _The One Girl in the World_ trembling on a reverential tongue. The man might have been performing prodigies of dreadful valour up the Line, but his soul had been on leave with a lady in marble halls.

There were two young Privates in the A.S.C. who bolted their Garvice at about two days to the book; and two trim Corporals of the Rifle Brigade who made as short work of the other magicians. This type of reader always hunted in couples, sharing the most sympathetic of all the pa.s.sions, if not the books themselves, which would double the rate of consumption. They were the hard drinkers at my bar; but the hardest of all was a lean young Jock, who smiled as hungrily as Ca.s.sius, and arrived punctually at six every evening to change his book. He looked delicate, and was, I think, like other regular attendants, on light duty in the town; in any case he took his bottle of fiction a day without fail, and once, when it was raining, drained it under my nose and wanted another. I refused to serve him. Unlike the other topers, he was a sardonic critic. One night he banged the counter with a book in my own old line, and the invidious comment:

'He can do what _you_ no can!'

I said I was sure, but inquired the special point of superiority.

'He can kill his mon as often as he likes,' said McCa.s.sius, grimly, 'and bring him to life again. Fufty times he has killed yon mon--fufty times!'

They were very nice to me about my books--but very honest! There was a certain stretcher-bearer, a homely old fellow with a horse-shoe moustache and mild brown eyes; not from the high-brow unit, but perhaps a greater reader than any of them; and one of those who eschewed the novel. _Scenes of Clerical Life_ (on top of Lenotre's _Incidents of the French Revolution_, and our two little volumes of _Elia_) had been his only dissipation until, our friendship ripening, he weighed me with his tranquil eyes and asked for _Raffles_. I seemed to detect a streak of filial piety in the departure, and gave him as fair warning as I could; but only the book itself could put him off. He returned it without a word to temper his forgiving smile, and took out _The Golden Treasury_ as a restorative. Poetry he loved with all his gentle soul; but when, at a later stage, he asked if I thought he could 'learn to write poetry,'

the wounds of vanity were at least anointed.

He used to take down Mr. David Somervell's capital _Companion to the Golden Treasury_ from the Poetry Shelf; and it was delightful to watch his bent head wagging between text and note, a black-rimmed forefinger creeping down either page, and his back as round as it could possibly have been before the war. He told me he was a Northamptonshire shoemaker by trade; and though you would trust him not to scamp a sole or b.u.mp a stretcher, there was nothing to show that the war meant more to him than his last, or life more than a chance of reading--the shadow lengthening in the sunshine that he found in books. Once I said how I envied him all that he had read; very gently--even for him--he answered that he owed it all to his mother, who had taught him when he was so high, and would be eighty-one come Tuesday. The man himself was only forty; but he was one of those guileless creatures who make one unconsciously look up to them as elders as well as betters. And at the front, where the old are so gloriously young, and the young so pathetically old, nothing is easier than to forget one's own age: often enough mine was brought home to me with a salutary shock.

'When I was up the Line,' said one of my friends, bubbling over with a compliment, 'a chap said to me, "You know that old--that--that _elderly_ man who runs the Rest Hut? He's the author of _Raffles_!"'

Disastrous refinement! And the fellow grinned as though he had not turned what might have been a term of friendship into one of pure opprobrium. Elderly! One would as lief be labelled Virtuous or Discreet.

Another of my poetry lovers did really write it--but not his own--there was too much of a twinkle in _his_ brown eyes! They were twinkling tremendously when I saw them first, fixed upon the Poetry Shelf, and the tightest upper lip in the hut seemed to be keeping down a cheer. No sooner had we spoken than he was saying he kept his own anthology in his field pocket-book--and could I remember the third verse of 'Out of the night that covers me'? Happily I could; and so made friends with a man after my heart of hearts.

In the first place, he spoke the adorable accent of my native heath or thereabouts; and the things he said were as good as the way he said them. Sense and sensibility, fun and feeling, candour and reserve, all were there in perfect partnership, and his twinkling eyes lit each in turn. Before the war he had been a postal telegraphist, and 'there wasn't a greater pacifist alive'; now he was an R.E. signaller attached to the Guards, and as for pacifism--the twinkle sharpened to a glitter and his upper lip disappeared.

Yet another man of forty, he had joined up early, and a.s.signed any credit to his wife--'good la.s.s!' He was splendid about her and their cheery life together; there was a happy marriage, if you like! 'Ever a rover,' as he said romantically (but with the twinkle), he might be in a post-office, but his heart was not; and it seemed the couple were one spirit. Every summer they had taken their holiday tramping the moors, their poets in their pack: 'when we were tired we would sit down and read aloud.' No wonder the Poetry Shelf made him twinkle! There were two cheery children, 'shaping' as you would expect; their dad borrowed my _If_ to copy out for the small boy's birthday, as well as in his field anthology.

Loyalty to one's own, when so impa.s.sioned, is by way of draining the plain man's stock: perfect home lives are not so common that the ordinary middle-aged ratepayer makes haste to give up one for the wars.

But the anthologist had not been 'wrapped up' like the rest of us. His loyalties did not even end at his country. That first afternoon, I remember, he told me he had been 'a bit of a Theosophist.'

'Aren't you one now?'

'No; but I still have a warm corner in my heart for them.'

I thought that very finely said of a creed outlived. Give me a warm corner for an old love, be it man, woman, or sect!

Daily he dropped in to read and chat; not to take out a book until his turn came for the Line. It was just when the German push seemed imminent to many, was indeed widely expected at a date when my friend would still be at his dangerous post. He knew well what it might mean at any moment; and I think he said, 'The wireless man must be the last to budge,' with the smile he kept for the things he meant; but for once his eyes were not doing their part. 'Well, thank G.o.d I've _had_ it!' he said of his happy past as we locked hands. 'And nothing can take it away from you,'

I had the nerve to say; for these may be the comforts of one's own heart, but it seems an insolence to offer them to a younger man with a harder grip on life. Happily we understood each other. 'And many happy chats had we,' he had written on the back of the photograph he left me.

He had also written his wife's address. _David Copperfield_ went with him when we parted. I wondered if I should ever see either of them again.

Sure enough, on the predicted night, came the roll of drum-fire, as like thunder as a noise can be; but it was our drum-fire, as it happened, and down came my friend next day to tell me all about it. No-Man's Land had been 'boiling like cocoa' under our sh.e.l.ls; he was full of the set-back administered to Jerry, of the fun of underground wireless and the genius of Charles d.i.c.kens. I sent him back with _Joseph Vance_, and we talked of nothing else at our next meeting. It was our last; but I treasure a letter (telling of 'the ruined city of our friendship,' among other things), and a field-card of more recent date; and have every hope that the writer is still lighting up underground danger-posts with his wise twinkle, and still adding to his field anthology.

Yet another hard reader was a Coldstream Guardsman, a much younger man, and one of the handsomest in the hut. He, too, if you will believe me, had brown eyes--a thing that could not happen to three successive characters in a novel--but of another order altogether. If they had never killed a lady in their time, their molten glow belied them. This young man liked a cla.s.sic author of full flavour. _Tom Jones_ was probably his favourite novel, but we had it not. De Maupa.s.sant would have enchanted him--but not the coa.r.s.e translations on vile paper--or Rousseau's or Cellini's open secrets. As it was he had to put up with Anatole France, and oddments of Swift and Wilde; nor do I forget his justifiable disgust on discovering too late that our _Gulliver_ was a nursery version. He was a delightful companion across the counter: subtle, understanding, soft-spoken, in himself a romantic figure, yet engagingly vulnerable to romance.

'I'm feeling sentimental, Mr. Hornung. I want a love-story,' he sighed one afternoon. I reminded him that he would also want Good Stuff, and succeeded in meeting all his needs with _Ships that Pa.s.s in the Night_.

Next day we had our Quiet Room Evening with Tom Hood; and that was the time I strayed upon delicate ground by way of 'The Bridge of Sighs,'

from poem to subject before I knew where I was. The men took it beautifully, and touched my heart by impulsively applauding the very things I should have feared to say to them upon reflection. As for our Coldstreamer, he came straight up to the counter and took out Jeremy Taylor's _Holy Living and Dying_!

WAR AND THE MAN

Not a day but some winning thing was said or done by one or other of them. A man whom I hardly knew had been changing his book when he heard me talking about green envelopes.

'Do you want a green envelope?' he asked point-blank.

'As a matter of fact, I do.'

'Then I'll see if I can't get you one.'

Now, the point about the 'green envelope' is the printed declaration on the outside, that the contents 'refer to nothing but private and family matters'; this being signed by the sender, your letter is censorable only at the base, and will not be read by anybody with whom you are in daily contact. There is, I believe, a weekly issue of one of these envelopes per man. This I only remembered as the generous soul was turning away.

'Don't you go giving me anything you want yourself!' I called after him.

He just looked over his shoulder. 'Then it wouldn't be much of a gift, would it?' was all he said; but I shall never give a copper to a crossing-sweeper without trying to forget his words.

That man was a driver in the R.H.A., and beyond the fact that he had just been reading _The White Company_ I know nothing about him. They cropped up under every cap-badge, these crisp, articulate, enlightening men; they had shaken off their marching feet the dust of every walk in civil life, and it was only here and there a tenacious speck caught the eye. I _have_ heard a Southern in Jock's clothing work in a word about the season-ticket and the 'silk hat' of his City days; but as a rule a soldier no more thinks of trading upon his civilian past than a small boy at a Public School dreams of bragging about his people. More than in any community on earth, the man at the front has to depend upon his own personality, absolutely without any extraneous aid whatsoever; and the knowledge that he has to do so is a tremendous sharpener of individuality.

Yet your arrant individualist is the last to see it. I remember recommending _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_ to a young man full of brains and sensibility--one of that Field Ambulance to which, as we saw it, the description applies in bulk. He came back enthusiastic, as I knew he would, and we discussed the book. I quarrelled with the pa.s.sage in which Gissing rails at the weekly drill in his school playground: 'even after forty years' the memory brought on a 'tremor of pa.s.sionate misery.... The loss of individuality seemed to me sheer disgrace.' My Red Cross friend applauded the sentiments that I deplored; himself as individual as a man need be, he a.s.sured me that the Army _did_ crush the individuality out of a man; and when, refraining from the _argumentum ad hominem_, I called his attention to many others present who showed no sign of such subdual, he said at any rate it happened to the weaker men.

It may: and if a man has no personality of his own, will he be so much the worse for the composite subst.i.tute to be acquired in the Army?

Better an efficient machine than a mere nonent.i.ty; but an efficient machine may be many things besides, and, under the British system, nearly always is. The truth is that discipline and restriction do not 'crush' the normal personality in the least. They compress it; and compression is strength. They prevent a man from 'slopping over'; they conserve his essence. They may not 'make a man' of one who is a man already, but they do exalt and intensify the quality of manhood; they do make a good man in that sense better, and a goodish man out of many a one who has been accounted 'no good' all his life.

Often when the hut was full of magnificent young life; bodies at their very best, perfect instruments in perfect tune; minds inquisitive, receptive, experienced beyond the dreams of pre-war philosophy, and honest as minds must be on the brink of Beyond; often and often have I looked down the hut and compared the splendid fellows I saw before me with the peace-time types perceptibly represented by so many. Small tradesmen, clerks, shop a.s.sistants, grooms and gardeners, labourers in every overcrowded field, what they were losing in the softer influences of life, that one might guess, but what they were gaining all the time, in mind, body, and character, that one could see. It did not lessen the heart-break of the thought that perhaps half would never see their homes again; but it did console with the conviction that the half who survived would be twice the men they ever would or could have been without the war. Nay, they were twice their old selves already, if I am any judge of a man who talks to me. I only know I never foregathered with a couple of them without feeling that we were all three the harder and yet the tenderer men for our humble sacrifices, our aching hearts and our precarious lives. I never looked thoughtfully upon a body of these younger brothers without thinking of the race to spring from loins so tried in such a fire. Never--if only because it was the first comfort that came to mind.

But it was not the only one. Here before my eyes, day after day, were scores of young men not only 'in the pink,' but in better 'form' than perhaps they themselves suspected; not only intensely alive but manifestly enjoying life, the corporate life of constant comradeship and a common if sub-conscious excitement, to an extent impossible for them to appreciate at the time. They put me in mind of a man I know who volunteered for South Africa in his athletic youth, and has ever since been celebrated among his friends for the remark of a lifetime. Somebody had asked him how he liked the Army. 'The Army?' cried this young patriot. '_Once a soldier, always a civilian!_' None the less, he was one of those I met in France, a Major in the A.S.C., which he had joined (under a false age) at the beginning of the war. And how many, now the first to adopt his watchword, would not jump at the chance to emulate his deed in another fifteen unadventurous years!

Many, we are told, will antic.i.p.ate the inconceivable by making their own adventures, if not their own war on society, such are the brutalising effects of war! In this proposition there is probably as much as a grain of truth to a sandhill of imbecility; but we shall hear of that grain on all sides; the soldier-criminal will be only too certain of a copious press, the bombing burglar of his headline. The people we are not going to hear about, and have no desire to recognise as such, are the rascals reformed, the weak men strengthened, the prodigals born again in this war, and at least less likely to die a second death-in-life. With all my heart I believe that, with few exceptions, the only characters which will have suffered by the war are those of such youngish men as have managed to stand out of it to the end, and men of all ages and all conditions who have failed throughout to put their personal considerations in their pockets, and left it to other men and other men's sons to die or bleed for them. I hope they are not more numerous than the men who have been 'brutalised' by war. At all events there were no successful shirkers about our huts in France; and that may have made the atmosphere what it was. All might not have the heart for war; here and there some sapient head might wag aloof; but at least all had their lives and bodies in the cause, there were no safe skins, no cold detachment, no complacent lookers-on. It was an atmosphere of manhood the more potent for the plain fact that no man regarded himself as such in any marked degree, or for one moment in the light of a hero.

That is all I have to say about their heroism. It is an absolute, like the beauty of Venus or the goodness of G.o.d. Daily and hourly they are rising to heights that keep all the world always wondering--when, indeed, it does not kill the power of wonderment. But their dead level, the level on which I saw them every day, lies high enough for me. It is not only what discipline has done for them, not only what the habit of sacrifice has made of them, that appeals and must appeal to the older man privileged to mix with soldiers at the front. It is also the wonderful quality of his fellow-countrymen as revealed in these tremendous years. That was there all the time, but it took the war to show it up, it took the war to make us see it. I might have known that rough poor lads were reading Ruskin and Carlyle, that a Northamptonshire shoemaker was as likely as anybody else to be steeped in Charles Lamb, or a telegraph-clerk and his wife to tramp the Yorkshire dales with Wordsworth and Keats about their persons. Yet I, for one, more shame for me! would never have imagined such men if the G.o.d of battles had not put me to school in my Rest Hut for one short half-term.

Neither could I have invented, at my best or worst, a young City clerk who played the piano divinely by the hour together, or a very shy young man, a chemist's a.s.sistant from the most unhallowed suburb, for whom I had to order Beethoven and Chopin, Liszt and Brahms and Schumann, because _he_ could play even better, but not from memory. Those two lads were the joy of the hut, of hundreds who frequented it. And how much joy had they given in their lodgings or behind the shop? Who had ever been prouder of them than their comrades, or done so much to 'bring them out'? Yet, need I say it? they both belonged to that clever, intellectual, fascinating Field Ambulance to which the Rest Hut owed so much; and I shouldn't wonder if they both agreed with that other nice fellow, their thoroughly individual comrade who declared that 'the Army crushes the individuality out of a man!'

'WE FALL TO RISE'

(_March-April, 1918_)

BEFORE THE STORM