The War on All Fronts: England's Effort Part 6

As we stand beside the trenches under the bright sun and piercing wind, looking at the dark lines of British soldiers on the snow, and listening to the explanations of a most keen and courteous officer, one's eyes wander, on the one side, over the great town and port, over the French coast and the distant sea, and on the other side, inland, over the beautiful French landscape with its farms and country houses. Everything one sees is steeped in history, a mingled history, in which England and France up to five centuries ago bore an almost equal share. Now again they are mingled here; all the old enmities buried in a comradeship that goes deeper far than they, a comradeship of the spirit that will surely mould the life of both nations for years to come.

How we grudged the snow and the low-sweeping clouds and the closed motor, on our drive of the next day! I remember little more of it than occasional glimpses of the tall cliffs that stand sentinel along the river, a hasty look at a fine church above a steeply built town, an army lorry stuck deep in the snow-drifts, and finally the quays and ships of another base port.

Our escort, Colonel S., pilots us to a pleasant hotel full of officers, mostly English, belonging to the Lines of Communications, with a few poor wives and mothers among them who have come over to nurse their wounded in one or other of the innumerable hospitals of the base.

Before dinner the general commanding the base had found me out and I had told my story.

"Oh, we'll put some notes together for you. We were up most of last night.

I dare say we shall be up most of this. But a little more or less doesn't matter." I protested most sincerely. But it is always the busiest men who shoulder the extra burdens; and the notes duly reached me. From them, from the talk of others spending their last ounce of brain and energy in the service of the base, and from the evidence of my own eyes, let me try and draw some general picture of what that service is: Suppose a British officer speaking:

Remember first that every man, every horse, every round of ammunition, every article of clothing and equipment, all the guns and vehicles, and nearly all the food have to be brought across the English Channel to maintain and reinforce the ever-growing British Army, which holds now so important a share of the fighting line in France. The ports of entry are already overtaxed by the civil and military needs of France herself. Imagine how difficult it is--and how the difficulty grows daily with the steady increase of the British Army--to receive, disembark, accommodate, and forward the mult.i.tude of men and the ma.s.ses of material!

You see the khaki in the French streets, the mingling everywhere of French and English; but the ordinary visitor can form no idea of the magnitude of this friendly invasion.

There is no formal delimitation of areas or s.p.a.ces, in docks, or town, or railways. But gradually the observer will realise that the town is honeycombed with the temporary locations of the British Army, which everywhere speckle the map hanging in the office of the Garrison Quartermaster. And let him further visit the place where the long lines of reinforcement, training and hospital camps are installed on open ground, and old England's mighty effort will scarcely hide itself from the least intelligent. _Work, efficiency, economy_ must be the watchwords of a base. Its functions may not be magnificent--_but they are war_--and war is impossible unless they are rightly carried out.

When we came back from the Loire in September, after our temporary retreat, the British _personnel_ at this place grew from 1,100 to 11,000 in a week. Now there are thousands of troops always pa.s.sing through, thousands of men in hospital, thousands at work in the docks and storehouses.

And let any one who cares for horses go and look at the Remount Depot and the Veterinary Hospitals. The whole treatment of horses in this war has been revolutionised.

Look at the cheap, ingenious stables, the comfort produced by the simplest means, the kind quiet handling; look at the Convalescent Horse Depots, the operating theatres, and the pharmacy stores in the Veterinary Hospitals.

As to the troops themselves, every Regiment has its own lines, for its own reinforcements. Good food, clean cooking, civilised dining-rooms, excellent sanitation--the base provides them all. It provides, too, whatever else Tommy Atkins wants, and _close at hand_; wet and dry canteens, libraries, recreation huts, tea and coffee huts, palatial cinemas, concerts. And what are the results? Excellent behaviour; excellent relations between the British soldier and the French inhabitants; absence of all serious crime.

Then look at the docks. You will see there armies of labourers, and long lines of ships discharging horses, timber, rations, fodder, coal, c.o.ke, petrol. Or at the stores and depots. It would take you days to get any idea of the huge quant.i.ties of stores, or of the new and ingenious means of s.p.a.ce economy and quick distribution. As to the Works Department--camps and depots are put up "while you wait" by the R.E. officers and unskilled military labour.

Add to all this the armies of clerks, despatch riders, and motor-cyclists--and the immense hospital _personnel_--then, if you make any intelligible picture of it in your mind, you will have some idea of what bases like these mean.

Pondering these notes, it seemed to me that the only way to get some kind of "intelligible picture" in two short days was to examine something in detail, and the rest in general! Accordingly, we spent a long Sunday morning in the Motor Transport Depot, which is the creation of Colonel B., and perhaps as good an example as one could find anywhere in France of the organising talent of the able British officer.

The depot opened in a theatre on the 13th of August, 1914. "It began,"

says Colonel B., "with a few b.a.l.l.s of string and a bag of nails!" Its staff then consisted of 6 officers and 91 N.C.O.'s and men--its permanent staff at present is about 500. All the drivers of some 20,000 motor vehicles--nearly 40,000 men--are tested here and, if necessary, instructed before going up to the fighting lines; and the depot deals with 350 different types of vehicles. In round figures 100,000 separate parts are now dealt with, stored, and arranged in the depot. The system of records and accounts is extraordinarily perfect, and so ingenious that it seems to work itself.

Meanwhile Colonel B.'s relations with his army of chauffeurs, of whom about 1,000 are always housed on the premises, are exceedingly human and friendly in spite of the strictness of the army discipline. Most of his men who are not married, the Colonel tells me, have found a "friend," in the town, one or other of its trimly dressed girls, with whom the English mechanic "walks out," on Sundays and holidays. There are many engagements, and, as I gather, no misconduct. Marriage is generally postponed till after the war, owing to the legal and other difficulties involved. But marriage there will be when peace comes. As to how the Englishman and the French girl communicate, there are amusing speculations, but little exact knowledge. There can be small doubt, however, that a number of hybrid words perfectly understood by both sides are gradually coming into use, and if the war lasts much longer, a rough Esperanto will have grown up which may leave its mark on both languages. The word "narpoo" is a case in point. It is said to be originally a corruption of "_il n'y a plus_"--the phrase which so often meets the Tommy foraging for eggs or milk or fruit.

At present it means anything from "done up" to "dead." Here is an instance of it, told me by a chaplain at the front. He was billeted in a farm with a number of men, and a sergeant. All the men, from the chaplain to the youngest private, felt a keen sympathy and admiration for the women of the farm, who were both working the land and looking after their billetees, with wonderful pluck and energy. One evening the chaplain arriving at the open door of the farm, saw in the kitchen beyond it the daughter of the house, who had just come in from farm work. She was looking at a pile of dirty plates and dishes which had to be washed before supper, and she gave a sigh of fatigue. Suddenly in the back door on the other side of the kitchen appeared the sergeant. He looked at the girl, then at the dishes, then again at the girl. "Fattigay?" he said cheerfully, going up to her.

"Narpoo? Give 'em me. Compree?" And before she could say a word he had driven her away, and plunged into the work.

The general relations, indeed, between our soldiers and the French population could not be better. General after General, both in the bases, and at the front dwelt on this point. A distinguished General commanding one of our armies on the line, spoke to me of it with emphasis. "The testimony is universal, and it is equally creditable to both sides." The French civilian in town and country is, no doubt, profiting by the large demand and prompt payments of the British forces. But just as in the case of the women munition workers, there is infinitely more in it than money.

On the British part there is, in both officers and men, a burning sympathy for what France has suffered, whether from the outrages of a brutal enemy, or from the inevitable hardships of war. The headquarters of the General I have mentioned were not more than fifteen or twenty miles from towns where unspeakable things were done by German soldiers--officers no less than men--in the first weeks of the struggle. With such deeds the French peasantry and small townsfolk, as they still remain in Picardy and Artois, can and do contrast, day by day, the temper, the courtesy, the humanity of the British soldier. Great Britain, of course, is a friend and ally; and Germany is the enemy. But these French folk, these defenceless women and children, know instinctively that the British Army, like their own, whether in its officers, or in its rank and file, is incapable, toward any non-combatant, of what the German Army has done repeatedly, officially, and still excuses and defends.

[Ill.u.s.tration: One of the Wards of a Base Hospital Visited by the King.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Howitzer in the Act of Firing.]

The signs of this feeling for and sympathy with the French _civils_, among our soldiers, are many. Here is one story, slight but illuminating, told me by an eye-witness. She is one of a band of women under a n.o.ble chief, who, since very early in the war, have been running a canteen for soldiers, night and day, at the large railway-station of the very base I have been describing, where trains are perpetually arriving from and departing to the front. In the early days of the war, a refugee train arrived one afternoon full of helpless French folk, mainly of course women and children, and old people, turned out of their homes by the German advance. In general, the refugees were looked after by the French Red Cross, "who did it admirably, going along the trains with hot drinks and food and clothing." But on this occasion there were a number of small children, and some of them got overlooked in the hubbub. "I found a raw young Scotchman, little more than a boy, from one of the Highland regiments," with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom he peremptorily demanded tea. "He had tears in his eyes, and his voice was all husky as he explained in homely Scotch how the bairns had been turned out of their homes--how he _couldn't_ bear it--and he would give them tea." A table was found. "I provided the milk, and he paid for bread and b.u.t.ter and chocolate, and waited on and talked to the six little French people himself. Strange to say, they seemed to understand each other quite well."

III

It was with this railway-station canteen that my latest memories of the great base are concerned. All the afternoon of our second day at ---- was spent in seeing a fine Red Cross hospital, and then in walking or driving round the endless reinforcement and hospital camps in the open country.

Everywhere the same vigourous expanding organisation, the same ceaselessly growing numbers, the same humanity and care in detail. "How many years have we been at war?" one tends to ask oneself in bewilderment, as the spectacle unrolls itself. "Is it possible that all this is the work of eighteen months?" And I am reminded of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his German captive, who asked his opinion about the duration of the war. "I'll tell you what--it's the furrst five years that'll be the worst!" We seem--in the bases--to have slipped through them already, measuring by any of the ordinary ratios of work to time. On my return home, a diplomat representing one of the neutral nations, told me that the Military Secretary of his staff had been round the English bases in France, and had come back with his "eyes starting out of his head." Having seen them myself, the phrase seemed to me quite natural.

Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, we turned toward the canteen at the railway-station. We found it going on in an old goods'

shed, simply fitted up with a long tea and coffee bar, tables and chairs; and in some small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end to end with a crowd of soldiers, who after many hours of waiting, were just departing for the front. The old shabby room, with its points of bright light, and its shadowy sides and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting for the moving throng of figures. Some men were crowding round the bar; some were writing letters in haste to post before the train went off; the piano was going, and a few, gathered round it, were singing the songs of the day, of which the choruses were sometimes taken up in the room. The men--drafts going up to different regiments on the line--appeared to me to come from many parts. The broad Yorkshire and c.u.mbrian speech, Scotch, the c.o.c.kney of the Home Counties, the Northumberland burr, the tongues of Devon and Somerset--one seemed to hear them all in turn. The demands at the counter had slackened a little, and I was presently listening to some of the talk of the indefatigable helpers who work this thing night and day. One of them drew a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable fighters of Ypres and Loos, of their breathless energy, and impatience of anything but the quickest pace of life, their appet.i.tes!--half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, at _3d_ each, swallowed down in a moment of time; then of the French-Canadians, their Old World French, their old-world Catholicism, simple and pa.s.sionate. One of these last asked if there was any chance of his being sent to Egypt. "Why are you so anxious to go to Egypt?" "Because it was there the Holy Family rested," said the lad shyly. The lady to whom he spoke described to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. Georgius, and he listened entranced.

Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, drawn from the poorest cla.s.s, perhaps, of an English seaport. They hustle for their food, shout at the helpers, and seem to have no notion that such words as "please" and "thank you" exist. After three or four hours of battling with such an apparently mannerless crew one of the helpers saw them depart to the platform where their train was waiting for them, with very natural relief. But they were no sooner gone, when a guardsman, with the manners, the stature, and the smartness of his kind, came back to the counter, and asked to speak to the lady in charge of it. "Those chaps, Miss, what have just gone out," he said apologetically, "have never been used to ladies, and they don't know what to say to them. So they asked me just to come in and say for them they were very much obliged for all the ladies' kindness, but they couldn't say it themselves." The tired helper was suddenly too choky to answer. The message, the choice of the messenger, as one sure to do "the right thing," were both so touching.

But there was a sudden movement in the crowd. The train was up. We all surged out upon the platform, and I watched the embarkation--the endless train engulfing its hundreds of men. Just as I had seen the food and equipment trains going up from the first base laden with everything necessary to replace the daily waste of the army, so here was the train of human material, going up to replace the daily waste of _men_. After many hours of travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these young soldiers--how young most of them were!--would find themselves face to face with the sharpest realities of war. I thought of what I had seen in the Red Cross hospital that afternoon--"what man has made of man"--the wreck of youth and strength, the hideous pain, the helpless disablement.

But the station rang with laughter and talk. Some one in the canteen began to play "Keep the Home Fires Burning"--and the men in the train joined in, though not very heartily, for as one or two took care to tell me, laughingly--"That and 'Tipperary' are awfully stale now!" A bright-faced lad discussed with D---- how long the war would last. "And _shan't_ we miss it when it's done!" he said, with a jesting farewell to us, as he jumped into the train which had begun to move. Slowly, slowly it pa.s.sed out of sight, amid waves of singing and the shouting of good-byes....

It was late that evening, when after much talk with various officers, I went up to my room to try and write, bewildered by a mult.i.tude of impressions--impressions of human energy, human intelligence, human suffering. What England is doing in this country will leave, it seems to me, indelible marks upon the national character. I feel a natural pride, as I sit thinking over the day, in all this British efficiency and power, and a quick joy in the consciousness of our fellowship with France, and hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun is still in its first intensity, and when I have read all that the evening newspapers contain about it, there stirs in me a fresh realisation of the meaning of what I have been seeing. In these great bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation of war, which, both in the French and English Armies, have now reached a perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself--the deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends? It is in the flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. At that courage and endurance, women, after all, can only guess--through whatever rending of their own hearts.

But I was to come somewhat nearer to it than I thought then. The morrow brought surprise.

V

Dear H.

Our journey farther north through the deep February snow was scarcely less striking as an ill.u.s.tration of Great Britain's constantly growing share in the war than the sight of the great supply bases themselves. The first part of it, indeed, led over solitary uplands, where the chained wheels of the motor rocked in the snow, and our military chauffeur dared make no stop, for fear he should never be able to start again. All that seemed alive in the white landscape were the partridges--sometimes in great flocks--which scudded at our approach, or occasional groups of hares in the middle distance holding winter parley. The road seemed interminably long and straight, and ours were almost the first tracks in it. The snow came down incessantly, and once or twice it looked as though we should be left stranded in the white wilderness.

But after a third of the journey was over, the snow began to lessen and the roads to clear. We dropped first into a seaport town which offered much the same mingled scene of French and English, of English nurses, and French _poilus_, of unloading ships, and British soldiers, as the bases we had left, only on a smaller scale. And beyond the town we climbed again on to the high land, through a beautiful country of interwoven downs, and more plentiful habitation. Soon, indeed, the roads began to show the signs of war--a village or small town, its picturesque market-place filled with a park of artillery wagons; roads lined with motor lorries with the painted sh.e.l.l upon them that tells ammunition; British artillerymen in khaki, bringing a band of horses out of a snow-bound farm; closed motor-cars filled with officers hurrying past; then an open car with King's Messengers, tall, soldierly figures, looking in some astonishment at the two ladies, as they hurry by. And who or what is this horseman looming out of the sleet--like a figure from a piece of Indian or Persian embroidery, turbaned and swarthy, his cloak swelling out round his handsome head and shoulders, the buildings of a Norman farm behind him?

"There are a few Indian cavalry about here," says our guide--"they are billeted in the farms." And presently the road is full of them. Their Eastern forms, their dark, intent faces pa.s.s strangely through the Norman landscape.

Now we are only some forty miles from the line, and we presently reach another town containing an important British Headquarters, where we are to stop for luncheon. The inn at which we put up is like the song in "Twelfth Night," "old and plain"--and when lunch is done, our Colonel goes to pay an official call at Headquarters, and my daughter and I make our way to the historic church of the town. The Colonel joins us here with another officer, who brings the amazing news that "G.H.Q."--General Headquarters--that mysterious centre and brain of all things--invites us for two days! If we accept, an officer will come for us on the morning of March 1st to our hotel in Boulogne and take us by motor, some forty miles, to the guest-house where G.H.Q. puts up its visitors. "_Accept!"_ Ah, if one could only forget for a moment the human facts behind the absorbing interest and excitement of this journey, one might be content to feel only the stir of quickened pulses, of grat.i.tude for a further opportunity so tremendous.

As it was, I saw all the journey henceforward with new eyes, because of that to which it was bringing us. On we sped, through the French countryside, past a great forest lying black on the edge of the white horizon--I open my map and find it marked Bois de Crecy!--past another old town, with Agincourt a few miles to the east, and so into a region of pine and sand that borders the sea. Darkness comes down, and we miss our way.

What are these lines of light among the pine woods? Another military and hospital camp, which we are to see on the morrow--so we discover at last.

But we have overshot our goal, and must grope our way back through the pine woods to the sea-sh.o.r.e, where a little primitive hotel, built for the summer, with walls that seem to be made of brown paper, receives us. But we have motored far that day, and greet it joyfully.

The following morning we woke to a silvery sunlight, with, at last, some promise of spring over a land cleared of snow. The day was spent in going through a camp which has been set down in one of the pleasantest and healthiest spots of France, a favourite haunt of French artists before the war. Now the sandy slopes, whence the pines, alack, have been cut away, are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training-grounds, where, as at other bases, the newly arrived troops are put through their last instruction before going to the front. As usual, the magnitude of what has been done in one short year filled one with amazement. Here is the bare catalogue: Infantry Base Depots, i.e. sleeping and mess quarters, for thousands of men belonging to the new armies; 16 hospitals with 21,000 beds, 3 rifle ranges; 2 training-camps; a machine-gun training-school; a vast laundry worked by Frenchwomen under British organisation, which washes for _all_ the hospitals, 30,000 pieces a day; recreation huts of all types and kinds, official and voluntary; a Cinema theatre, seating 800 men, with performances twice a day; nurses' clubs; officers' clubs; a Supply Depot for food; an Ordnance Depot for everything that is not food; new sidings to the railway, where 1,000 men can be entrained on the one side, while 1,000 men are detraining on the other; or two full ambulance trains can come in and go out; a Convalescent Depot of 2,000 patients, and a Convalescent Horse Depot of 2,000 horses, etcetera. And this is the work accomplished since last April in one camp.

Yet, as I look back upon it, my chief impression of that long day is an impression, first, of endless hospital huts and marquees, with their rows of beds, in which the pale or flushed faces are generally ready--unless pain or weariness forbid--as a visitor ventures timidly near, to turn and smile in response to the few halting words of sympathy or inquiry which are all one can find to say; and, next, of such a wealth of skill, and pity, and devotion poured out upon this terrible human need, as makes one thank G.o.d for doctors, and nurses, and bright-faced V.A.D.'s. After all, one tremblingly asks oneself, in spite of the appalling facts of wounds, and death, and violence in which the human world is now steeped, is it yet possible, is it yet true, that the ultimate thing, the final power behind the veil--to which at least this vast linked spectacle of suffering and tenderness, here in this great camp, testifies--is _not_ Force, but Love?

Is this the mysterious message which seems to breathe from these crowded wards--to make them _just_ bearable. Let me recollect the open door of an operating theatre, and a young officer, quite a boy, lying there with a bullet in his chest, which the surgeons were just about to try and extract. The fine, pale features of the wounded man, the faces of the surgeon and the nurses, so intent and cheerfully absorbed, the shining surfaces and appliances of the white room--stamp themselves on memory. I recollect, too, one John S----, a very bad case, a private. "Oh, you must come and see John S----," says one of the Sisters. "We get all the little distractions we can for John. Will he recover? Well, we thought so--but"--her face changes gravely--"John himself seems to have made up his mind lately. He knows--but he never complains." Knows what? We go to see him, and he turns round philosophically from his tea. "Oh, I'm all right--a bit tired--that's all." And then a smile pa.s.ses between him and his nurse. He has lost a leg, he has a deep wound in his back which won't heal, which is draining his life away--poor, poor John S----! Close by is a short, plain man, with a look of fevered and patient endurance that haunts one now to think of. "It's my eyes. I'm afraid they're getting worse. I was. .h.i.t in the head, you see. Yes, the pain's bad--sometimes."

The nurse looks at him anxiously as we pa.s.s, and explains what is being tried to give relief.

This devotion of the nurses--how can one ever say enough of it! I recall the wrath of a medical officer in charge of a large hospital at Rouen.

"Why don't they give more Red Crosses to the _working nurses_? They don't get half enough recognition. I have a nurse here who has been twelve months in the operating theatre. She ought to have a V.C.!--It's worth it."

And here is a dark-eyed young officer who had come from a distant colony to fight for England. I find him in an officer's hospital, established not long after the war broke out, in a former Casino, where the huge baccarat-room has been turned into two large and splendid wards. He is courteously ready to talk about his wound, but much more ready to talk about his Sister.

"It's simply _wonderful_ what they do for us!" he says, all his face lighting up. "When I was worst there wasn't an hour in the day or night my Sister wasn't ready to try anything in the world to help me. But they're all like that."

Let me here gratefully recall, also, the hospitals organised by the Universities of Chicago and Harvard, entirely staffed by American Sisters and Doctors, each of them providing 34 doctors and 80 nurses, and dealing with 1,040 patients. Harvard has maintained a general hospital with the British Force in France since July, 1915. The first pa.s.sages and uniforms were paid for by the British Government, but the University has itself paid all pa.s.sages, and provided all uniforms since the start; and it is proposed, I am told, to carry on this generous help indefinitely.

Twenty thousand wounded!--while every day the ambulance trains come and go from the front, or to other bases--there to fill up one or other of the splendid hospital ships that take our brave fellows back to England, and home, and rest. And this city of hospitals, under its hard-pressed medical chief, with all its wealth of scientific invention, and painsaving device, and unremitting care, with its wonderful health and recovery statistics, has been the growth of just twelve months. The mind wavers between the two opposing images it suggests: war and its havoc on the one hand--the power of the human brain and the goodness of the human heart on the other.

II