War Classics (15 page)

‘’E bin just out o’ the shatoo, Miss,’ said his comrade, apologetically, as they peaceably left the inn.

The French audience was no longer smiling. They had seen that, drunk as he was, he rated an Englishwoman so much above the French that he would not willingly let her hear or see one unseemly thing. ‘They think you’re made of gold,’ said the Frenchman I was with, wonderingly.

I laughed. ‘That’s because they’re made of gold.’

Human nature is an odd thing. I used to think I was a good judge of it. Anybody can think that in England, where people live so much by convention. But human nature is not conventional. I am a very poor judge of it – I know now – but at least I know this: a man may drink and steal and swear and lie – and yet none of these things will prevent him from being ‘a verray parfit gentil knight’ to a woman who expects it of him. And he may do none of these things and keep all the conventions that even England honours, and yet be wholly unreliable. With ‘other ranks’ any of them, drunk or sober, I would go without a qualm down the loneliest road, past the most terrifying Chinese, but if my escort were an officer, I should want to know him first. It is for others to speak of how he fights, but when I think of human nature at its best, I think of the English private soldier in France.

1
.  Julia and Mildred were both in Paris from December 1918 onwards, working as typists at the Peace Conference.

2
.  Henry Brooke’s secretary was Miss P.M. Woodroffe.

3
.  ‘Give Me A Little Cosy Corner’ was a very recent popular song, written in 1918 by Clifford Harris and James W Tate.

4
.  Throughout this chapter Christina brings to mind a series of popular songs, evoking powerfully the way in which music offered a release from the horrors of war for both troops and civilians. ‘I was a Good Little Girl Till I Met You’ is another Harris and Tate song, this time from 1914, while ‘We Don’t Want to Lose You’ (Paul Rubens) became a huge favourite at the start of the war, used to persuade young men to enlist. Some, like ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’ (1916) have since been recorded and re-recorded and have become classics, while others are today more or less forgotten. It is interesting that the song Christina singles out as carrying ‘too many memories and too much pain’ is ‘Roses of Picardy’. Written in 1916, it was widely popular among the troops but became synonymous with the terrible slaughter which took place in the battlefields of Picardy. You can almost picture Christina sitting, pen in hand, humming the tunes as she writes – and, as the music recalls the emotions of the time, slipping from the frivolous fun of flirting with officers to the remembered pain of the reality of loss.

5
.  The Auberge de Clos Normand at Martin-Èglise, which still exists today, had in peacetime attracted some of the literary and artistic figures who visited Dieppe. Oscar Wilde came here, and Walter Sickert painted the owner of the inn, Victor Lecour.

6
.  An interesting insight into how Christina saw herself!
Dignity and Impudence
is a painting by Sir Edwin Landseer of a great bloodhound contrasted with a little West Highland terrier.

T
here was a Base Hospital at the very limit of our Area. It had been the Base for the Somme Battle in ’16 and comprised, indeed, four General Hospitals – two Canadian and two English.
1
We had some workers there, and the Chief suggested one day that I might like to go through and visit them. It was a beautiful Saturday morning when I set off in the car. This time it was a good road. Indeed it was one of the English military roads, forming part of the actual lines of communications. The English wires, with their plain, blunt posts, ran along the left side of the road. The French, on more slender posts, ornamented with curious spirals, held the right. I thought the difference was typical of the nations. The English aimed solely at doing its work. The French must have a little ornament to life as well. The road had been one of Napoleon’s, so it ran dead straight. I settled myself back in the Ford – running rippingly, with the road a white ribbon up to the horizon – and prepared to enjoy the pleasant morning. Presently I picked out a flag – red, black and yellow – flapping in the breeze. ‘Belgian HQ,’ said the chauffeur briefly, as we whizzed past. I sniffed daintily. The Belgian other ranks looked none too prepossessing and their officers slouched. A little later, pointing to an undulating patch on the left, ‘Fine camp that made,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘The Guards were there all August and September.’ I sat up – so that was where Miss Mordaunt had spent her wonderful six weeks.

The countryside was flat and appeared to be well tilled, but we never saw a soul in the fields. In fact, I never have in France – except in the little cottage gardens. We were drawing near the Hospital Base itself when the line of communication branched off and we followed a road up a hill – up a high, high hill, until we came to what seemed to be the little town on top. Nearly every camp I had been to was on a hill, but none of them had a view like this. All the winds of heaven blew here – the sea lay green and fair, away down beneath our feet, and at our side nestled the little red-roofed French town, cosily sheltered under the heights. But the English town of huts was larger – four General Hospitals placed together and coping with the Somme battle needed to be of some size. We drove through street after street of long low huts, with their tiny gardens picked out with white stones. Against the brown background, the hospital blue of the men and the scarlet and grey of an occasional nurse, struck a bright note. It was all very still and quiet and haunted. The Base, with its routine and its excitements, seemed humdrum and to belong to another world.

It was right in the centre of the wooden town that we stopped, at a hut called ‘Highland Mary’, which was flanked on either side by two smaller huts, being respectively the Roman Catholic and the Church of England chapels. ‘Highland Mary’ was only half full. The convalescents were being sent home as speedily as possible, and the hospitals were closing down. As for our education work, I found little new. The men were hardly fit for study, but they delighted in Shakespeare readings. After a talk with some of them, I slipped out by myself into the Hospital streets.

For the first time since coming to France, I felt as if I were at last treading in the footsteps of the War. Even the
rapatriés
had not brought it as near as this. The long wards were many of them deserted – increasing the feeling of desolation. Yet only a few short months before, the Boche had been within twenty miles, the Hospital was packed up, ready to go at a moment’s notice, and the engines in the station below were waiting with full steam up.

A group of nurses were coming towards me. ‘Which is the way to the military cemetery?’ I asked one of them as she passed.

Instantly she corrected me. ‘You want to know where the boys are?’ she said quickly, putting it in the way she knew.

They were not far away it seemed. On the edge of the little brown town was an open field, with a forest of crosses of the same brown wood. They were the first I had seen, and I am always glad that it was in such a beautiful place I saw them. Nothing but Stevenson’s winds ‘austere and pure’ and the call of the seagull flying from a land they had known, and the beat of the waves from a sea that washed England too – home sounds, all of them, to the boys who hadn’t made back home. No one at all was there as I went down the lines of crosses. The boys slept two in a grave, sharing even in death, as they had shared so magnificently in life – one cross over both, with the double name. The American Army – characteristically – did not share.

After the first moment, a glance down the lines told where our own folks were. I had no feeling that they were really dead. The military lines, the ranks, the officers lying apart – all gave the impression of an Army asleep, but an Army still. That air of solemnity and pomp that somehow rebuffs one in a home cemetery, was absent here. There was nothing that was not natural and human and common to all of us. No smallest child would have been afraid to go to this cemetery. I think it was the absence of tombstones and inscriptions that did most to produce this effect. An inscription makes a person really dead. It is as conclusive as an obituary notice. It is the last word on him. But the last word had not been said over the boys who lay here.

Here they were from all over the world, and ranks, conditions and degrees, from nearly every regiment. In this one thing only they were alike. Wounded in the Somme, they had come here to die. It seemed hard that they should get to the water’s edge and yet have no strength to cross it – that they had to die almost within sight of home. The nearness of the sea and of the land that one could almost discern beyond it – these between them made these crosses tragic. In one corner, by themselves, stood rows of other crosses – Maltese crosses – not quite so simple. Under them lay the Boche prisoners captured at the Somme – who had died here too. Boche and American and Briton side by side now.

Slowly I turned away down the long steep road from the hill. Near the foot stood the house where I was staying – it had been used during the war to put up the relatives of the dangerously wounded.
2
How often they must have climbed by this same road to the Hospital – the road of the ambulances, the road of the relatives, the road of the dead. For the road of the living lay over the water. The house was run by our own people – a Hut Lady in charge and two orderlies to help her. Though the house was lower than the Hospitals, it yet overlooked the French town, and my room – a corner one with a great bow window – looked over the roof far out to sea. When the thick blue curtains were drawn at night and I lay abed by candlelight, I began to dream of all the people who had spent days of distress here. The many rooms lay empty, for of course the war was over. A faint sound, growing louder, struck my ears and I stole to the window. Down the steep hillside crept a ladder of light – twinkling headlights and canvas bodies, as the last of all the convoys slipped down to the station. It went very slowly, but I waited till the last light flickered by and the hill was black again. Black now – for always; never again would it know the grim grey trail that day and night for four years had stolen up and down. I should have been glad, I know, that it was so. It was a bad thing well done with. But I was not. It seemed as if the last friend of all was leaving the boys in the field above. As long as English voices came and went and English bugles blew, they could not be as lonely as they were going to be now. I crept back to bed and fell asleep.

‘You didn’t hear any footsteps last night, did you?’ said the Hut Lady to me cheerfully next morning, over breakfast.

‘No,’ I said with interest, ‘Was there anyone?’

‘Only a Boche prisoner trying to escape,’ she went on, buttering her toast. ‘He got into the kitchen, somehow, the orderly says, and wandered about a bit. They’re looking for him in the garden now.’

‘What!’ I cried in alarm, ‘A Boche prisoner wandering about near my bedroom?’

‘It’s all right,’ she soothed me. ‘I’ve been up some time and they’ve ringed him round now. He must be either in the garden or the field next door to it. Ah! There’s a shout – they’ve got him now, I think.’

I hoped so devoutly. While I had been mooning about at my window, watching the ambulances, a Boche had been prowling about, near my room. If I’d only had a gun, I’d have shot him – piecemeal – if I could. So I thought but probably I should have been scared to death of him had I really set eyes on him.

She went to the window. ‘He’s wounded,’ she remarked, ‘and they’re taking him to hospital.’ I lost all further interest in him.

‘Would you like,’ she suggested later, ‘to go to Tanks today? It’s a nice walk and they’ll send us back in a car.’ But I didn’t want to see officers here – that side of life went with the Base – not with the Hospital.

‘I’m looking for Scotch soldiers,’ I told her hesitatingly, ‘and I’ve only the one day. There weren’t any in that cemetery I saw, and there must be some somewhere from the Somme.’

‘Lots,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s another cemetery down the hill, next door to the French one.’
3

It was older and smaller and the big
Calvaire
[cross] from the French cemetery towered over it. But the crosses were the same and on some graves flowers had been planted. A soldier caretaker was digging in one corner. I spoke to him. ‘You want to see Captain So and So, Miss,’ as if I would meet him face to face. ‘He is just down here, the officers are all on the outside.’ He saluted and left me.

I thought at first they were all Scotch – it seemed like a Highland Brigade – but there were some others. Here was an English Brigadier side by side with a VAD – the only woman there. And here was I, Highland born, like so many of them, standing empty-handed in their midst. Surely I might bring some message from the hills that were theirs and mine! I had no heather and no tartan but it was winter and there were snowdrops in crowds. So I laid some snowdrops by every Highland cross, and by the officers some carnations, and I hoped the turf might lie as light.

‘There is some money over,’ said the Hut Lady to me later, ‘that the relatives gave me for fruit for the wounded. There aren’t any wounded now and the money might just as well go in rose trees for your graves. Would you like that?’ So rose trees grow on Highland graves nestling down to the English Channel. I hope they’ll blossom – red, red roses – for the love that went with them.

‘I can’t make out what you did on your weekend,’ said the Secretary to me with a puzzled air on my return. ‘No officers, no RTOs, no Tanks, and the Chief sent you for a holiday. It seems to have been cemeteries all the time.’

‘They weren’t real cemeteries – not like the kind at home,’ I told her, ‘and the men in them aren’t really dead. Anybody with them will tell you that. Besides,’ I finished, ‘they were my own people and we’re neither of us Highland for nothing.’ (The Secretary is a dear, but she is only English.)