Title: By-ways on Service - Notes from an Australian Journal
Author: Dinning, Hector
Language: English
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BY-WAYS ON SERVICE



  BY-WAYS ON SERVICE


  NOTES FROM
  AN AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL


  BY
  HECTOR DINNING


  LONDON
  CONSTABLE AND COMPANY, LTD.
  1918



Printed in Great Britain



  To

  AUSTRALIA



NOTE BY THE AUTHOR


These sketches were not originally written for publication in the form
of a book; and there has been little opportunity of revising them with
that object. The idea of collection and publication came late, after
they (most of them) had appeared in the daily press or in some other
journal; and it came rather by suggestion from friends than on the
writer's initiative.

The collection is rough and inconsecutive. It does not attempt to give
a complete picture of what was to be seen by an Australian at any stage
after embarkation from Australia. It is a series of impressions gained
from an outlook necessarily limited. I wrote about the things that
impressed me most, chiefly for the reason that they impressed me; there
was also the motive of conveying to a small circle of friends some
notion of what I saw.

In the light of the offensive fighting of 1917 in Western Europe,
a great deal of this book will appear feeble, and even flippant.
Descriptions of Egyptian cities and of the Canal-Zone will seem a
kind of impertinence, in a book from the War-area, after tales of the
fighting in Picardy. But they are published with the belief that after
Peace has broken out some soldiers may find an interest in awakening
the memory of their first-love in the world outside Australia. For most
of them Egypt was that; and though in the desert they often declared
themselves "fed-up" with Egypt, it was a transient and liverish
judgment, and their relationship with this first-love was never stodgy.
For the East of the sort they stumbled across in Cairo and on the
Canal, Australians discovered in themselves a liveliness of interest
that was almost an affinity.

But no apology for reminiscences of Anzac is called for, let the
fighting at Pozieres be never so fierce. It is certain that Gallipoli
is overshadowed by the fierce intensity and ceaselessness of the
struggle in France. But it is only the intensity of the Turkish
fighting that is overshadowed. No intensity of the struggle on the
Somme will ever eclipse the intense pathos of that ill-starred
adventure on the ridges of Anzac.

These sketches were written hurriedly and in the midst of a good deal
of distraction. There has been no time to attend to considerations
of style or arrangement of the matter within the limits of single
articles. Often I was stuck for leisure, and sometimes for paper.
Most of the Anzac sketches were written in the dug-out at nights in
circumstances that would have contented transitorily the most Bohemian
scribbler. Those from Egypt were mostly scrawled in a desert camp. In
either case there was the Censor to reckon with. That is seized as
another excuse for inconsecutiveness.

My acknowledgments are due to Messrs. Cassell and Company for their
permission to include in this volume the sketch of Anzac which appeared
in the _Anzac-Book_.

  HECTOR DINNING.

  Somme,
  _December, 1917_.



CONTENTS


    BOOK I.--WAITING

    SECTION A.--ON THE WAY

    CHAPTER                              PAGE

      I.   TRANSPORT                        1

     II.   UP THE CANAL                    13

    III.   ABBASSIEH                       24


    SECTION B.--CAIRO

      I.   ON LEAVE IN CAIRO               33

     II.   THE MOOSKI                      42


    BOOK II.--GALLIPOLI

      I.   THE JOURNEY                     55

     II.   GLIMPSES OF ANZAC.--I.          67

    III.   GLIMPSES OF ANZAC.--II.         82

     IV.   SIGNALS                         92

      V.   THE DESPATCH-RIDERS             96

     VI.   THE BLIZZARD                    98

    VII.   EVACUATION                     103


    BOOK III.--BACK TO EGYPT

      I.   LEMNOS                         111

     II.   MAHSAMAH                       118

    III.   CANAL-ZONE                     127

     IV.   ALEXANDRIA THE THIRD TIME      138

      V.   THE LAST OF EGYPT              152


    BOOK IV.--FRANCE


    SECTION A.--A BASE

    CHAPTER                                PAGE

      I.   ENTRÉE                         163

     II.   BILLETED                       169

    III.   THE SEINE AT ROUEN             175

     IV.   ROUEN _REVUE_                  180

      V.   LA BOUILLE                     184


    SECTION B.--PICARDY AND THE SOMME

      I.   BEHIND THE LINES.--I.          188

     II.   BEHIND THE LINES.--II.         196

    III.   C.C.S.                         200

     IV.   THE FOUGHTEN-FIELD             213

      V.   AN ADVANCED RAILHEAD           219

     VI.   ARRAS AFTER THE PUSH           232


    SECTION C.--FRENCH PROVINCIAL LIFE

      I.   A MORNING IN PICARDY           242

     II.   THÉRÈSE                        251

    III.   LEAVES FROM A VILLAGE DIARY    260

     IV.   THE CAFÉ DU PROGRÈS            270

      V.   L'HÔTEL DES BONS ENFANTS       275

     VI.   PROVINCIAL SHOPS               278



BOOK I

WAITING



BY-WAYS ON SERVICE



SECTION A.--ON THE WAY



CHAPTER I

TRANSPORT


There is something high-sounding in the name Australian Imperial
Expeditionary Force. The expedition with which our troop-ship
cast loose justified, so far, our part in that name. The false
alarms relating to the date of embarkation, raised whilst we were
still in camp, had bred in us a kind of scepticism as to all such
pronouncements. When it was told that we would go aboard on Tuesday,
most of us emitted a sarcastic "te-hee!" And it was not until on Monday
morning our black kit-bags were piled meaningly on the parade ground
for transport that we began to rein-in our humour and visualise the
method of voyaging and believe there must have been some fragment of
truth in what we called the Tuesday fable. We believed it all when
the unit marched in column of route on Tuesday to the ship, and the
quartermaster brought up the odds and ends on a lorry in the rear. But
even so, we were prepared to lie a few hours, at least (and some said
a few days), before casting-off. Some of us had even devised visits to
and from the homes of our friends, in our mongrel-civilian fashion, to
sit once more--or twice--and say good-bye. Quite the majority of us saw
ourselves swaggering about the port, slaking thirst, and being pointed
at as "the Boys." By two o'clock the last baggage came over the side,
and we sat a moment to breathe. Some didn't wait to breathe. As soon as
they got well off the pier, the gangways were raised. By 2.20 we were
in motion. The hope of embarkation, deferred so long, was realised with
a suddenness that almost forbade the saying good-bye. Many a friend,
expecting the hand-clasp, watched the transport steam relentlessly
away; many a man, bracing himself to the final show of a light heart,
saw the gangway rudely raised as he innocently rested after the labour
of embarkation; and all his show of bravery ended in an unwonted
glistening of the eye and a silent turning away from those who would
have turned homewards from the shore, but could not. Many smothered
what they felt in the wild hilarity of jingoistic dialogue with the
shore and with civilian craft flitting about the transport. Two belated
members of the column tore along the pier towards the ship in motion,
embarked in a launch, and were received; and three months of irksome
sitting in a preparatory camp were well-nigh gone for nothing. Two
others, who had "gone up the street for an hour" to make merry finally
with their friends, were left lamenting.

It was a Leviathan we found ourselves upon; the largest boat--as they
say--that ever has come to us. And certainly she carries more men than
one ever expected to find afloat (in these waters) on one vessel--a
kind of city full. So huge is she that you wonder, in the half-logical
excitement of the first few hours, whether she will pitch on the open
sea. "Sweet delusion!" smiles the quizzical reader; "you'll soon see."
Well, we haven't seen. She has pitched hardly enough to upset the
gentlest sucking-dove. That, however, is, perhaps, not all by virtue of
our tonnage; so smooth a sea, and so consistently smooth, the tenderest
liver could hardly hope for. There have, perhaps, a dozen men been
ill; and what are they among so many? With a smooth start, such as we
are blest with, notoriously weak sailors may even hope to get through
without a spasm. At least there are those aboard amazed at their own
heartiness.

Is there any call to relate the daily routine on a troop-ship? Everyone
at home, you say, knows it; it's all there is in most letters from the
fleet. But all kind and patient readers of these notes may not have
friends in the fleet.

Well, then, _réveille_ blows providentially later than on shore--six
o'clock; providentially and paradoxically, for who wants "a little more
folding of the hands to sleep" at sea? Who, on land, does not, save the
few fanatical or deranged? As many as can find ground-room there, sleep
on deck, and have been peeping at the Day's-Eye for half an hour before
the strident note crashes along the decks. He is _blasé_ and weary
indeed who can lie insensible to the dawn here. There is one glory of
the hills at sunrise; the sea hath another glory. On land you see the
dawn in part, here the whole stately procession lies to your eye, and
you see all the detail of the lengthening march defined by the gently
heaving sea. He who sees it not has got well to the Devil! But whether
you are of the Devil or not, you obey the summons to get up, and cut
short your contemplation of the pageant. There is no before breakfast
duty, except for a casual swabbing-fatigue. The men mess at seven on
their troop-decks; the sergeants and officers at 8.30. Thereby hang two
digressions.

The troop-decks have been installed in the holds, or located where old
passenger cabins have been knocked out. Much refitting of a liner,
indeed, had been necessary to make of her a troop-ship. The troops
have been quartered thus: the sergeants mess and sleep in the old
dining-saloon; the officers' mess is the old music-room; both the
smoke-room and gymnasium have been transferred into hospitals. The
sergeants and the men sleep in hammocks slung above their mess-tables.
The officers sleep in such cabins as are left standing.

The other digression ought to show why the sergeants and officers
(apart from the distinctions which the superiority of those creatures
demands) mess an-hour-and-a-half later than the men. Each unit must
appoint, as ashore, an orderly-officer and orderly-sergeant for the
day, and part of their duty is to supervise the issue and distribution
of rations. Each sergeant is given, beside, the supervision of the
quarters of a section of the unit, and this includes overlooking the
complete setting-in-order after messing. Each unit in rotation supplies
a ship's orderly-officer and ship's troop-deck sergeant, whose duties
are general and at the dictation of the ship's commandant.

After breakfast we massage ourselves internally and open up our chests
with an hour's exercise, much as ashore; but we must drill in small
sections, for want of space. Most parades, apart from this last, which
is universal, are for lectures; in which the officers endeavour to
put the theoretical side--appropriately enough, for the practice must
precede the theory in any matter whatsoever, but especially in the
game of war. We were men before we became philosophers; we digested
our food before we thought of physiological research; and we can put a
bullet through a vulnerable part before we know much about the chemical
combustion preceding the discharge. Lectures are, naturally, more or
less directly on the topic of mechanical-transport, in some aspect of
it, but some are on topics of generally military importance.

Curious is the variety in the method of receiving lecture; the rank and
file do not readily adjust themselves to the academic outlook. "Another
b----y lecture, Bill!" "That's all right; 'e'll take a tumble----"
(_The Censor did not pass the rest of this conversation._) But these
are extreme comments, and rather a form of playfulness than serious
utterances. Of the rest, some sit it through in a bovine complacency,
some take the risks of dozing, some crack furtive jokes; most listen
attentively enough. There are many intelligent, well-trained men who
prick up their ears here and there and carry on a muffled discussion,
in a sort of unauthorised _semina_. There is, on an average, one hour's
lecture in the day.

Perhaps half the day is the men's own--clear. It is spent largely in
lounging and smoking, partly in sleeping, a little in reading. There
are well-worn magazines--such as Mr. Ruskin would disapprove--and
little else, except sixpenny editions of the limelight authors. But in
reading and such effeminate arts what good soldier will languish long?

There are sports, of a sort--very sporadic and very confined. They
commonly take the form of passing-the-ball and leap-frog.

The Censor has an _ipse dixit_ way, and is his own court of appeal.
These notes could otherwise be made a little less inconsecutive.

We steamed out of ---- a little after dawn in column of half sections,
artistically out of step and with the alignment nautically groggy. Our
ship took the head of one column; the flagship led the other. That
procession is a sight unique, which you are defied to parallel in the
annals of passenger shipping. The files come heaving along, like a
school of marine monsters disporting themselves....

  (_Censor at work again._)

In preparation for the European winter in store for us, about which
so much has been written and spoken at home, and by which so much Red
Cross knitting and tea-drinking have been inspired--as a preparation
for this, the weather is becoming intolerably hot. As we approach the
line the best traditions of that vicinity are being maintained. We wake
in the morning with that sense of lassitude you read of as the regular
matutinal sensation of the Anglo-Indian in Calcutta. At six o'clock the
sun beats down--or beats along--with as much effect as he achieves high
in the heavens in the early Australian summer. No sluggard sleeping on
deck but would rather get up and under cover than remain stewing in
the oblique, biting rays. At the breakfast-mess, situated in as cool
and strategic a position as the brazen sergeants could get chosen, you
perspire as though violently exercising. In a few isolated cases this
is justified; but as the day wears on you perspire without provocation
of any sort. The men on their improvised troop-decks are in hell--and
use a language and attitude appropriate in the circumstances. Not
unnaturally, you see the most grotesque attires designed to make life
tolerable. To the devil with uniformity! Men must first live. The
general effect is motley. Leggings and breeches and regimental boots
are not to be seen--except on the unhappy sentry. A following wind
blows upon us, and just keeps our pace; there is not a breath; the sea
is unruffled; the men lie limp off parade (for parade persists); one
begins to recall an ancient mariner and the tricks the sultry main
played upon him. And discussions arise, as animated as the heat will
allow, as to whether you'd rather fight in the burning Sahara or the
frozen trenches of Northern Europe.

A change in the manner of life on a troop-ship has been effected
almost as complete as _Oliver Twist_ shows to have taken place in
the administration of public charity, or as Charles Reade shows in
the conduct of His Majesty's prisons. Trooping in the 'seventies and
'eighties resembled pretty closely transport on an old slaver--in
respect of rations, ventilation, dirt, and space for exercise. By
comparison this is luxurious. Perhaps the most notable difference
is that there is no beer. The traditional regimental issue of one
pint _per_ man _per diem_ (and three pints for sergeants) has been
abolished. It is chiefly in a kind of Hogarth theory that this is
deplorable; most of the romance of beer-drinking is confined to the art
of such delineators as Hogarth and Thackeray. But amongst a section
of the men the regret is genuine. Especially hard was a beerless
Christmas for many who had been accustomed to charge themselves up with
goodwill towards men at that season.

There is a dry canteen, the most violent beverage, obtainable at which
is Schweppes's Dry, and hot coffee. Besides, it drives an incessant
trade in tobacco, groceries, clothing, and chocolate. We are a people
whose god is their belly. During canteen hours an endless queue moves
up the promenade-deck to either window of the store, and men purchase,
at the most prodigal rate, creature comforts they would despise on
land. With many of them it is part of the day's routine.

The leisure and associations of Christmas Day here brought home to the
bosoms of most men, more clearly than anything had done previously,
what they had departed from. There was hilarity spontaneous; there was
some forced to exaggeration, probably with the motive of smothering
all the feelings raised by the associations of the festival. You may
see, in your "mind's eye, Horatio," the troop-decks festooned above the
mess-tables, and all beneath softened with coloured sheaths about the
electric bulbs. There is strange and wonderful masquerading amongst the
diners, and much song. A good deal of the singing is facetiously woven
about the defective theme of "No Beer."

But beside, the old home-songs were given, and here and there a
Christmas hymn. It was a strangely mingled scene, but not all
tomfooling--not by a great deal.

The Chaplain-Colonel celebrated Holy Communion in the officers' mess at
7 and 8 a.m., and afterwards at Divine-Service on deck addressed the
men. Chiefly he was concerned with an attempted reconciliation of the
War with the teaching of Christianity. The rest of the day went _ad
lib._

The night is the unsullied property of the men--in a manner of
speaking; but in a manner only. The same could not be said of the
officers, as a body. The officers, it is true, fare sumptuously every
night, and dress elaborately to dine. The ill-starred private, his
simple meal long since consumed, perambulates, and looks on at this
good feasting from the promenade deck. "Gawd! I'd like them blokes'
job. Givin' b----y orders all day, an' feedin' like that--dressin' up,
too! 'Struth! Nothin' better t' do!" Now, that is the everlasting cry
of the rank-and-file against those in authority. It's in the business
house, where the artificer glares after the managing director--"'Olds
all the brass, an' never done a day's work in 'is loife!" It's not so
common in military as in civil experience. But as the artisan overlooks
the brooding of the managing director in the night watches, whilst he
sleeps dreamless, filled with bread, so the private tends to forget
that when the Major's dinner is over and his cigar well through, he may
work like the deuce until midnight, and be up at _réveille_ with the
most private of them. The officers are a picturesque group of diners,
and they promenade impressively for an hour thereafter; but they have
their night cares, which persist long after the rank and file is well
hammocked and snoring.

But before any snoring is engaged in there is a couple of hours of
yarning and repartee and horse-play and mirth of all orders. The band
plays; the name of the band is legion aboard, and often several members
of the legion are in action simultaneously, blaring out their brazen
hearts in some imperial noise about (say) Britannia and the waves and
the way she rules them; and if you're one of the dozen ill, you cast up
a prayer that she will see fit, in her own time, to rule them rather
more straight.

Hardly a night but there is a concert, from which the downright
song--as such--is rigidly excluded, and nothing but burlesque will be
listened to.

As the sun sets, you may lie and wait the lift of the long southern
swell of the Indian Ocean. The sunsets are already coloured with the
rich ultra-tropical warmth that caught the imagination of so many who
looked on that "Sunset at Agra." "Yet but a little while," you say
fondly, "and we shall glide south of that fabled Indian land of spice";
and you shudder at the vileness of contending man. There is danger in
the distracting fascination of a voyage of discovery, embraced by this
transporting to the land of war. For the old soldier--of whom the fleet
carries more than a few--it is hardly possible to realise the utter
glow of the imagination in the tyro, seeing for the first time those
spaces of the earth he has visualised for twenty years. You, therefore,
like a good soldier, put on the breast-plate of common sense, and
look up on the fore-masthead at the tiny mouth of fire, delicately
gaping and closing, uttering the Morse lingo (St. Elmo's fire, caught
and harnessed to human uses, by some collective Prospero) and make an
attempt to construe in your clumsy, 'prentice way.

Almost you will always fall asleep at this, and lie there a couple of
hours. And when you wake you go on lying there; and it is of little
consequence whether you lie there all night, or not, in the delicate
tropic air. And often you do so, and dream of all things but war.



CHAPTER II

UP THE CANAL


We put into the outer harbour at Aden for some hours to wait for the
main fleet, from which we had been parted mysteriously off Colombo.
They came in the early morning, handed us a heavy home-mail, and by
sundown we were all in motion, steaming up into the heat of the Red
Sea. If this is the Red Sea in midwinter, the Lord deliver us from
its summer! The heat is beguiled by heavy betting as to the port
of disembarkation. But as we get up towards Suez the hand of the
war-lords begins to show itself in cryptic paragraphs of troop-ship
orders--and the like. Marseilles is our desired haven, and next to that
Southampton. But--

  It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
  If any man get that which he desires,
  Or any merit that which he obtains.

Before lunch on the --th the African coast loomed up on the port-bow.
About mid-day we were steaming over the traditionally located
Israelitish crossing. Curious! the entirely unquestioning attitude of
the most blasphemous trooper afloat towards the literal authenticity of
Old Testament history. The Higher Criticism has, at any rate, no part
with the devil-may-care soldier full of strange oaths. Apparently to a
man the troops speak in quite an accepted fashion of the miraculous
Israelitish triumph over the Egyptian army: the inference from which
is, perhaps, that blasphemy is rather an habitual mannerism in such men
than anything deliberate. But after a month's living in their midst it
requires no such occasion as this discussion of Mosaic geography to
tell you that.

After lunch the Arabian coast also was to be seen. The contrast between
the coasts is memorable. It was a warm, grey day, and Arabia showed
more delicate than we had yet seen it. The immense mountains were
almost beyond sight. All the foreground was opalescent sand shot with
tiny cones and ridges of rock, themselves streaked with colour as
though sprinkled with the same sand. The effect of opalescence must be
purely atmospheric--but it is very beautiful.

But the African coast is rugged to the water's edge. The mountains
tower out of the sea; and the grey day, which drew out the iridescence
of Arabia, only blackened deeper the gigantic mountains of Africa. The
one is delicate pearl and amber, the other is ebony. Well justified
by sight and feeling were the judgments of books upon the perfumes
and delicate-bred steeds and philosophy of Arabia as over against the
grimness of "Darkest Africa."

All gazing was distracted by a death on board at sunset. The body
was buried under the moon at eight o'clock. Every soldier stands to
attention; the engines are stopped; in the sudden silence the solemn
service is read; the body is slid from the plank; the massed buglers
sound the Last Post.... The engines begin again to throb and grind, and
the routine, broken rudely but momentarily, resumes.

Next morning we wakened in the harbour of Suez. We lay here a day.
There appeared to have been some guerilla sniping from the banks of the
Canal. The troop-ship bridges were barricaded with sandbags, and all
ranks warned against exposing themselves unnecessarily. A shot in the
back out of the desert would be a more or less ignominious beginning,
and, as an ending, unutterable!

At ten in the morning we started into the Canal. Much valuable Egyptian
shore was missed by our being obliged to cross to starboard and salute
a French cruiser lying in the mouth. But before we had well passed
her the Arabian bank became thick with Ghurkas. War--or the rumour
of war--was brought home to our bosoms by their deep and elaborate
entrenchments, barbed-wire entanglements, and outworks. The Ghurkas
justify, seen in the flesh, all that has been said of their physique:
short, deep-chested fellows, with a grin that suggests war is their
sport indeed.

On the Egyptian side the Suez suburbs stretched away in a thin strip
of fertile country bearing crops and palm-groves and following the
rail to Cairo--easily visible, running neck-and-neck with a half-dozen
telegraph-lines. Later on, the line draws still nearer to the Canal,
making a halt at each of the Canal stations. The stations, with their
neat courtyards and neat French offices, and the neat and handsome
red-roofed villa, break the monotony of sand-ridge. And the monotony of
ejaculation from the deck is broken by a robust French voice shouting a
greeting through the megaphone from the station pontoon.

The Egyptian bank is still more strongly fortified; for in addition
to the entrenchments and entanglements of the other shore, the
place bristles with masked-batteries. The troops here were chiefly
Australian, with a sprinkling of Ghurka and of Sikh cavalry. Here
and there an Indian trooper would indicate by pantomime that firing
and bayoneting were in progress in the interior. But how much was
histrionic fervour and how much the truth remains to be known.

The Canal is embanked with limestone as far as the Bitter Lakes, and
at intervals thereafter. The Egyptian shore from the Lakes almost to
Ismailia is planted with a graceful grove of fir. The controllers
of the Canal evidently intend it shall be more than a commercial
channel--in some sense, a place to be seen. This is essentially French.

It was evident that trouble from the Turk was expected. The strongest
fortifications yet seen had been erected on the Arabian bank: much
artillery, thousands of men, searchlight, and frequent outpost. Our own
stern-chasers were unmasked and charged, ready in the event of game
showing. Almost every hour the troops were called to attention to pass
a British or French gunboat. All the warships had their guns run out
and their sandbags piled.

We steamed steadily to Port Said, at a pace which, if made habitual by
shipping here, would prove bad for the Canal shore and channel.

The towns of this route increase in size as we progress. Port Said
spreads herself out to prodigal limits.... On a nearer approach you
may see the wharves of the Arabian side lined with coal-tramps, backed
in like so many vans and disgorging into barges. There is the flash
of a grin, the white of an eye. The Port-side is the more interesting.
The finest buildings of the city would seem to be standing along the
water's edge. The business advertisements of the most cosmopolitan
city in the world are emphatically English; the signs for Kodak, and
Lipton's, and King George the Fourth Whisky, and the rest of them, look
familiarly out.

The touch of war is to be seen at any interval along the Canal; here
it is laid on with a trowel. Ghurkas are encamped in the suburb;
reclining at the foot of the Admiralty steps is a submarine rusted
and disfigured; ten minutes after, you pass the seaplane station; and
before the ship is at rest a hydroplane has buzzed over our masthead
and taken the water for a half-mile at the stern. Before dark three
monoplanes and a biplane have swept in out of the southern distance and
gone to roost after their scouting flight.

We were anchored within fifty yards of the heart of the city. One knew
not whether to be galled by the proximity of our prison-house to the
blandishments of such a city or grateful for a proximity which let us
see so much of it from deck. Seen through a glass, Arab, Frenchmen,
Italian, British, Yankee, Jap, and Jew justified the cosmopolitan
reputation of a city mid-set on the trade-route between the East and
West. The Canal here is gay as a Venetian highway and busy with flying
official cutters and pleasure craft and native boats. These last
swarmed to the side and drove a trade that was fierce; for the night
was coming, when no man could work at that. This was the degenerate
East indeed--not a cigar to be had, nothing to smoke but cheap and
foul Turkish and Egyptian cigarettes, fit food for eunuchs and such
effeminate rascals--for their vendors (for example) dressed in a most
ambiguous skirt: you never know whether, beneath skirt and turban, you
have a man or a woman!

The money-getters over the side included, here, a boat-load of
serenaders and one of jugglers. The first rung the changes on their
orchestra and their throats until we were as tired as they; and in
consequence their gorgeous parasol, gaping for coin in the hands of the
boy, gathered in some missiles whose purchasing power was not high. The
jugglers were more deserving.

The same unhallowed load of black bargees as at Aden came alongside to
coal and make night hideous. But they worked harder--time was short
and the boss used a rope's-end, and actually "laid out" more than one
who dared to stop for scraps thrown. They eked out their industry with
an alleged chant, echoed in derision by the troops all over the ship.
About midnight firing--or its equivalent--began to the south. At the
sound of guns the Mohammedan bargees forgot their labours and the
rope's-end--as did the boss, together with his authority--cast aside
their baskets, and incontinently fell on their faces in the coal-dust
and called in terror upon Allah.

Soon after dawn we stood out for Alexandria, and were there early the
following morning. The sun rising behind the city cast into flat black
Pompey's Pillar and the Port. It was hard to see, in the first blush,
in this city--when the sun had risen above it--a centre of action of
Pompey and of Alexander and of Cæsar. There is a curious blending of
age and of what is intensely modern; and so it is more easy to conceive
Sir Charles Beresford bombarding from the _Condor_, with Admiral
Seymour pounding from behind; or Napoleon storming the citadel. From
our anchorage it was with ease we saw the scene of bombardment and the
converging-point from which the Egyptians fled helter-skelter to the
hinterland.

       *       *       *       *       *

Anchored in the harbour, we supposed by habit we should have to be
content with externals and with conjecture as to what was to be seen in
the midst of the city. But we loitered some days to disembark infantry,
and leave was granted freely. One would have easily given a month's pay
for a day ashore--apart from the month's pay he could spend there--had
that been necessary.

Your first business after leaving the gangway is to stave-off the
horde of beggars and gharry-drivers (an Australian cab-rank is put
to shame here) and choose one of the latter's vehicles approximately
respectable. It takes ten minutes' brisk driving to get you well out of
the labyrinth of wharves, docks, and dhows. You emerge by one of seven
dock-gates, vigilated by native police, into the Arab quarter, by which
alone approach to the city proper is possible. Cook's tourists drive
hurriedly through this region, and protect their eyes and noses with
the daily newspaper. The wise man knows that if he is to see Alexandria
he will dismiss the gharry and walk--and walk slowly--through the
native-quarter. In fact, he will care not a damn whether he ever gets
to imposing French and English residential quarters or not....

So, in your wonder at the utter strangeness of everything you overpay
the driver some five piastres and begin to thread your way over the
cobbles. All building is of stone, with a facing of cement, which once
was bright-coloured, but has faded into faint blues and browns and
greys; and if you look up and along the street of crumbling, flat-faced
upper storeys broken by tiny balconies, you feel intensely the gentle
irregularity and the mass of mellow colour. The one and the other is
never seen in Australia, with our new shining-painted angularities of
hardwood and bright nails and eaves and gables and sharp-sloping roofs.
A gentle irregularity, in a street where boards thrust out and planks
give way and vulgarly project themselves, where neither roofs nor
fronts are flat, is unknown in our country.

What Mr. Wells calls "the inundating flood of babies" ebbs and flows
in the streets. The Arab women, bare-legged, slovenly of gait, broad
of person, with swaying, unstable bust, move up and down or sit in the
doorways, or lounge and haggle over a purchase. Every hovel in the
bazaars, with its low door and dark recesses, sells or makes something,
and the Arab quarter is a succession of bazaars. The artificers squat
at their work in brass or clay or fabric or gold; the greybeards sit
at the doors with hubble-bubble and dream through the day in a state
of coma. Fruits and dates, sweets and pastry, and Eastern culinary
products that defy nomenclature by the Australian, are piled in an
Eastern profusion. Sweets and pastry abound in excess and are curiously
cheap. Toffee is sold from stands at every street-corner, and the
quantity you might carry off for sixpence would be embarrassing. Pastry
is made here of a flavour and lightness unexcelled by any English
housewife. Sit at an open restaurant, call for a light lunch, and you
will have a plate heaped with the most delicious meat and spice pastry
and sugared fruits, for something less than the price of a street-stall
pie in Australia, and with a glass of sherbet thrown in. The fineness
of the fabrics sold (amongst bales of Manchester rubbish) will draw
the better class of Egyptian woman into the bazaars of this east-end;
they are beautiful in rich black silk from head to toe, with a delicate
white yashmak; they have a regularity of feature and a complexion and
a beauty of eye and of gait to make you look again. Nothing is lost to
them by the setting through which they glide: the ragged bargainers,
the sluttishness of the women, the unmitigated dirt of earth and asses
and children and tethered goats, and water-carriers with their greasy
swine-skins filled and shining. They offer an analogy to the stately
mosque and minaret which lifts its graceful head above the squalid
erections of the poor. And as futilely might the stranger pry into
those features with his free curiosity as attempt an entrance to the
Mosque unattended.

Progress is slow towards the Square. Not the interest of the scene
alone invites you to linger: the whole atmosphere is one of lounge.
Everyone moves at a lounging pace; those not in motion lounge; there
are periodical cafés where the men lounge in the fumes of smoke and
native spirits by the half-day together. No one hurries. Business seems
rather a hobby and an incident than the earnest, insistent thing it is
in England. The advantage surely lies with the Arab; he finds time to
live and contemplate and get to know something of himself. God help the
American! Better, perhaps, to spend the evening of your life with your
chin on your knees and your hubble-bubble adjacent, looking out on the
life before you, and within upon your own, than boast yourself still
keen in the steel trade; that your features are "mobile and alert,"
though your head is grey, whereas your contemporaries are "failing." ...

At the end of a half-day you'll know your proximity to the
Centre by the uprising of "respectable" cafés and imposing
cigarette-manufactories and of hotels. And you come into the Square
overlooked by the noble statue of the noble Mahomet Aly--every ounce a
soldier.

Wide and well-built streets lead away into the regions of high-class
trade and residence. You had best take a gharry here. There are two
extreme classes amongst tourists--the thoroughgoing Cook's sight-seer
who works exclusively by the vehicle and the book, and the tourist who
steadily refuses to "do" the stock places. Each is at fault if he is
inflexible: the former in the Arab quarter, the latter when he emerges
from it. For in a city such as Alexandria the visitor who declines to
see the spots relict of the ancient history of this world is clearly
an obdurate fool with a strange topsy-turvey-dom of values. Let him
take a gharry and a book in his hand when the time is ripe; let him be
free with his piastres when Pompey's Pillar stands over the catacombs
of the city. The Forts of Cæsar and of Napoleon watch over the sea. He
may stand upon the ground where was the library of Alexandria and where
Euclid reasoned over his geometrical figures in the sand. Here Hypatia
suffered martyrdom and Cleopatra held her court and died in her palace.
On the northern horn of the harbour stood the great Beacon of Pharos,
one of the Seven Wonders.

So you get your vehicle and a chattering guide....

On the way back to ship the Park and the Nouzha Gardens are a delicious
sight after the aridity of the desert.... The gharry is dismissed on
re-entering the Arab quarter; it would be a sad waste of opportunity to
drive....

We climbed the gangway bearing much fruit and dirt, and very much
late for dinner. And after mess the boat-deck and the pipes and our
purchases in tobacco and our ventures in cigars--and the day all over
again.



CHAPTER III

ABBASSIEH


We left the ship's side in a barge that might have carried twice our
number without crowding. Every man of us had chafed at the confinement
of the voyage, but not one did not now regret the dissociation from our
unit, with all the chances it carried of never rejoining, and even,
possibly, of never getting to Europe at all. Private friendships do
not fall within the consideration of motives in the issue of military
orders. Men were calling a farewell from the deck with whom we would
have given much to go through the campaign. There was nothing for it
but to cultivate the philosophy of the grin and simulate an elation at
being free, at last, from the prison-house, and chaff the others about
the bitter English winter they were sailing into, and claim we had the
best of it. But in our hearts we coveted their chances of moving into
Europe first. No part in the Egyptian army of occupation, with the
off-chance of a fitful brawl with the Turk, compensated for that.

Baggage required but brief handling. We had little more than our rifles
and equipment and kit-bags. By sunset we were entrained, and flying
between the back-yards of Alexandria. A five hours' run was before us.
There was nothing to be seen except each other, and we had had enough
of that in the last five weeks. We cast about for something to eat
(the ship's cooks' fatigue had bagged a sack of cold fowl before making
their exit from the bowels of the transport), and composed ourselves to
sleep. The cessation of motion at Cairo, at 2 a.m., awakened us. Half
an hour afterwards we were at Abbassieh, tumbling out into the cold
and "falling-in." A guide was waiting. The baggage was piled on the
platform under a guard until the morning. A pair of blankets per man
was issued, and we marched through a mile of barracks to the camp. The
fuddled brains of those still half asleep had conceived a picture of
tents and the soft, warm sand and the immediate resumption of slumber.
This was ill-founded. We poked about for a place in which to sleep.
Ultimately we stumbled upon a line of blockhouses erected for messing,
wherein we crept, posted a couple of sentries, and disposed ourselves
about the tables. It was very cold; had we been less tired, we should
have been about before seven the next morning.

Abbassieh, except for its mosque, is nothing but a barrack-settlement.
Barracks almost encircle the camp. Indeed, it would appear that the
Regular Cairene troops are mostly quartered in this suburb. The eastern
and northern barracks are for the Egyptian Regulars; the Territorials
occupy those on the west. We see much of either. The Egyptians are
impressive--very lithe and strongly built, but not tall. Alertness is
the badge of all their tribe. The first impression they give is that
everything in their training is done "at the double." As you turn in
your bed at 5.30, you hear their _réveille_ trumpeted forth from the
whole barrack settlement; and that is significant. To a man, they bear
about the mouth those lines seen upon the face of the thoroughgoing
athlete. They love to fraternise with the Australians. The Turks they
hate with a perfect hatred; more than one has lost a brother "down the
Canal." If this is the type of man Kitchener had with his British, the
consistent victories of his Egyptian campaign are quite in the order of
nature. They show an individual strength, efficiency, and alertfulness
which probably is to be seen nowhere else--except, perhaps, among the
Ghurkas--in all the British forces now under arms. The best Australian
or Territorial unit will have its weeds and its blear-eyed and its
round-shouldered and its slouchers. Here you look for them in vain.

The Camp is busy enough at any time of the day, and the Army Service
Corps which supplies it is almost as busy as any unit on active
service. The difference is that it is not feverishly busy, and that
it has a convenient and resourceful base from which to work--the city
of Cairo, as well and variously stocked as the most fastidious army
could wish. And an army which is merely sitting in occupation is in
danger of growing fastidious--with shops of Parisian splendour and
Turkish baths and cafés of the standard of the _Francatelli_ within
two miles, and opportunity of generous leave. In the first half of
the day the camp supply depôt is animated with men of more than one
race and beasts of many breeds. Long trains of camels and donkeys
move in from the irrigation with their loads of green fodder and
vegetables, and the high and narrow Arab carts, decorated fore and
aft in quasi-hieroglyphic, bring in the chaff and grain. General
service waggons, manned by Australians, are there too. The unloading
and distribution is done chiefly by hired Arabs working under the
superintendence of our men. The din is terrific; no Arab can work
without much talk and shout. If he has no companion to be voluble
with, he talks with and at his beast. But here is a crowd of a
hundred of them, and it is with difficulty the superintendents make
themselves audible, much less intelligible. All the heavy fatigue
work is done by natives attached--splitting wood, digging drains and
soakage-pits, erection of out-houses, removal of refuse of all sorts.
Native labour is extremely cheap, and beside its official employment
the men use it for such purposes as private washing; a native takes
your week's soiled clothes and returns them next day, snow white, for
a couple of piastres. During certain hours the camp swarms with Arab
vendors of newspapers, fruit, sweets, cakes, post-cards, Arab-English
phrase-books, rifle-covers (invaluable, almost indispensable, here to
the right preservation of arms), clothing, tobacco and cigarettes. They
easily become a bane if encouraged in any degree. Native police patrol
the place day and night for the sole purpose of keeping them in check.
This is no easy matter. They are slippery as eels, cunning as foxes,
and impudent as they make 'em. They fight incessantly; bloody coxcombs
are to be seen daily, and the men rarely hesitate to fan an embryonic
fight into a serious combat as a relief from the lassitude of the
mid-day; for the noon is as hot as the night is cold. To incite is the
soldier's delight: "Go it, Snowball!"--"Well hit, Pompey!"--"Get after
him!" ... until a couple of native police break in and carry off the
combatants by the lug. Even then, they often break away and resume, or
clear off into the desert. And a policeman in thick blue serge, with
leggings and bayonet, is no match in a chase for a bare-footed Arab in
his cotton skirt.

The Arab is intelligent, and in many cases has picked up decent English
and speaks with fluency. Between the early parade and breakfast we
often engage them in talk, partly for amusement, partly to improve our
mongrel Arabic. They are good subjects for interrogation, with a nice
sense of humour--indulged often at your expense--and a knack of getting
behind the mind of the questioner. They excel, too, in the furnishing
of examples in illustration of answers to questions about custom and
usage in Egypt. The best conversationalists, by far, are the native
police sergeants, who are chosen a good deal for their intelligence
and mental alertfulness. Get a police sergeant into your tent after
tea, and you have a fruitful evening before you. He readily discusses
Mohammedanism, and Egyptian history and peoples, and local geography
and customs, and is as pleased to discuss as you to start him. The
intelligent Arab in British employ is a revelation in intellectual
freshness and open-mindedness. He never speaks in formula, and is
clearly astonished at the want of intellectual curiosity in many of his
interlocutors.

The men sleep in bell-tents--some in the sand; others, more flush of
piastres, on a species of matting supplied by the native weavers. Sand
may be warm and comfortable enough in itself, but it breeds vermin
prolifically, specialising in fleas. And at midnight you will see an
unhappy infested fellow squatting, roused from sleep because of their
importunity, conducting a search by candle-light, engaged in much the
same business as his Simian ancestors; the difference is that whereas
they were too strong-minded to be disturbed in their sleep by any such
trifle, his search is mostly nocturnal--though not exclusively so;
and, moreover, in place of their merely impatient gibbering, he speaks
with eloquence and consecutiveness, often in quite sustained periods,
logically constructed and glowing with purple patches.... The Medical
Officer has got a paragraph inserted in camp routine orders about a
bathing parade on Fridays, compelling a complete ablution. But what
avails cold water, once a week? Most men, however, have been known to
bathe more often.

The military Medical Officer in this country is as considerable a
personage as the medicine-man amongst the American Indians. In a land
where the rainfall is not worth mentioning, and the sun is hot, and the
natural drainage poor, and sanitation little considered by the natives,
he is a man whose word in camp is law. He speaks almost daily, through
camp orders or through pamphlets of his own compiling, imperative words
of warning, and in the daily camp inspection the Commandant is his
mere satellite. "Avoid," says he (in effect) in his fifth philippic
against dirt, "the incontinent consumption of fruit unpeeled and
raw or unwashed vegetables. Therefrom proceed dysentery, enteritis,
Mediterranean fever, parasitic diseases, and all manner of Egyptian
scourges. Would you fly the plagues of Egypt, abhor the Arab hawker
and the native beer-shop." Certain quarters are hygienically declared
"out of bounds." They include "all liquor-shops and cafés, except
those specified hereafter ..."; the village of Abbassieh; the village
adjoining the Tombs of the Caliphs (the most squalid in Cairo). It is
for other reasons than hygienic that the gardens of the Sultan's palace
at Koubbeh and the Egyptian State-railways are placed out of bounds too.

Men scarcely need go to Cairo for the satisfaction of their most
fastidious wants. The regimental institute receives camp-rent from
grocer, haberdasher, keeper of restaurants, vendor of rifle-covers,
barber, boot-repairer, tailor, and proprietor of the wet-canteen.

We get precious and intermittent mails from Australia. Their delivery
is somewhat irregular. That is no fault of our friends. What may be the
fault of our friends is an ultimate scarcity of letters. One has read
of the ecstasies of satisfied longing with which the exile in Labrador
reads his half-yearly home mail. If friends in Australia knew fully the
elation their gentle missives inspire here, they would write with what
might become for them a monotonous regularity. The man who gets a fair
budget on mail-day hankers after no leave that night.

Sabbath morning in the Egyptian desert breaks calm; there is no
before-breakfast parade. The sergeants set the example of lying a
little after waking, as at home. Through the tent door, as you lie,
you can see the sun rise over the undulating field of sand. The long
stone Arab prison, standing away towards the sun in sombre isolation,
is sharply defined against the ruddy east. The sand billows redden,
easily taking the glow of the dawn; and the hills of rock in the south,
which look down over Cairo, catch the level rays until their rich brown
burns. A fresh breeze from the heart of the desert, pure as the morning
wind of the ocean, rustles the fly and invites you out, until you can
lie no longer. Throwing on your great-coat, you saunter with a towel,
professedly making for the shower-baths, but careless of the time you
take to get there, so gentle is the morning and so mysteriously rich
the glory of Heliopolis, glittering like the morning star, and so
spacious the rosy heaven reflecting the sun-laved sand.

You dawdle over dressing in a way that is civilian. By the time these
unregimental preliminaries to breakfast are over, the mess is calling;
and thereafter is basking in the sun beneath the wall of the mess-hut
with the pipes gently steaming, reading over the morning war-news.
The news is cried about the camp on Sunday more clamorously than on
any other day: Friday is the Mohammedan Sabbath. Sunday brings forth
special editions of the dailies, and all the weeklies beside. The
soldier is the slave of habit, and the Sunday morning is instinctively
unsullied. Even horse-play is more or less disused. The men are content
to bask and smoke.

At 9.15 the "Fall-in" sounds for parade for Divine service. Columns
from all quarters converge quietly on a point where the Chaplain's
desk and tiny organ rest in the sand. By 9.30 the units have massed
in a square surrounding them and are standing silently at ease. The
Chaplain-Colonel whirrs up in his car. He salutes the Commandant and
announces the Psalm. Thousands of throats burst into harmonious praise,
and the voice of the little organ, its leading chord once given, is
lost in the lusty concert. The lesson is read; the solemn prayers for
men on the Field of Battle are offered: no less solemn is the petition
for Homes left behind; the full-throated responses are offered. The
Commandant resumes momentary authority. He commands them to sit down;
they are in number about five thousand. The Chaplain bares his head,
steps upon his dais, and reclining upon the sands of Egypt the men
listen to the Gospel, much as the Israelites may have heard the Word of
God from the bearded patriarch--even upon these very sands.

At no stage in the worship of the God of Battles is the authority of
military rank suppressed. The parade which is assembled to worship
Him that maketh wars to cease is never permitted to be unmindful of
a Major. One despises proverbial philosophy in general, but herein
the reader may see, if he will, a kind of comment on the truism that
Heaven helps those that help themselves. Colonels and Majors are part
of the means whereby we hope to win. The persistence of military rank
throughout Divine worship is the implicit registering of a pledge to do
our part. There is nothing in us of the unthinking optimist who says it
will all come out well and that we cannot choose but win....

As the Chaplain offers prayer a regiment of Egyptian Lancers gallops
past with polished accoutrements and glittering lance-heads for a
field-day in the desert. Bowed heads are raised, and suppressed
comments of admiration go round, and the parson says _Amen_ alone.



SECTION B.--CAIRO



CHAPTER I

ON LEAVE IN CAIRO


It is not so long ago as to render it untrue now that Dean Stanley
said, looking down from the Citadel: "Cairo is not the ghost of the
dead Egyptian Empire, nor anything like it."

The interval elapsed since that reflection was uttered has, indeed,
only deepened its truth. Cairo is becoming more modern every season.
The "booming" of Cairo as a winter resort for Europeans was begun at
the opening of the Canal by the Khedive Ismail. His ambition was the
transforming of Cairo into a kind of Paris of Africa. The effort has
not died with him. It has persisted with the official-set and their
visitors. The result now is that in half an hour's ride you may pass
from those monuments of antiquity, the Sphinx and the Pyramid of
Cheops, in a modern tram-car, along a route which is neither ancient
nor modern, into a city which blends in a most amazing fashion Europe
of to-day with Egypt of a very long time past. There are wheels within
wheels: at the foot of the Great Pyramid are crowded shanties and
taverns such as you might enter in a poorer Melbourne Street or on a
new-found gold-field; and the intensity of the contradiction in Cairo
itself baffles description.

Cairo has been so accurately portrayed in every aspect with the pen
that it seems presumptuous to attempt to reproduce even impressions,
much less relate facts. One prefers, of course, if he does attempt to
do either, to give impressions rather than facts. Any guide-book will
give you facts. And the reader who demands a sort of Foster-Frazer
tabulation of facts is analogous to those unhappy readers of romance
who rank incident above characterisation.

What one feels he must say, chiefly, is that it is the living rather
than the dead in Cairo that attract most strongly. You go to the Museum
or stand beside the sarcophagus of the King's Chamber in the Great
Pyramid once, and again; not because it is conventionally fitting, but
because that conventional appropriateness rests upon a broad and deep
psychology: these places have their hold upon you. But incomparably
stronger is that which draws you times without number to the bazaars.
"Fool!" says Teufelsdröckh. "Why journeyest thou wearisomely, in thy
antiquarian fervour, to gaze on the stone Pyramids of Geeza, or the
clay ones of Sacchara? These stand there, as I can tell thee, idle and
inert, looking over the desert, foolishly enough, for the last three
thousand years...."

A half-day in the bazaars I would not exchange for a whole wilderness
of Sphinxes. You may go twice and thrice before the Sphinx, but there
comes a time when there is no place for you but the ebb and flow of the
human tide in the narrow streets; when you spend all your leave there,
and are content to commend the venerable dead and their mausolea to the
Keeper of Personality for ever.

I dare not enter on the multiplicity of the charm of the bazaars: more
accurately, I cannot. The dazzling incongruity of vendors and of wares
under the over-meeting structures multiplies multiplicity. They move
and cry up and down classified bazaars. A vociferous Arab hawks a cow
for sale through the boot-bazaar; the delicious Arabian perfumes of
the picturesque scent bazaar are fouled by a crier of insanitary food;
Jews, French, Italians, Tunisians, Greeks, and Spaniards jostle each
other through the alleys of the tent bazaar, braziers' bazaar, bazaar
of the weavers, book bazaar--bazaar of any commodity or industry you
care to name; and the proprietors and artificers squat on their tiny
floors, maybe four feet square. In the busy forenoon, looking up the
Mooski, it is as though the wizard had been there: almost you look
for the djin to materialise. Rich colour is splashed over the stalls
and the throng; there is music in the jingle of wares and the hum of
voices; and the sober and graceful mosque, its rich colour gently
mellowed by centuries of exposure, lifts a minaret above the animation.
If this is the complexity of the broad view, what contrasts are thrust
at you from the detail of men and things, as you saunter through!

Here in the Mooski is the micro-Cairo--Cairo bodied forth in little,
except for the intruding official set and the unrestrained quarter of
the brothels. But less truthfully might you set out to picture the real
Cairo with the former than without the latter. Any account which passes
without note the incessant trade--in the high-noon as under the garish
night-lights--driven by the women of Cairo will altogether misrepresent
the city. It is with a hideous propriety that she should stand
partly on the site of Old Babylon. She is a city which, in perhaps
her most representative quarter, lives in and for lasciviousness. The
details of that trade in its thoroughgoing haunts are no more to be
described than looked upon. There is no shame; sexual transactions are
conducted as openly and on as regular and well-established a footing
of bargaining and market values as the sale of food and drink. Meat
and drink, indeed, they must furnish to much of the population, and
its alimentary properties are to be seen at every corner and in every
gutter in hideousness of feature and disease unutterable. Not Paris,
nor Constantinople, approaches in shamelessness the conduct of venereal
industry in Cairo. All the pollution of the East would seem to drain
into their foul pool. That which is nameless is not viewless. I speak
that I do know and testify that I have seen. The phrase, the act, every
imagination of the heart of man (and of woman), is impregnated with the
filth of hell.

The official set you will see disporting itself on the piazza at
Shepheard's or the Continental every afternoon. The official set
is also the fashionable set, and it or its sojourning friends--or
both--make up the monied set. I had no opportunity of going to a
race-meeting at Gezireh; but it should come near to holding its own in
"tone" with the great race-day at Caulfield.

Shepheard's is an habitual rendezvous of British officers at any time.
The officers of the permanent army at Cairo assemble there, and the
general orders are posted in the entrance-hall as regularly as at
the Kasr-el-Nil Barracks. It is at Shepheard's that officers most do
congregate. According to a sort of tacit agreement--extended later
into an inescapable routine order--none lower in rank than a Subaltern
enters there.

Otherwise, everywhere is the soldier; there is nothing he does not
see. Everything is so utterly new that a day in Cairo is a continual
voyage of discovery; and if he does no more than perambulate without
an objective, it is doubtful if he has not the best of it. Fools and
blind there are who look on everything from a gharry, fast-trotting.
God help them! How can such a visitor hope to know the full charm
of manner and voice and attire of the vendor of sherbet or sweet
Nile-water if he move behind a pair of fast-trotting greys? How may
he hope to know the inner beauties of a thoroughgoing bargaining-bout
between two Arabs, when he catches only a fragment of dialogue and
gesture in whisking past? What does he know of the beggars at the city
gate in the old wall?--except how to evade them. Little he sees of the
delicate tracery of the mosque; no time to wander over ancient Arab
houses with their deserted harems, floor and walls in choice mosaic,
rich stained windows, with all the symbolism of the manner of living
disposed about the apartment. It is denied to him to poke about the
native bakeries, to converse with salesmen, to look in on the Schools
chanting _Al Koran_, to watch the manual weavers, tent-makers, and
artificers of garments and ornaments. One cannot too much insist that
it is a sad waste of opportunity to go otherwise than slowly and afoot,
and innocent of "programmes," "schemes," _agenda_--even of set routes.

The alleged romance of Cairo is alleged only. Cairo is intensely
matter-of-fact. In Carlyle's study of Mahomet you read: "This night
the watchman on the streets of Cairo, when he cries 'Who goes?' will
hear from the passenger, along with his answer, 'There is no God but
_God_.'--'_Allah akbar, Islam_,' sounds through the souls, and whole
daily existence, of these dusky millions."

This is romance read into Cairo by Carlyle. The watchman gets far
other rejoinders to his cry this night--answers the more hideous for
Carlyle's other-worldly supposition. Romance is gone out of Cairo,
except in a distorted mental construction of the city. Cairo is not
romantic; it is picturesque, and picturesque beyond description.

Alfresco cafés are ubiquitous. Their frequency and pleasantness suggest
that the heat of Australia would justify their establishment there in
very large numbers. Chairs and tables extend on to the footpaths. The
people of all nations lounge there in their fez caps, drinking much,
talking more, gambling most of all. Young men from the University
abound; much resemble, in their speech and manner, the young men of
any other University. They deal in witty criticism of the passengers,
but show a readiness in repartee with them of which only an Arab
undergraduate is capable.

The gambling of the cafés is merely symbolic of the spirit of gambling
which pervades the city. It is incipient in the Arab salesman's love
of bargaining for its own sake. The commercial dealings of Egypt,
wholesale and retail alike, are said to want fixity in a marked degree.
Downright British merchants go so far as to call it by harder names
than the "spirit of gambling." The guides are willing to bet you
anything on the smallest provocation. Lottery tickets are hawked about
the streets like sweetmeats; there are stalls which sell nothing but
lottery tickets, and thrive upon the sale.

You will see much, sitting in these cafés at your ease. Absinthe and
coffee are the drinks. Coffee prevails, served black in tiny china
cups, with a glass of cold water. It is a delicious beverage: the
coffee fiend is not uncommon. Cigarettes are the habitual smoke in the
streets. At the cafés you call for a hubble-bubble. They stand by the
score in long racks. The more genteel (and hygienic) customers carry
their own mouth-pieces, but it is not reckoned a sporting practice.

You cannot sit five minutes before the vendors beset you with edibles,
curios, prawns, oranges, sheep's trotters, cakes, and post-cards. The
boys who would polish your boots are the most noisome. The military
camps in the dusty desert have created an industry amongst them. A
dozen will follow you a mile through the streets. If you stop, your leg
is pulled in all directions, and nothing but the half-playful exercise
of your cane upon the sea of ragged backs saves you from falling in.

The streets swarm with guides, who apparently believe either that you
are inevitably bound for the Pyramids or incapable of walking through
the bazaars unpiloted. And a guide would spoil any bazaar, though at
the Pyramids he may be useful. If you suggest you are your own guide,
the dog suggests an assistant. They are subtle and hard to be rid of,
and frequently abusive when you are frank. The hawkers and solicitors
of the streets of Cairo have acquired English oaths, parrot-wise. The
smallest boy has got this parasitic obscenity with a facility that
beats any Australian newsboy in a canter.

There is a frequent electric tramway service in Cairo. It is very
convenient and very dirty, and moderately slow, and most informally
conducted. The spirit of bargaining has infected even the collector
of fares. Journeying is informal in other ways; only in theory is
it forbidden (in French, Arabic, Greek, and English) to ride on the
footboard. You ride where you can. Many soldiers you will see squatting
on the roofs. And if the regulations about riding on footboards were
enforced the hawkers of meats and drinks and curios would not plague
you with their constant solicitation. The boot-boys carry on their
trade furtively between the seats: often they ride a mile, working
hard at a half-dozen boots. The conductor objects only to the extent
of a facetious cuff, which he is the last to expect to take effect.
Both motorman and conductor raise the voice in song: an incongruous
practice to the earnest-working Briton. But the Cairene Arab who takes
life seriously is far to seek. There is nothing here of the struggling
earnestness of spirit of the old Bedouin Arabs to whom Mahomet
preached. The Cairene is a carnal creature, flippant and voluptuous,
with more than a touch of the Parisian. You'll find him asleep at
his shop-door at ten in the morning, and gambling earlier still.
Well-defined articulation is unknown amongst the Arabs here, except in
anger and in fight. They do not open their teeth either to speak or to
sing. The sense of effort is everywhere wanting--in their slouching
gait, their intonation; their very writing drags and trails itself
along. But what are you due to expect in a country where the heat
blisters most of the year; where change of temperature and of physical
outlook are foreign--a country of perennially wrinkled skins, where
a rousing thunder-storm is unknown, and where the physical outlook
varies only between the limits of sand and rock? The call for comment
would arise if physical inertia were other than the rule. And of the
Anglo-Egyptian, what may you expect?...

One has not seen Cairo unless he has wandered both by day and by night.
So, he knows at least two different worlds. To analyse the contrast
would take long. It is hard to know which part of a day charms you the
most. The afternoon is not as the morning; the night is far removed
from either. Go deeper, and you may get more subtle divisions of
twelve hours' wandering than these; with accuracy of discrimination
you may even raise seven Dantean circles in your day's progress. The
safe course, then, is to "make a day of it." Tramp it, after an early
breakfast, over the desert to the car, and plod back past the guard
after midnight. You'll turn in exhausted, but the richer in your
experience (at the expense of a few piastres) by far more than any gold
can buy.



CHAPTER II

THE MOOSKI


The camp at Tel-el-Kebir is a good camp, as camp sites go. None the
less exhilarating for that is the prospect of leave in Cairo. After
retiring, you spend most of the night before you go in planning the
most judicious economy of the few hours you will have in the great
city. And so you wake up short of sleep--for the train leaves soon
after sunrise--and curse yourself for an incontinent fool, no better
than some mercurial youngster who cannot sleep for thinking of the
party on the next day.

But the journey revives you. How deliciously it revives you!--and how
generously! as you skim across that green delta, sleeping under the
dew, with the mist-wreaths winding about the quiet palm-fronds. The
sweet-water canal runs silently beside you all the way between its
clover-grown tow-paths, without a ripple. The buffalo stand motionless
in the lush berseem. The Egyptian State railways are the smoothest in
the world. Two hours' swift gliding through these early-morning haunts
of quietness retrieves your loss of sleep, and would reinforce you for
a day in any city.

As you approach Cairo you find the delta has wakened. The mists have
departed, disclosing the acres of colour in the blossom of the crops.
The road beside the Canal is peopled. The fellaheen and his family
are moving along to work on donkey and buffalo and camel. The women in
their black robes and yashmaks are moving to the dipping-places in the
Canal, pitcher on head, walking with a grace and erectness that does
you good to look on. Some are already drawing, knee-deep in the cool
water; or emerging, and showing to the world, below the freely raised
robe, that of whose outline they have no call to be ashamed. Some of
the labourers are already at work, hoeing in squads under an overseer
or guiding the primitive Vergilian plough behind its yoke of oxen.
The blindfold yak has started his weary, interminable round at the
water-wheel. The camels are looping along with their burdens of fruit
and berseem, and the tiny donkeys amble under their disproportionate
loads, sweeping the ground; they are hardly to be seen; in the distance
they show merely a jogging hillock of green. By nine o'clock, as you
race through the outskirts of Cairo, you see an occasional waiting man
asleep full-stretch on the sod; the hour is early for sleeping. On the
suburban roads are moving towards the centre venerable sheikhs, squat
on the haunches of their well-groomed donkeys; merchants lying back
in their elaborate gharries; gabbling peasants driving their little
company of beasts; English and French officials, carefully dressed,
smoking the morning cigarette.

Shortly the Pyramids emerge on the eastern sky-line, and over the
thickening house-tops rises the splendid relief of the Makattam Hills,
with the stately citadel perched on the fringe, looking down on the
City under its soaring minarets.

You had formed plans for the economy of the day; they are all
dissipated when you step from the train and realise yourself within
a mile of the bazaars. Their call is irresistible. The Pyramids, the
mosques, the museum--all can wait, to be visited if there is time for
it. You enter a gharry and alight at the mouth of the Mooski. It is
palpably a mouth to that seething network, as plainly defined (as you
gaze up Mooski Street from the Square) as the entrance to an industrial
exhibition.

There is a crowd of men in the early stages of Mooski Street, whose
business, day and night, is to conduct. They lurk privily for the
innocent, like the wicked men in the Book of Psalms. The guides have
come so much into disrepute that they mostly hasten to tell you they
are not guides. "What are you, then?"--"I am student, sair"; or "I am
agent, sair"; or "I am your friend; I do not wish for money." You'll
meet such self-abnegation nowhere on earth as in the Mooski. Those
who do own to being guides will never name a price. "How much do you
want?"--"I leave that to you, sair. If you are pleased, you give me
what you think." ... This is all very subtle: the man who is agent
will get his commission and tender for baksheesh for having put you
in the way of purchase (whereas he is in league with the rogue who
fleeces you in the sale). The student shows no sort of ideal scholastic
contempt for lucre; it's of degrees of gullibility that he's chiefly
a student--and an astute one, gathering where he has not strawed. The
man who is your friend and wouldn't think of money turns out a mere
liar, downright--who does care, greatly. These are the subtlest ways
of approaching you and broaching the subject of a tour. The rascal may
simply fall into step and ask the time of day and proceed to talk
of the weather--merely glad of your company--and abruptly close the
half-mile walk with a demand for cash, like any guide requisitioned. In
short, it's to be doubted whether in any city men live on their wits
more artfully and unscrupulously than in the Cairene bazaars.

As a practice, it's wise to decline all offers to accompany--as a
practice; but first time through it's wise to accept. No one can hope
to unravel the tangle of the Mooski geography unaided or by chance.
The labyrinth of overshadowed alleys is as confusing as the network of
saps near the firing-line. Take a guide at your first going. If he does
no more than show "the bright points" in an experience of the bazaars,
he has earned his exorbitant fee. After that, refuse him, which you
will never do without harsh discourtesy. A mere "No, thank you," is as
nothing. "Yallah minhenna"--or its equivalent--uttered in your most
quarrelsome manner, is the least of which he will begin to take notice.

The best beginning is through the narrow doorway off Mooski Street
into the spice bazaar. Of so unpretentious a doorway you never would
suspect the purpose without a guide, and that's the first argument
for tolerating him. Can such a needle's-eye lead to anything worth
entering? You arrive in an area where the air is voluptuous with the
scent of all the spices of the East--something more delicious than even
the scent bazaar, and less enervating. All the purchasers are women,
moving round behind their yashmaks. They boil and beat the spices to
grow fat, and to be fat is a national feminine aspiration. The boys
are pounding the wares in large stone mortars, crushing out the
sweetness, which pervades like an incense.

Appropriately enough, it is but a step into the scent bazaar proper,
and many of the purchasers there are (inappropriately) men. That the
men should wear and hanker after perfumes to this degree is one phase
of Egyptian degeneracy. The vendors squat in their narrow cubicles
lined with shelf upon shelf of gaily-coloured phials. They invite you
to sit down. Coffee is called for, and whilst that is preparing you
must taste the sweets of their wares on your tunic-sleeve. Bottle by
bottle comes down; he shakes them and rubs the stopper across your
forearm: attar of roses, jasmine, violet, orange-blossom, banana, and
the rest of them, until you are fairly stupid with the medley of sweet
fumes. You saunter off rubbing your sleeve upon your breeches, and
wondering what your comrades in arms will say if they catch you wearing
the odours of the lord of the harem. You have a tiny flask of attar of
roses upon you to send home to its appropriate wearer.

You move on to the tarbush bazaar; Tunis bazaar, where the fine
Tunisian scarves of the guides are sold; slipper bazaar, showing piles
of the red canoe-shoe of the Soudanese hotel-waiter, and of the yellow
heelless slipper of the lounging Egyptian; blue bazaar, where the women
buy their dress-stuffs--their gaudy prints and silks, all the rough
material for their garments. No Australian flapper can hold a candle
to them in their excited keenness of selection; and there is the added
excitement of bargaining. The feminine vanities of adornment are deep
and confirmed in Cairo. To see the Cairene aristocrats purchasing
dress-material, go to Stein's or Roberts's, Hughes's or Philips's or
Senouadi's, or to any of the other big houses, in the middle afternoon.
It's there, and not at any vulgar promenading (for they all drive),
that you see the fine women of Cairo. Mostly French they are, and
beautiful indeed, dressed as aptly and with as much artistry as in
Alexandria; and that is saying the last word. There you will see a
galaxy of beauty--not in any facetious or popular sense, but actually.
It's a privilege to stand an hour in any such house and watch the
procession: a privilege that does you good. The Frenchwomen of Cairo
perform very naturally and capably the duty of matching their beauty.
They have an unerring æsthetic sense, and evidently realise well enough
that to dress well and harmoniously is a form of art almost as pure as
the painting of pictures.

But we were in the Mooski, where the art is not so purely practised.
The Egyptian women do not dress beautifully nor harmoniously. They
dress with extreme ugliness; their colours outrage the sense at
every turn. Only the extreme beauty of their features and clarity of
complexion save them from repulsiveness. The glaring fabrics of the
blue bazaar express well the Egyptian feminine taste in colour.

The book bazaar leads up towards the Mosque al Azhar. The books are
all hand-made. Here is the paradise of the librarian who wails for
the elimination of machine-made rubbish of the modern Press. At any
such work the Egyptian mechanic excels in patience and thoroughness.
Making books by hand is, in fact, an ideal form of labour for him, as
is hand-weaving, which still prevails, and the designing and chiselling
of the silver and brass work. _Al Koran_ is here in all stages of
production; and with propriety there is a lecture-hall in the midst
of the book bazaar, which is, so to speak, "within" the Al Azhar
University close by. A lecture is being delivered. The speaker squats
on a tall stool and delivers himself with vigour to the audience seated
on the mat-strewn floor. Well dressed and well featured they are,
jotting notes rather more industriously than in most Colonial halls of
learning, or listening with an intensity that is almost pained.

The Moslem University in the Mosque al Azhar has a fine old front
designed with a grace and finished in a mellowness of colour that any
Oxonian College might respect. You show a proper respect--whether you
will or no--by donning the capacious slippers over your boots, as in
visiting any other mosque, and enter the outer court, filled with the
junior students. The hum and clatter rises to a mild roar. All are
seated in circular groups, usually about a loud and gesticulating
teacher; and where there is no teacher the students are swaying gently
in a rhythmic accompaniment to the drone with which _Al Koran_ is being
got by heart. There is no concerted recitation or repetition: every
man for himself. That, perhaps, helps to visualise the swaying mass of
students and to conceive the babel of sound. There is no roof above
that tarbushed throng. This is the preparatory school. The University
proper, beyond the partition, containing the adult students, alone
is roofed. Here they are all conning in the winter sunshine. Little
attention is given to visitors; most students are droning with closed
eyes, presumably to avert distraction. Few are aware of your presence.
That consciousness is betrayed chiefly by a furtively whispered
"Baksheesh!"--the national watchword of Egypt--uttered with a strange
incongruity in a temple of learning--a temple literally.

Beyond, in the adult schools, you will hear no mention of baksheesh,
except from the high-priest of the Temple, the sheikh of the
University, who demands it with dignity, as due in the nature of a
temple-offering, but appropriated (you know) by himself and for his
own purposes. Any knowledge of a British University renders this place
interesting indeed by sheer virtue of comparison. The Koran is the
only textbook--of literature, of history, of ethics, and philosophy in
general: a wonderful book, indeed, and a reverend. What English book
will submit successfully to such a test?...

Here is the same droning by heart and the same rhythmic, absorbed
accompaniment, but in a less degree. The lecturer is more frequent
and more animated in gesture and more loud and dogmatic in utterance.
Declamation of the most vigorous kind is the method with him, and rapt
attention with the undergraduates. The lecturers are invariably past
middle age, and with flowing beards, and as venerable in feature as
the Jerusalem doctors. The groups of students are small--as a rule,
four or five. Yet the teachers speak as loud as to an audience of two
hundred. The method here is that of the University _semina_: that is to
say, small, and seemingly select, groups of students; frequent, almost
incessant, interrogation by the student; and discussion that is very
free and well sustained. The class-rooms, defined by low partitions, go
by race, each with its national lecturers.

Within the building are the tombs of former sheikhs, enclosed and
looked upon with reverence. These approximate to tablets to pious
founders. The sheikh will tell you that, as he puts it, the Sultan
pays for the education of all students: he is their patron. That is
to say, in plain English, the University is State-controlled and
State-supported. Moreover, the students sleep there. You may see their
bedding piled on rafters. It is laid in the floor of the lecture-room
at night.

When you have delivered over baksheesh to the sheikh and to the
conductor and to the attendants who remove your slippers at exit, you
move down to the brass and silver bazaar. Here is some of the most
characteristic work you'll see in Egypt. Every vessel, every bowl
and tray and pot, is Egyptian in shape or chiselled design, or both.
As soon as you enter you are offered tea, and the bargaining begins,
although _Prix Fixé_ is the ubiquitous sign. It is in the fixed-price
shops that the best bargains are struck, which is at one with the
prevailing Egyptian disregard for truth. The best brass bazaars have
their own workshops attached. Labour is obviously cheap--cheap in any
case, but especially cheap when you consider that at least half the
workers in brass and silver are the merest boys. Whatever may be the
Egyptian judgment in colour, the Egyptian instinct for form is sound;
for these boys of eight and ten execute elaborate and responsible work
in design. They are entrusted with "big jobs," and they do them well.
There is almost no sketching-out of the design for chisel work; the
youngster takes his tool and eats-out the design without preliminaries.
And much of it makes exacting demands upon the sense of symmetry. This
is one of the most striking evidences of the popular artistic sense.
The national handwriting is full of grace; the national music is of
highly developed rhythm; and the national feeling for form and symmetry
is unimpeachable.

You need more self-control in these enchanting places than the
confirmed drinker in the neighbourhood of a _pub_. Unless you restrain
yourself with an iron self-discipline, you'll exhaust all your
_feloose_. The event rarely shows you to emerge with more than your
railway-fare back to camp. But under your arm are treasures that are
priceless--except in the eyes of the salesman. You trek to the post
office and send off to Australia wares that are a joy for ever. And
there you find on the same errand officers and privates and Sisters.
There is a satisfied air about them, as of a good deed done and money
well spent, as who should say: "I may squander time, and sometimes I
squander money and energy in this Land; but in this box is that which
will endure when peace has descended, and purses are tattered, and
Egypt is a memory at the Antipodes."



BOOK II

GALLIPOLI



CHAPTER I

THE JOURNEY


We were given twelve hours to collect bag and baggage and clear out
from Abbassieh. It was a night of alarms and excursions. In the midst
of it all came a home-mail. That was one of many occasions on which
one in His Majesty's service is forced to postpone the luxury of
perusal. Sometimes a mail will come in and be distributed just before
the "Fall-in" is blown. This means carrying about the budget unopened
and burning a hole in the pocket for a half-day--and more. In this
case the mail was read in the train next morning. We were out of camp
at sunrise, with the waggons ahead. By eight o'clock we had taken
leave of this fair-foul, repulsive yet fascinating city, and were
sweeping across the waving rice-fields of the delta towards the city of
Alexandria.

We arrived about mid-day. The urgency of the summons had justified
the inference that we should embark directly. Not so. We entered what
was technically known as a rest camp at Gabbari. Rest camps had been
established at various points about the city to accommodate temporarily
the British and French expeditions then arriving daily _en route_ to
the Dardanelles. The time was not yet ripe for a landing. Here was the
opportunity to stretch the legs--of both men and horses, and of the
mules from Spain.

At no stage even of the classical occupation of Egypt--or
thereafter--could the inner harbour of Alexandria have given more
vividly the impression of the imminence of war. It was crammed with
transports, ranged in long lines, with here and there a battle-cruiser
between. As many as could come alongside the Quay at one time were
busily disembarking troops (mostly French), which streamed down the
gangways in their picturesque uniforms and moved off in column through
the city to the camps on the outskirts. The moral effect of such
processions upon the Egyptians could hardly be over-estimated. Long
queues of Arab scows ranged along the railway wharf, taking ammunition
and moving off to the troopships. Day and night the harbour was dotted
with launches tearing from transport to transport bearing officers of
the General Staff. As for the city--the streets, the restaurants, the
theatres and music-halls, fairly teemed with soldiers; and civilian
traffic constantly gave way before the gharries of officers--and of men.

Many French were in our camp. There was something admirable in them,
hard to define. There was a sober, almost pathetic, restraint amongst
them--beside the Australians, which was as much as to suggest that what
they had seen and known through their proximity to the War in Europe
had had its effect. It could hardly be temperamental in the vivacious
French. They were not maudlin; and on rare occasions, infected by the
effervescing spirits of the Australians, would come into the mess-hut
at night and dance or chant the _Marseillaise_ in unison with the
melody of a French accordion. But in general they seemed too much
impressed with the nature and the possibilities of their mission for
jollification. They showed a simple and honest affection amongst
themselves. The Australians may--and do--have it, but it is concealed
under their knack of mutual banter and of argument. The French love
each other and do not shame to show it. Riding in the car a man would
fling his arm about his friend; in the streets they would link arms to
stroll. Very pathetic and very sincere and affectionate are the French
fighters.

The evenings off duty were precious and well earned and well spent.
Little can be seen of the city at night, except its people. The best
way of seeing them as they are is to take two boon companions from the
camp, ride to town, and instal yourselves in an Egyptian café for the
night, containing none but Egyptians, except yourselves; invite three
neighbours to join you in coffee and a hubble-bubble. They'll talk
English and are glad of your company. At the cost of a few piastres (a
pipe costs one, and lasts two hours, and a cup of coffee a half) you
have their conversation and the finest of smokes and cup after cup of
the best Mocha. This is no mean entertainment.

This kind of thing developed into a nocturnal habit, until the Italian
opera-season opened at the Alhambra. We sat with the gods for five
piastres ("a bob"). The gods were worth that in themselves to sit
amongst. The gallery is always interesting, even in Australia; but
where the gods are French, Russian, Italian, English, Jewish, Greek,
and Egyptian, the intervals become almost as interesting as the acts,
and there is little temptation to saunter out between them....

But all theatres and all cafés were for us cut short abruptly by the
order to embark.

The refugee camp at Alexandria made its contribution. One had been
galled daily by the sight of strong men trapesing to and from the city
or lounging in the quarters provided by a benevolent Government. This
resentment was in a sense illogical: they had their wives and their
babies, and were no more due to fight than many strong Britishers
bound to remain at home. But the notion of refugee-men constantly got
dissociated from that of their dependents. It was chiefly the thought
of virile idleness under Government almsgiving that troubled you.
Eventually it troubled them too; for they enlisted almost in a body and
went to Cairo for training. The Government undertook to look after the
women.

We found them fellow-passengers on our trooper. They were mostly young,
all from Jaffa, in Palestine. Seemingly they marry young and are
fathers at twenty. They brought three hundred mules with them, and were
called the Zion Mule Transport Company. It is a curious name. They were
there to carry water and food to the firing-line.

Their wives and mothers incontinently came to the wharf to see them
leave. Poor fellows! Poor women! They wailed as the women of Israel
wail in Scripture, as only Israelitish women _can_ wail. The Egyptian
police kept them back with a simulated harshness, and supported them
from falling. Many were physically helpless. Their men broke into a
melancholy chant as we moved off, and sustained it, as the ship passed
out over the laughing water, until we reached the outer-harbour. They
got frolicsome soon, and forgot their women's weeping. We stood
steadily out into the rich blue Mediterranean. The Zionites fell to
the care of their beasts. By the time the level western rays burned on
the blue we had the geography of the ship, and had ceased speculation
as to the geography of our destination--except in its detail. We knew
we should run up through the Sporades: it was enough for us that we
were about to enter the Eastern theatre of war. That was an absorbing
prospect. To enter the field of this War at any point was a prospect
to set you aglow. But the East had become the cynosure of all eyes. No
one thought much about the sporadic duelling in the frozen West. The
world's interest in the game was centred about the Black Sea entrance.
It was the Sick Man of Europe in his stronghold that should be watched:
is he to persist in his noisome existence, or is the community of
Europe to be cleansed of him for ever?

But before reaching the zone in which an attempt was being made to
decide that we were to thread a course through the magical Archipelago.
All the next day we looked out on the beauty of the water, unbroken
to the horizon. The men of Zion did their work and we took charge of
their fatigues. They cleaned the ship, fed and watered their mules,
and resumed their military training on the boat-deck. The initiative
of the Australian soldier is amazing. Abstractly it is so; but put
him beside a mob from Jaffa (or, better, put him over them) and he is
a masterful fellow. The Jews leap to his command. Our fellows found
a zest in providing that not one unit in the mass should by strategy
succeed in loafing. Diamond cut diamond in every corner of the holds
and the alley-ways. The language of the Australian soldier in repose
is vigorous; put him in charge of fatigue and his lips are touched as
with a live-coal--but from elsewhere than off the altar. He is commonly
charged with poverty in his range of oaths. Never believe it. The boss
and his fatigue were mutually unintelligible--verbally, that is. But
actually, there was no shadow of misunderstanding. Oaths aptly ripped
out are universally intelligible, and oaths here were supplemented with
gesture. There was no injustice done. The Australian is no bully.

The Jerusalem brigade, though young men, were adults, but adults
strangely childish in their play and conversation. It was with the
eagerness of a child rather than with the earnestness of a man that
they attacked their drill. They knew nothing of military discipline,
even less of military drill. Their sergeant-major made one son of
Israel a prisoner for insubordination. He blubbered like a child. Great
tears coursed down as he was led oft to the "clink." The door closed
after him protesting and entreating. This is at one with the abandoned
wailing of their women.

Drill must be difficult for them. The instruction was administered
in English; The men, who speak nothing but an admixture of Russian,
Hebrew, German, and Arabic, understood not a word of command or
explanation. They learned by association purely. They made feverish
and exaggerated efforts, and really did well. But of the stability and
deliberative coolness of a learning-man they had not a trace. This
childish method of attack never will make fighters. But they are not to
fight. They are to draw food and water. As a matter of form they are
issued with rifles--Mausers taken from the Turks on the Canal.

At evening of the second day out we got abreast of Rhodes, with
Karpathos on the port-bow. Rhodes stood afar off: would we had
come nearer! The long darkening streak of Karpathos was our real
introduction to the Archipelago. All night we ploughed through the maze
of islands. "Not bad for the old man," said the second-mate next day;
"he's never been here before, and kept going through a muddy night."
The night had been starless. And when morning broke we lay off Chios,
with a horrible tempest brewing in the north.

A storm was gathering up in the black bosom of Chios. Here were no
smiling wine-clad slopes, no fair Horatian landscape. All that seemed
somehow past. A battle-cruiser lay half a mile ahead. She had been
expecting us, together with two other transports and a hospital-ship in
our wake. A black and snaky destroyer bore down from far ahead, belched
past us, turned in her own length abreast of the transports, flashed
a Morse message to the cruiser across the darkening water, and we
gathered round her. She called up each in turn by semaphore: "Destroyer
will escort you westward"; and left us.

The journey began again. There was not a breath of wind; no beam
of sunlight. The water was sullen. The islands were black masses,
ill-defined and forbidding. This introduction to the theatre of war was
apt. We were bearing up into the heart of the Sporades in an atmosphere
surcharged and menacing. No storm came. It was the worse for that. Gone
were the golden "isles that crown the Ægean deep" beloved of Byron.
Long strata of smoke from the ships of war lay low over the water,
transecting their shapes.

After lunch the sun shone out. In the middle afternoon we came west
of Skyros, and left our transports there. They were French: Skyros
is the French base. At the end of the lovely island we turned east
and set our course for Lemnos. It was ten before the lights of Lemnos
twinkled through the blackness. At 10.30 we dropped anchor in the
outer harbour of Mudros Bay. The light on the northern horn turned and
flashed--turned and flashed upon us. Inside the boom a cruiser played
her searchlight, sweeping the zone of entrance. A French submarine
stole under our bows and cried "All's well," and we turned in to sleep.

We were up before the dawn to verify the conjectures as to land and
water hazarded in the darkness and the cruiser's pencil of light.
At sunrise we moved in through the boom. Here were the signs of war
indeed: a hundred and fifty transports lying at their moorings; a dozen
cruisers before; the tents of the Allies clothing the green slopes.

       *       *       *       *       *

Lemnos is beautiful. The harbour is long and winds amongst the
uplands. We were anchored beside an islet, flecked with the colour of
wild-flowers blooming as prodigally as the Greeks said they did when
they sailed these seas. The slopes about the shore were clothed with
crops and vines. Behind were grey hills of granite.

In Mudros we lay a week, waiting, waiting. Let the spot be lovely as
you will, waiting is not good with the sound of the guns coming down on
the wind day and night. Our fifth morning on Lemnos was the Sabbath.
We woke to the soft boom of naval guns. Lemnos is a goodish sail from
the straits. The "boom, boom," was a low, soft growl, felt rather than
heard. The day before, at sundown, the first trooper of the fleet had
gone out, with band playing, to the cheering of the cruisers. The
Army and Navy have always in this campaign, shown themselves happily
complementary. A seaplane escorted them out aloft, two cruisers below.
Great was the rejoicing at the beginning of the exodus.

Next morning we left the mules of Zion and transferred to a store-ship.
She lay two days. We solaced ourselves with bathing in the clear bay
from the ship's side, and basking nude, with our pipes, afterwards in
the pleasant heat of the spring sun; with visits to the shore, where we
wandered into the Greek Church, in size and magnificence of decoration
out of all consonance with its neighbouring villages, and where the
wine of Lemnos might be drunk for a penny a glass; with bargaining at
the boats that drew alongside from the shore, as at Aden, filled with
nuts, figs, dates, Egyptian delight--all the old stock, except Greeks,
who manned them here. The dwellers on Lemnos are all Greeks.... Would
we never move?

On the seventh day at noon the naval cutter ran alongside. In half an
hour we were moving through the boom. As soon as we had cleared the
south-east corner of the island, Imbros stood out to port, and Tenedos,
our destination, lay dead ahead, under the mountains of Turkey in
Asia. A fresh breeze blew out of the Dardanelles, thunder-laden with
the roar of the guns, and every heave of our bow brought it down more
clear. Before sundown we were abreast of Tenedos and had sighted the
aeroplane station and had seen five of the great amphibious planes come
to earth. As we swung round to a view of the straits' mouth, every
eye was strained for the visible signs of what we had been hearing so
long. The straits lay murky under the smoke of three days' firing. The
first flash was sighted--with what a quickening of the pulse! In three
minutes we had the lay of the discharges and the bursts. An attempt was
made to muster a fall-in aft for the first issue of tobacco ration. Not
a man moved! The attempt was postponed until we should have seen enough
of these epoch-making flashes. "We can get tobacco at home--without
paying for it; you don't see cruisers spitting shrapnel every day at
Port Philip!" At length two ranks got formed-up--one for cigarettes
(appropriately, the rear), the front rank for those who smoked pipes.
Oh, degenerates!--the rear was half as long again! Two ounces of
medium-Capstan per man--in tins; four packets of cigarettes: that was
our momentous first issue.

The bombardment went on, ten miles off. No one wanted tea. At 7.30 the
Major half-ordered a concert aft. Everyone went. It was really a good
concert, almost free of martial songs. But here and there you'd find a
man sneak off to the bows to watch the line of spurting flame in the
north; and many an auditor, looking absently at the singer, knew as
little of the theme as of the havoc those shells were working in the
night.

We lay three days at Tenedos: so near and yet so far from the forts of
the Dardanelles. We could see two in ruins on the toe of Gallipoli, and
one tottering down the heights of the Asiatic shore at the entrance to
the straits. But the straits ran at a right-angle with the shore under
which we lay. We could see the bombarding fleet lying off the mouth. We
could see them fire, but no result. What more tantalising?

We lay alongside Headquarters ship, loaded with the Directing Staff.
H.Q. moved up and down, at safe distances, between us and the
firing-line. We were one of an enormously large waiting fleet of
transports and storeships. The impression of war was vivid: here was
this waiting fleet, and tearing up and down the coast were destroyers
and cruisers without number, and aloft, the whirring seaplanes.

Our moving-in orders came at three on an afternoon. This was the
heart-shaking move; for we were to sail up, beyond the mouth, to an
anchorage off the Anzac position. We were to see in detail everything
that we had, for the last three days, seen as an indistinct whole.
We were to pass immediately behind the firing-line, to test the
speculations we had been making day and night upon what was in
progress, upon the geography of the fighting zone, upon the operations
within the mouth. Every yard was a step farther in our voyage of
discovery.

The demolitions became plain. The ports on the water's edge had toppled
over "in a confused welter of ruin." Such wall as still stood gaped
with ghastly vents. These had been the first to come under fire, and
the cruisers had done their work with a thoroughness that agreed well
with the traditional deliberation of the British Navy. And thorough
work was in progress.

Far up the straits' entrance lay the black lines of gunboats. We moved
up the coast past an ill-starred village: the guns were at her from
the open sea. By sundown we had passed from this scene of action to
another, at ---- Beach, where the Australians had landed. The heights
above ---- Beach were the scene of an engagement far more fierce than
any we had seen below. The Turks were strongly posted in the shrubs of
the Crest. Our batteries were hardly advanced beyond the beach, and
were getting it hot. Night was coming on. A biting wind was blowing off
the land, bringing down a bitter rain from the hills of the interior.
It was almost too cold to stand in our bows and watch: what for those
poor devils juggling shell at the batteries and falling under the rain
of fire? After dark there was an hour's lull. At nine o'clock began a
two hours' engagement hot enough to make any fighter on shore oblivious
of the temperature. Towards midnight the firing ceased and the rain and
the wind abated.



CHAPTER II

GLIMPSES OF ANZAC

I


It's the monotony that kills; not hard work, nor hard fare. We have
now been disembarked on the Peninsula rather longer than three months.
But there has been little change in our way of living. Every day there
is the same work on the same beach, shelled by the same guns, manned
by the same Turks--presumably the same; for we never seem to knock-out
those furtive and deadly batteries that enfilade the Cove Beach and
maim or kill--or both--almost daily. Every morning we look out on the
same stretch of the lovely Ægean, with the same two islands standing
over in the west.

Yet neither the islands nor the sea are the same any two successive
days. The temper of the Ægean, at this time, changes more suddenly and
frequently than ever does the Pacific. That delicious Mediterranean
colour, of which we used to read sceptically, and which we half
disbelieved in J.M. Turner's pictures, changes in the quality of its
hue almost hourly. And every morning the islands of the west take on
fresh colour and are trailed by fresh shapes of mist. The atmosphere
deludes, in the matter of distance, as though pranking for the love of
deception. To-day Imbros stands right over-against you; you see the
detail of the fleet in the harbour, and the striated heights of rocky
Samothrace reveal the small ravines; to-morrow in the early-morning
light--but more often towards evening--Imbros lies mysteriously afar
off like an isle of the blest, a delicate vapour-shape reposing on the
placid sea.

Nor is there monotony in either weather or temperature. This is the
late October. Late October synchronises with late autumn. Yet it is a
halting and irregular advance the late autumn is making. Changes in
temperature are as incalculable as at Melbourne, in certain seasons.
Fierce, biting, raw days alternate with the comfortableness of the mild
late-summer. To-day to bathe is as much as your life is worth (shrapnel
disregarded); to-morrow, in the gentle air, you may splash and gloat an
hour, and desire more. And you prolong the joy by washing many garments.

The Ægean autumn has yet shown little bitterness. Here on Anzac we
have suffered the tail-end of one or two autumn storms, and have had
two fierce and downright gales blow up. The wind came in the night
with a suddenness that found most unprepared. There was little rain;
insufficient to allay the maelstroms of choking dust that whirled over
our ploughed and powdered ridges. In half an hour many of us were
homeless, crouching about with our bundled bed-clothes, trespassing
tyrannically upon the confined space of the more stout dug-outs of
our friends: a sore tax upon true friendship. Men lay on their backs
and held down their roofs by mere weight of body, until overpowered.
Spectral figures in the driving atmosphere collided and wrangled and
swore and blasphemed. The sea roared over the shingle with a violence
that made even revilings inaudible. It was a night for Lear to be out.
Men had, for weeks, in spare time, been formally preparing dug-outs
against the approach of winter, but they were unprepared for weather of
such violence. And if this is a taste of the quality of winter storms,
the warning comes timely.

For the morning showed a sorry beach. Barges had been torn adrift from
moorings and trawlers, and hurled ashore. Some were empty; some were
filled with supplies; all were battered; some disabled; some utterly
broken. One was filled with rum. Never before, on active service, had
such a chance of unlimited spirits offered. Many jars had been spirited
away when the time of unlading came. There were riotous faces and
super-merriment on the beach that morning; and by mid-day the "clink"
was overflowing. Far more serious was the state of the landing-piers.
There were--there had been--three. One stood intact; the landward
half of the second was clean gone; of the third there was no trace,
except in a few splintered spars ashore. A collective grin overlooked
the beach that morning at the time of rising. The General grinned
too--a sort of dogged grin. The remedying began forthwith; so did the
bursting of shrapnel over the workmen. This stroke of Allah upon the
Unfaithful was not to go unsupplemented. But it was as with the unhappy
Armada: the winds of heaven wrought more havoc than the enemy guns. By
nightfall the abridged pier was re-united to the shore--and this in
spite of a sea that made it impossible for barges to come alongside.
For two days the after-wind of the gale kept bread and meat and mails
tossing on the face of the waters off Anzac; and we fed on bully-beef
and biscuit, and eyed wistfully the mail-trawler pitching there with
her precious burden.

The arrival of mails eclipses considerations of life and death--of
fighting and the landing of rations. The mail-barge coming in somehow
looms larger than a barge of supplies. Mails have been arriving
weekly for six months, yet no one is callous to them. Sometimes
they come twice in a week; for a fresh mail is despatched from the
base post-office in instalments which may spread over three or four
landings. The Army Corps Post Office never rests. Most mails are
landed between sunset and dawn--generally after midnight. Post-office
officials must be there to supervise and check. It's little sleep
they get on "mail nights." Incoming mails do not constitute all their
cares. Mails outgoing from the firing-line are heavy. And there are the
pathetic "returns" to be dealt with, the letters of men who will never
read them--letters written before the heavy news had got home. It is
a huge bulk of correspondence marked _Killed_ and re-addressed to the
place of origin of the fallen. Their comrades keep their newspapers.
Usually the parcels of comforts directed to them bring melancholy cheer
to their still fighting comrades in arms. What else is to be done with
them?

Of incoming mails letters stand inevitably first. They put a man at
home for a couple of hours. But so does his local newspaper. Perusing
that, he is back at the old matutinal habit of picking at the news
over his eggs-and-coffee, racing against the suburban business-train.
Intimate associations hang about the reading of the local
sheet--domestic and parochial associations almost as powerful as are
brought to him by letters. Relatives at home, did they know this fully,
would despatch newspapers with a stricter regularity.

And what shall be said of parcels from home? The boarding-school
home-hamper is at last superseded. No son away at grammar-school ever
pursued his voyage of discovery through tarts, cakes and preserves,
sweets, pies and fruit, with the intensity of gloating expectation
in which a man on Gallipoli discloses the contents of his "parcel":
"'Struth! a noo pipe, Bill!--an' some er the ole terbaccer. Blimey!
cigars, too! 'Ave one, before the crowd smells 'em. D----d if there
ain't choclut! look 'ere! An' 'ere's some er the dinkum coc'nut ice the
tart uster make. Hullo! more socks! Never mind: winter's comin'.--'Ere!
'ow er yer orf fer socks, cobber? Take these--bonzer 'and-knitted.
Sling them issue-things inter the sea.... I'm b----d!--soap fer the
voy'ge 'ome.... 'Angkerch'fs!--orl right when the ---- blizzerds
come, an' a chap's snifflin' fer a ----in' week on end.... Writin'
paper!--well, that's the straight ---- tip! The ----s er bin puttin' it
in me letters lately, too. Well, I'll write ter night, on the stren'th
of it.... Gawd! 'ere's a shavin'-stick!--'andy, that; I wuz clean run
out--usin' carbolic soap, ---- it!... Aw, that's a dinkum ---- parcel,
that is!"

"Bonzer tarts" (and others) may infer that a parcel is as a gift from
the gods, and carries more than "its intrinsic worth." Such treasures
as the 'and-knitted socks and coc'nut ice bring home rather more near
than it ever comes to the man who has no part in the parcel mail.

Mails deserve all the organised care the War-Office can bestow; they
make for efficiency.

There is no morning delivery of the daily newspaper at Anzac. But we
get the news. At the foot of Headquarters gully is the notice-board.
The wireless messages are posted daily. At any hour men are elbowing
a way into the perusing circle. There is news of the operations along
our own Front and copious messages from the Eiffel Tower of the Russian
and Western Fronts. The Melbourne Cup finish was cabled through
immediately. The sports foregathered and collected or "shelled out";
there were few men indeed who did not handle their purses round the
board that evening. No war news, for months, had been so momentous as
this. The associations called up by the news from the Australian Mecca
at Flemington, whither the whole continent makes annual pilgrimage,
were strong, and homely as well as national. All the detail of the
little annual domestic sweeps at the breakfast-table came back with
a pathetic nearness. Men were recalled for a while from the land of
blood to the office, the bank, the warehouse, the country pub., the
shearing-shed, where the Cup bets were wont to be made. Squatters' sons
were back at the homestead making the sweeps. The myriad-sided sporting
spirit is perhaps stronger than any other Australian national trait.
The Defence-Department knew it when they made provision for a cabled
despatch of the running.

Three weeks ago began the flight of birds before the Russian winter.
They came over thick, in wedge formation, swallowing up, in their
hoarse cries, the crack of rifles over the ridges, from which,
otherwise, only the roar of a half-gale delivers us, day or night.
Over Anzac--which seemed to mark a definite stage in the journey--they
showed a curious indecision as to direction. Possibly they were
interested in the bird's-eye view of the disposal of forces. They
wheeled and re-formed into grotesque figures; men would stop in their
work and try to decipher the pattern. "That's a W."--"Yes; and what's
that?"--"Oh, that?" (after a crafty pause)--"that's one er them Turkish
figgers--'member them in Cairo?"

The flight of birds south is surely the most reliable of all forecasts
as to what we may expect in temperatures. Yet the official account,
published for the information of troops, of the traditional weather
between October and March shows we need expect nothing unreasonably
severe before the middle of January; but that then will come heavy
snow-storms and thoroughgoing blizzards. Furthermore, men are advised
to instruct their sisters to send Cardigans, sweets in plenty, and much
tobacco. _Amen_ to this; we shall instruct them faithfully.

Meanwhile the systematic fortification of dug-outs against damp and
cold goes on.

We foresee, unhappily, the winter robbing us of the boon of daily
bathing. This is a serious matter. The morning splash has come to be
indispensable. Daily at 6.30 you have been used to see the bald pate of
General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge in shore, and a host
of nudes lining the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated
fellows who either are fanatics or are come down from the trenches and
must clear up a vermin- and dust-infested skin at all costs. Naturally
we prefer to bathe at mid-day, rather than at 6.30, when the sun has
not got above the precipitous ridges of Sari Bair. But the early
morning dip is almost the only safe one. The beach is still enfiladed
by Turkish artillery from the right flank. But times are better;
formerly both flanks commanded us. The gun on the right continues to
harass. He is familiarly known as Beachy Bill. That on the left went by
a name intended for the ears of soldiers only. Beachy Bill is, in fact,
merely the collective name for a whole battery, capable of throwing
over five shell simultaneously. Not infrequently Beachy Bill catches a
mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards,
and scurrying over the beach to cover by men clad only in the garments
Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are
disporting yourself raises chiefly the question: Will it ever stop?
By this you, of course, mean: Will the pellets ever cease to whip the
water? The interval between the murderous lightning-burst aloft and
the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting. The
suspense always is trying.

The times and the seasons of Beachy Bill are inscrutable. Earlier on,
the six o'clock bather was not safe. Now he is almost prepared to bet
upon his chances. Possibly an enemy gun is by this time aware that
there goes on now less than heretofore of that stealthy night discharge
of lighters which used to persist beyond the dawn--until the job was
finished.

Wonderful is the march of organisation. It appreciably improves daily,
under your eyes--organisation in mule transport to the flanks, in the
landing of supplies, in the local distribution of rations; the last
phase perhaps most obvious, because it comes home close to the business
and bosoms of the troops. Where, a month ago, we languished on tinned
beef and biscuit, we now rejoice daily in fresh meat, bread, milk, and
(less frequently) fresh vegetables. It all becomes better than one
dared to expect: a beef-steak and toast for breakfast, soup for dinner,
boiled mutton for tea. This is all incredibly good. Yet the sickness
diminishes little. Colic, enteric, dysentery, jaundice, are still
painfully prevalent, and our sick are far-flung and thick over Lemnos,
Egypt, Malta, and England. So long as flies and the unburied persist,
we cannot well be delivered. But the wastage in sick men deported is
near to being alarming.

A regimental canteen on Imbros does much to compensate. Unit
representatives proceed thence weekly by trawler for stores. One feels
almost in the land of the living when, within fifteen miles, lie tinned
fruit, butter, coffee, cocoa, tinned sausages, sauces, chutneys, pipes,
"Craven" mixture and chocolate. Such a _répertoire_, combined with a
monthly visit from the Paymaster, removes one far from the commissariat
hardships of the Crimea.

The visualising of unstinted civilian meals is a prevalent pastime
here. Men sit at the mouths of their dug-outs and relate the _minutiæ_
of the first dinner at home. Some men excel in this. They do it with
a carnal power of graphic description which makes one fairly pine.
I have heard a Colonel-Chaplain talk for two hours of nothing but
grub, and at the end convincingly exempt himself from the charge of
carnal-mindedness. Truly we are a people whose god is their belly. One
never realised, until this period of enforced deprivation, the whole
meaning of the classical fable of the Belly and the Members.

Yet in the last analysis (all this talk is largely so much artistry)
one is amazingly free from the hankering after creature-comforts.
There is a sort of rough philosophy abroad to scorn delights and live
laborious days. Those delights embraced by the use of good tobacco
and deliverance from vermin at nights are the most desired; both
hard to procure. There is somehow a great gulf fixed between the
civilian quality of any tobacco and the make-up of the same brand for
the Army. (The Arcadia mixture is unvarying, but cannot always be
had.) This ought not to be. Once in six months a friend in Australia
despatches a parcel of cigars. Therein lies the entrance to a fleeting
paradise--fleeting indeed when one's comrades have sniffed or ferreted
out the key. After all, the pipe, with reasonably good tobacco, gives
the _entrée_ to the paradise farthest removed from that of the fool.
One harks back to the words of Lytton: "He who does not smoke tobacco
either has never known any great sorrow or has rejected the sweetest
consolation under heaven."

Of the plague of nocturnal vermin little needs be said explicitly.
The locomotion of the day almost dissipates the evil. It makes night
hideous. One needs but think of the ravages open to one boarding-house
imp amongst the sheets, to form some crude notion of what havoc may be
wrought at night by a vermin whose name is legion. Keating's powder is
_not_ "sold by all chemists and storekeepers" on the Peninsula. One
would give a week's pay for an effective dose of insectibane.

The tendency is to retire late, and thus abridge the period of
persecution. There is the balm of weariness, too, against which no
louse is altogether proof. One's friends "drop in" for a yarn and a
smoke after tea, and the dreaded hour of turning in is postponed by
reminiscent chit-chat and the late preparation of supper. One renews
here a surprising bulk of old acquaintance, and the changes are nightly
rung upon its personnel. All this makes against the plagues of vermin;
and against the monotony that kills, too. Old college chums are dug
out, and one talks back and lives a couple of hours in the glory of
days that have passed and in the brighter glory of a potential re-entry
to the old life. Believe it not that there is no deliverance possible
from the hardness of active service, even in its midst. The retrospect,
and the prospect, and the ever-present faculty of visualisation, are
ministering angels sent to minister.

Rude interruptions come in upon such attempts at self-deliverance.
Enemy aircraft make nocturnal bomb-dropping raids and rudely dissipate
prospect and retrospect. One harbours a sneaking regard for the
pluckily low elevation at which these night flights are made. Happily,
they have yet made few casualties.... On a ridge above us stands a
factory for the manufacture of bombs and hand grenades. Every night
mules are laden there for the trenches. One evening a restive mule,
ramping about, thrust his heel through a case of bombs adjacent. They
responded with a roar that shook the hill-side. Three other cases
were set going. At once the slopes and gullies were peopled by thinly
clad figures from the dug-outs rushing to and fro in astonishment. The
immediate inference was of enemy missiles: no one suspected our own
bomb factory. The most curious conjectures were abroad. One fellow
bawled that the Turks had broken our line and were bombing us from the
ridge above; another shouted that Zeppelins had crept over; one man
cried that the cruiser, at that moment working under her searchlight
on enemy positions, had "messed up" the angle of elevation and was
pouring high-explosive into us. Shouting and lanterns and the call for
stretcher-bearers about the bomb factory soon disclosed the truth.
The festive mule, with three companions, had been literally blown to
pieces; next morning chunks of mule were lying about our depôt. The
worst was that our own men were killed and shattered. This was ghastly.
Is it not enough to be laid low by enemy shell?

Yet the work of enemy shell on this beach is peculiarly horrible.
Men are struck down suddenly and unmercifully where there is no heat
of battle. A man dies more easily in the charge; here he is wounded
mortally unloading a barge, mending a pier, drawing water for his
unit, directing a mule-convoy. He may even lose a limb or his life off
duty--merely returning from a bathe or washing a shirt on the shingle.

One of our men was struck by shrapnel pellet retiring to his dug-out
to read his just-delivered mail. He was off duty--was, in fact, far up
the ridge above the beach. The wound gaped in his back. There was no
stanching it. Every thump of the aorta pumped out his life. Practically
he was a dead man when struck; he lived but a few minutes, with his
pipe, still steaming, clenched in his teeth. They laid him aside in
the hospital. That night we stood about the grave in which he lay
beneath his ground-sheet. Over that wind-swept headland the moon shone
fitfully through driving cloud. A monitor bombarded offshore. Under
her friendly-screaming shell and the singing bullets of the Turk the
worn, big-hearted Padré intoned the beautiful Catholic intercession for
the soul of the dead, in his cracked voice. At the burial of Sir John
Moore was heard the distant and random gun. Here the shell do sometimes
burst in the midst of the burial-party. Bearers are laid low. There is
indecent running for cover. The grave is hastily filled in by a couple
of shovelmen; the hideous desecration is over; and fresh graves are to
be dug immediately for stricken members of the party. To die violently
and be laid in this shell-swept area is to die lonely indeed. The day
is far off (but it will come) when splendid mausolea will be raised
over these heroic dead. And one foresees the time when steamers will
bear up the Ægean pilgrims come to do honour at the resting-places of
friends and kindred, and to move over the charred battle-grounds of
Turkey.

There is more than shrapnel to be contended with on the beach, though
shrapnel takes far the heaviest toll. Taube flights over the position
are frequent by day, and bombs are dropped. The intermittent sobbing
shriek of a descending bomb is unmistakable and heart-shaking. You know
the direction of shrapnel; you know in which direction the hellish
shower will spread; there is time for lightning calculation and action.
But a bomb gives little indication of its degree of proximity, and with
it there is no "direction" of burst; a circle of death hurtles forth
from the missile. No calculation is possible as to a way of escape.

Taube bombs and machine-gun bullets are not the only missiles from
above of which it behoves Anzac denizens to beware. Men are struck by
pellets and shell-case from the shrapnel discharged at our 'planes from
Turkish anti-aircraft guns. Our aircraft is fired at very consistently.
There is a temptation to stand gaping there, face to the sky, watching
their fortunes. Such temptation comes from below, and should not be
yielded to--unless our 'planes are vertically overhead or on our
west. If they are circling over the Turkish position, take cover; for
"what goes up must come down," according to the formula accompanying
a schoolboy trick; and shrapnel discharged at 'planes on your eastern
elevation may as well come down on your altruistically-inquisitive head
as bury in the earth beside you.

To all such onslaughts from aloft and around most men show an
indifference that is fairly consistent. The impression is left with
you that there is quite a large number of them who have "come to terms
with themselves" on the subject of an eventuality of whatever nature,
and this is abundantly clear when you see them after their tragedy
has eventuated. There is little visible panic in the victims in any
dressing station, little evidence of astonishment, little restlessness.
Men lie there quiet under the thrusts and turns of the sword of pain,
steadfast in the attitude of no-compromise with suffering. To this
exceptions will be found; all men have not reckoned up squarely and
accurately beforehand the cost of all emergencies that are possible.
But most of them have.



CHAPTER III

GLIMPSES OF ANZAC

II


A whole legion of Gallipoli maps has been published in the Press. They
show the landing-places. All Australians know the Anzac positions where
their sons and brothers scrambled from the boats, splashed to the fatal
sand, and fell forthwith or fixed the steel and charged to conquer or
fall above. This spot, where Australians showed the world what manner
of man is nurtured beneath the Southern Cross, is fair to look on. We
saw it first from the sea, in the full burst of the spring. Literature,
ancient and Byronic, glows with the beauties of the Ægean spring. It's
all true. Anzac is reckoned a true type of that loveliness. The charge
was made up a steep ridged hill opening upon an irregular tableland.
Either flank of that hill is gently undulating low country. The thin
belt of light sand fronts all. The deep wild-flower colour flung in
broad splashes upon the low country of the flanks is foiled by the
delicious blue that bathes the sand-strip. When the ancients gave us a
picture of all this we questioned it, as perhaps painted inaccurately
in the elation of literary composition. That is not a right inference.
One attempts to describe it as it appears in 1915; but there is the
danger of being disbelieved, because the prodigal flinging of spring
colour over the shores of Gallipoli utterly surpasses in richness the
colour of Australia. England doubtless shows something far more like it
in spring. The colour ashore is a glowing red--acres of poppy waving
there upon the green plains. Neither do we know the Ægean blue in
Australian waters, somehow. The reader, harassed by the war news from
this smiling land, may conceive the incongruity of this fair landscape
splashed with colour of another sort--the red dust of a moving troop,
the hideous discolour of bursting lyddite, and the grey smudge of
shrapnel. A grand range of chalk hills runs south behind the pasture of
the right flank. The low shore plain of the left flank is backed by a
group of green pinnacles moving north towards the glittering salt-lake.
The coast, northerly, sweeps out to the southern horn of Saros Bay--a
rough, sheer-rising headland, southern sentinel of the great Saros
Cliffs.

Moving inshore to the foot of the Anzac plateau, one gets a delusive
impression of Anzac smoothness. Anzac in detail is rough: small
gulches, ravines--Arabian _wadys_--which at once hindered and assisted
the aggressors at landing. Leaving behind the beach, with its feverish
busyness, the climb up to the trenches begins forthwith. You follow a
well-engineered road levelled in the bed of the ravine. In the sides
the dug-outs are as thick as dwellings in a Cairene alley--which is
saying much. Beaten side-tracks branch off like rivulets which join a
mountain torrent. The only haven for mules and horses is the shelter of
the banks, which have been half dug out at intervals into an extensive
sort of stable. It is the height of the afternoon. There is no wind
stirring under the hill. The men off duty are sleeping heavily--have
flung themselves down, worn-out, and lie in the thick dust of their
shelters, where the flies swarm and the heat reeks. But all are not
sleeping. Periodically a regimental office is dug in; the typewriters
are noisy: they make a strange dissonance with the hum of bullets
above, which does not cease. The post-office lies in a bend of the
path. This is dug deep, with sandbag bulwarks. There's no sleeping
here. A khaki staff sorts and stamps, in this curious subterranean
chamber, amidst a disorder of mail-bags and the fumes of sealing-wax.
One hopes, in passing, the shrapnel will spare this sanctuary.... Half
a mile up, the road peters out into a rough and dusty track under the
hill-crest. It is heavy climbing. One realises fully for the first
time what a scaling was here at the first charge. It has been hard
work up a beaten road: what for those hampered infantrymen, with their
steel-laden rifles and their equipment, and the Turks raining death
from their entrenchments aloft? It was seventeen minutes' work for
them; we have been panting and scrambling for forty, and are not up
yet. Five minutes more brings us to the sentry guarding the entrance
to the communication-trench. He sets us on our stooping way. You dare
not walk erect. Here the bullets are not "spent," though "spent"
bullets can do damage enough. The labour of trench-making must have
been enormous. Here is a picked trench five feet deep, and half as wide
again as your body, cut out of a soft rock--hundreds of yards of it,
half-miles of it. Fifteen minutes looping along brings us to an exit
opening on a battery, where two guns are speaking from their pits. In
a dug-out beside the pit lies the presiding genius with his ear to a
telephone. His lingo is almost unintelligible, except to the initiated.
From the observers on our flanks he is transmitting the corrections and
directions to his gunners. One man is juggling shell from the rear of
the pit; one is laying the gun; the rest are understrappers. The roar
of discharge, heard from behind, is not excessive. What comes uppermost
is the prolonged whizz and scream of the shell. Artillery work must
be far the most interesting. The infantryman, a good deal, aims "in a
direction," and hopes for the best. The man at the gun watches each
shot, the error is gauged, and he acts accordingly at the next. His is
a sort of triumphal progress upon his mark.... Re-entering the trench,
we crept to our second line. There were a few scattered marksmen. There
is a kind of comfort, even in trenches. The sleeping-places hollowed
out under the lee of the wall, a foot from the floor, will keep one
more or less dry in rain. There are carnal symbols of creature comfort
scattered up and down--blankets, newspapers, tobacco-tins, egg-shells,
orange-peel, and the wrappings of Mexican chocolate. But it's harsh
enough. From the crackle of musketry and the song of the bullet and the
intimate scream of the shell there's little respite.

The labyrinth of trenches becomes very intricate as you approach the
front line: saps, communication trenches, tunnels, and galleries, make
a maze that requires some initiation to negotiate successfully. In the
rear lines the men off duty are resting, as well as may be, plagued
as they are with flies, heat and dust. In general they are too far
exhausted to care much, so long as they can get their tobacco and a
place to lie. They try to lie comfortable in the squalor; try to cook
a trifle at their pathetic little hole-in-the-wall fires. The most
impressive thing near the first line (there are things more impressive
when you get there) is the elaborateness and permanency of the trenches
and dug-outs and overhead cover. One might think the beggars are
here for a year: which God forbid! The impression of keenness and
alertness here is in striking contrast with the easy-going aspect of
the "reservists." The men work at frequent intervals, in pairs, one
observing with the periscope, the other missing no chances with the
rifle. We looked long and earnestly through a periscope. Two things
arrest you. The first is the ghastly spectacle of our dead lying beyond
the parapet. They have been there since the last charge; that is three
weeks ago, and they are black and swollen. They lie in so exposed
a place that they dare not be approached. The stink is revolting;
putrefying human flesh emits an odour without a parallel. An hour's
inhalation was almost overpowering. One asks how our men have breathed
it for three and five months. The flies swarm in hosts.

The second thing that arrests you is the amazing proximity of the
enemy trenches. You put down the periscope and look furtively through
a loophole to verify. The average distance is about fifteen yards. Our
conductor smiled at the expression of amazement. "Come along here;
they're a bit closer." He took us to a point at which the neutral
ground was no more than five yards in width; rifle and bayonet extended
from either trench could have met across it. We well believed our
men could hear the Turks snore. This is an uncanny proximity. One
result is that the bomb is the chief weapon of offence. To shy a bomb
effectively over five yards is as good a deed as drink. Bomb wounds are
much to be dreaded. The missile does not pierce, it shatters, and there
is no choosing where you will have your wound. We laid well to heart
the admonition to be momentarily on the look out for bombs.

We worked slowly back along a tortuous route. These are old Turkish
trenches. They had been so constructed as to fight in the direction of
the sea. When our men took them they had immediately to turn round and
build a parapet on the side more remote. They were choked with Turkish
dead. To bury them in the open was unthinkable; they had to be thrown
into pits excavated in the trench wall, or flung aloft, and buried
beneath the new inland parapet. The consequence is that as you make
your way along the trench floor you occasionally come into contact with
a protruding boot encasing the foot of a Turk. We had more than one
such unsavoury encounter. The odour arising from our own dead is not
all with which our infantry have to contend. War isn't fun. A good deal
of drivel is spoken and written about the ennobling effects of warfare
in the field.

The men who have had four months of this are, in great part,
pasty-faced ghosts, with nerves on raw edge. What may one expect?
Inadequate rest, and that rudely and habitually broken; almost an
entire want of exercise--except in the charge; food that is necessarily
scanty and ill-nourishing; a perpetual and overpowering stink of
the most revolting kind; black swarms of flies that make quiescence
impossible--even if enemy shelling and enemy bomb-slinging did not;
a nervous strain of suspense or known peril (or both) that never is
lifted. Australians have done their part with unequalled magnificence.
But they are not gods. Flesh and blood and spirit cannot go on at
this indefinitely. God help the Australian infantryman with less than
a frame of steel wire, muscles of whipcord, and a heart of fire. The
cases are rare, but men have been driven demented in our firing-line,
and men who in civil-life were modest, gentle, tender-hearted, and
self-effacing, have become bloody-minded, lusting to kill. War is _not_
fun; neither is it ennobling.

It was fighting of another sort when Greeks and Persians traversed this
ground. For the Narrows was, more than possibly, the crossing-place
of the Hellespont for either host. Anzac or Gaba Tepe would be,
almost inevitably, right in the track. Australian trenches perhaps
cut across the classic line of march. Who is to say that the site of
Xerxes' Headquarters-camp is not at this moment serried with Australian
dug-outs? Where he stood to embark, the wireless operator may now be
squatting in his sandpit receiving from our cruisers. Certainly every
mile over which we are fighting is charged with classical associations.

The new geographical nomenclature stands contrasted with the classical,
as do methods of transport and fighting. What does the dust of Persian
Generals know of Quinn's Post, Walker's Ridge, or Pope's Hill? Even the
Turkish names are despised. We are "naming" our own map as we go on.
Pope's Hill is a feature in the landscape considerable enough to have
justified a Turkish name before we came here. The map of Gallipoli,
as well as that of Western Europe, is in a state of flux. Should
Gallipoli be garrisoned, Australian terms, not to be found in the
dictionary, will stick; scrubs, creeks, and gullies, dignified with the
names of heroes who commanded there, will abound.

It is by way of Shrapnel Gully we regain the beach. The Australian
hospital stands on the right extremity--by no means out of danger. A
sparse line of stretchers is moving down almost continuously. This
is a hospital for mere hasty dressing to enable wounded to go aboard
the pinnace to the Hospital ship standing out. Collins Street doctors
who have left behind surgeries "replete with every convenience" find
themselves in others that are mere hastily run up _marquées_. Half the
attendants hop or limp. They have been peppered. The dentist's outfit
is elaborate, and plagued men may have teeth "stopped" or extracted.
There is a mechanical department, too, where artificial teeth are
repaired--teeth that have been wrecked on the Army biscuit, which is
not just angels'-food. Dentists' kit is almost complete; lacks little,
in fact, but an electric current.

The beach is animated. There are A.S.C. depôts almost innumerable,
wireless stations, ordnance stores, medical supply stores, and
what-not. This is not the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious
war, but the hard facts and hard graft and dirt, sweat and peril, of
righteous war. It is by these mundane means the clash of ideals is
proceeding, and by which a decision will come....

Only when the masked enemy batteries of the flanks are firing (which
is many times in the day) is the beach cleared and quiet. At one stage
a couple of Lieutenants-Colonel limited the adminitory patrolling
to themselves during fire. They walked up and down unconcernedly
with an heroic and nonchalant self-possession, swearing hard at the
men who showed themselves. The hidden battery cannot be located. The
cruisers are doing their best with searching fire; their bluejackets
are climbing the masts to observe; the balloon is aloft; the seaplanes
are vigilant; our own outposts never relax. There is no clue. It is
concealed with devilish ingenuity. Every day it is costing us dearly.

All's fair in war. Their sniping is awfully successful. They have
picked off our officers at a deadly rate. Lance-corporals have become
Lieutenants in a single night. Transport of supplies to the flanks
is done by mule-carts manned by Sikhs. The route is sniped at close
intervals, by night as well as by day, and by machine-gun as well as
by the rifle; beside, it is swept by shrapnel. Only under the most
urgent necessity are supplies taken to the flanks by day. Then the loss
in men and mules is heavier than we can bear. The Turkish sniper is
almost unequalled--certainly unexcelled--as an unerring shot. At night
the rattle of the mule-carts directs the fire. At certain more exposed
intervals of the route the carts move at the gallop, the drivers lying
full-stretch in the bottom of the carts and flogging on to safety.
Is not this worse than trench-fighting? The Sikhs are doing a deadly
dangerous work unflinchingly well.

It was reported unofficially that two Turkish women were captured
sniping. Rumours are persistent enough as to the presence of women in
and behind the Turkish lines. Our outposts claim to have seen them,
and victorious attacking parties that have captured Turkish camps
have been said to declare they have found hanging there garments of
the most significant lace-frilled sort. The unbelieving diagnose these
as the highly-embellished pyjamas of Turkish officers. The whole thing
is probably to be disbelieved. The Turk is too seriously busy to be
distracted by the blandishments of his women. Harems doubtless are left
well at home, to be revelled in when the British have ultimately been
driven into the sea.

The men bathe, but often pay too dearly for the bath. The bathing beach
is a place notorious for good-humoured but successful "lifting." In the
early stages there was mixed bathing of Colonels and lance-corporals,
Majors and full privates. The Colonel leaves his boots on the sand;
a private is sneaking off--"Hey! those ---- boots are mine!" ... All
ranks go about ashore dressed alike, with the rank shown symbolically;
distinguishing marks of rank become distinguishing marks for
sharp-shooters too: you must know a Captain by his bearing rather than
his clothes. Curious dialogues arise. The officers are in a garb which
differs in many ways from their dress of the promenade at Shepheard's
Hotel.

There is little damping of spirits. Most men are happy. Pettiness
is snubbed. All are bound by the common danger into the spirit of
amity. There is growling day and night--the legitimate growling of the
overwrought man, which means nothing. Little outbursts of the liver
there are, but of a different quality from those civilian ventings of
the spleen.



CHAPTER IV

SIGNALS


The step is a far one from the signal-office of the first month in
Anzac to that of December. The first crude centre of intelligence was
like a Euclidean point--without magnitude, with position only. It was
a mere location from which signals could be despatched, without any
of the show of a compartment, and without apparatus. And the wireless
station was a hastily scratched hole in the sand, where the operator
supported himself on an elbow and received.

Now in December this is all changed. The Army Corps Signal Office
is a building, of sandbags and timber and galvanised iron, standing
four-square, solid as a blockhouse, protected alike from wind and the
entrance of rain and (by its branch-thatched roof) from the hawk-glance
of the aircraft observer.

Within there is an incongruous sense of civilisation. The staff is
clean, neatly dressed, shaven--in a word, civilianised. The spirit
of order presides. Except that the denizens wear a uniform, and that
the walls are of sandbag, you might be in a metropolitan telegraphic
office. They sit there tap-tap-tapping in their absorbed fashion. The
shrapnel screams overhead and bursts to their north. They are too
intent to hear it, mostly. All that has disturbed them, in the last
month, is the cry of "_Taube!_" (colloquial _Torb!_). Anti-aircraft
bring them trooping out to squint up at the swift, black, forbidding
craft humming raucously across the position. They laugh at shrapnel,
under the lee of the protecting ridge: no ridge makes immune from that
whirring dove of peace up there!

As you stumble up the Gully at night the illumination of the
signal-office gives a touch of the arclight and of city brilliance to
the place. The operators, sitting there, as you peer in from the outer
darkness, are a part of another world. Those not transmitting or under
call sit reading sixpenny editions and smoking cigarettes. They are
tapping out no orders from Headquarters. Neither in the words before
them nor in the placid _tap_ of the instruments is there any hint of
war. They're in London. But that sudden roar as of a locomotive is of
no London street traffic; London streets do not roar in a _crescendo_.
This is as of a rushing, mighty wind, rising to the scream of a
tornado. Comes the blast of explosion which unsettles them in their
seats. The walls of their house quake about them, and the shower of
earth and _débris_ descends; the foul stink drives through the dust,
and the well-ordered city room is hurried back, in the twinkling of
an eye, into the midst of war in the troublous land of Turkey. A
six-inch howitzer shell has exploded in the bank over against them--so
close that the unuttered thought flies to the possibility of a nearer
ultimate burst. The howitzer, searcher out of the protected sites in
ravines, under looming hill-crests, is a searcher of hearts too--a
disturber of the placid sense of security.

The _débris_ is cleared and the fumes pass, and order returns. The
operator goes back to his dot-and-dash monotone, and his neighbour
resumes his novel and lights another cigarette. The quiet undertone of
conversation revives.

Money is the sinews of war: where, in the anthropomorphic figure, will
you place these men of the Army Corps Signal Office? Analytical reader,
you may place them at your leisure--if you can. They make vocal (or
scriptural) the will of Headquarters. A general order they tap out to
the utmost post on the flanks. The flanks flash into them the hourly
report of progress. The watch in the trenches is realised, through
them, by Headquarters. If the Turk is quiescent, it is the telegraphist
here who knows it; if a move is made in the enemy lines--a Turkish
mule convoy sighted from the outpost, an enemy bombardment set up--it
is flashed through incontinently. These men, who see so little of
war--apart from searching howitzer--may, if they choose, visualise the
whole outlook along our line. They are to Army Headquarters what the
sergeant is to the Captain of infantry: the one may scribble or bawl
orders until weary; if the other is not there to distribute and enforce
the given word, all will perhaps be in vain.

And Army Corps Signal Office is the link between the Peninsula and
General Headquarters stationed in that island lying on the west.
Divisions flash in their reports from the flanks to Army Corps; all is
transmitted by cable to Imbros. And this is the medium through which
G.H.Q. orders materialise. Helles reports here also, by cable, for
transmission by cable. Here is the hub of all intelligence relating
to the Turkish campaign. For the network of cables centres here:
cable from Alexandria to Lemnos, Lemnos to Tenedos, Lemnos to Anzac,
Helles to Anzac, Anzac to G.H.Q. on Imbros. Thus there is direct
communication between G.H.Q. and the intermediate base in Egypt; cabled
dialogues are practicable regarding reinforcements of troops and
supplies of equipment and of food. The storeships that dodge submarines
from Alexandria lie at Lemnos waiting to disgorge; Anzac requirements
are cabled down to them, and they off-load accordingly into the small
transports that the Turks shell daily off Anzac. News of mail is
flashed up from Alexandria and from Mudros, and the mail despatch from
the Peninsula cabled down. No progress in operations is possible apart
from this wizard's hut where the signallers sit and tap and smoke and
read.



CHAPTER V

THE DESPATCH-RIDERS


But though Army Corps Headquarters is in touch with the flanks by both
telephone and telegraph, that is not enough. Either or both may fail.
But apart from that, there are some communications which no officer
will trust to a wire. And until that is premised one wonders vaguely
what is the use for despatch-riders. Almost it would seem that in
these days, when so much of the romance of war has departed, telephone
and telegraph would do all; indeed, the despatch-rider and his steed
would seem among the first of the old usages to vanish before the
march of science in the field. But here they are, these lithe, brown
fellows with their furrowed bushmen's features--lined, not with years
(they average twenty-five) nor with care (they're of a flinging, happy
frame), but with the sparse, clear lines of the athlete about the
mouth, and about the eyes of the man who has peered into long distances
over the interminable plains of Western Queensland. They're horsemen
down to the tendons of their heels. You may see them tending their
horses at sundown, any day, in mule gully, slinging their saddles
across the bar outside their dug-out; and, after, boiling the billy.
They're modest, too, like many another good horseman, and will relate
the experience of their rides from Suvla only if you press for it.
But there is no need for a relation; you may see them ride and sniped
most days of the week, if you'll be at the pains to climb the ridge
overlooking the level country of the left flank. Before the saps were
made their work was no game at horsemanship. But there are intervals
where the sap avails them nothing; and here they gallop at the stretch;
you may trace their route by the cloud of dust in the wake; and you
see them slow suddenly as they get into protected territory. The
sniping (they will tell you) is, curiously enough, worst at night; the
Turk creeps forth into advanced sniping-positions, and even brings up
his machine-gun within striking distance, and directs his aim by the
horse's clatter. Despatch-riding, day or night, is known as "the dinkum
thing."



CHAPTER VI

THE BLIZZARD


One knows little of the times and the seasons at which the early
Gallipoli winter plays its pranks. It is fairly gymnastic in its turns
of temperature. Still, we never expected a snow-blizzard in November.
For thus spoke the official weather-god (through the _Peninsula Press_)
regarding that fair month: "November generally comes in fine, with
a lovely first ten-days or so. It, however, becomes rather sharp at
night, and there may be expected a cold snap in the second or third
week of the month. This lasts a few days, after which the weather
gets fine and warm until the end of the month. November is, in fact,
considered by many to be the most glorious month of the year." ...

Thus had it been a month to mark with a white stone. Instead, it marked
itself with white stones that were many. The halting autumn was full of
vagaries, but there was a persistent bitterness creeping in the wake of
the fitful November gales:

  And all around me ev'ry bush and tree
  Says autumn's here, and winter soon will be--
  That snows his soft white silence over all.

We had foreseen the snow-drift no nearer than that.

But on the Sabbath morning of the 28th of November we woke to find a
Peninsula of snow, with snow-men bearing snow-rifles walking over the
snow-ridges. This was the introduction of most of us to a fall. The
nearest we had yet come to the meeting was at the "movies" which had
shown Cossacks ploughing through their native drifts for the Front.
Here was our first touch with reality in utter cold.

The Australian has a reputation for adaptability of which not even
cold can rob him. He moved about like any Esquimau. This was true,
literally; for the first time he donned his rabbit-skin jacket and
his Balaclava cap and peaked field-service. The resemblance to an
Esquimau in his bear-skin coat and hood was remarkable. His curiosity
worked complementarily to his adaptability. This was like seeing a new
country for the first time. The snow made a new world, and no excess
of cold was to keep him from examining and wandering. He sloshed about
the gullies scrutinising the flakes as they lodged on his clothes; he
climbed the ridges to see something more of the general effect. The
Englishman regarded him from the stronghold of his snowy tradition with
superior commiseration, as who should say: "This'll make the beggar
hop!" The ill-starred Egyptians, never previously out of Lower-Egypt,
literally and piteously wailed with the cold. The Australians mostly
grinned and sky-larked.

By eight o'clock he was pasting all passers-by from his store of
ammunition; and after breakfast was conducting a sort of trench-warfare
in the gullies, bombing out the glowing enemy with a new brand of
hand-grenade, pure-white.

The wind blew a gale, driving the snow like thick smoke over the turbid
Ægean. Like rain it was not: far too thick and cloudy. The towering
ridges on our east happily saved us the extreme bitterness of the
blast. But it whistled down our sheltered ravines in a gusty fashion.

The trenches had another tale to unfold. For them was no grateful ridge
shelter. The freezing gale cut like a frosty knife across the parapet,
and drove a jet of ice through the loophole, and whistled ruthlessly
down any trench it could enfilade. The "Stand-to" at 5.30 that morning
was an experience of Arctic rigour.

No sun relieved the grey, relentless day. The men slopped on through
the slush. Never had they conceived anything so cold underfoot. But
next morning the ground was frozen hard. Every footprint was filled
with ice. Where yesterday we had bogged, we progressed to-day like
windmills, with arms spread to keep a balance on the glassy and steep
inclining surface. Buckets and pans were frozen over. The bristles of
shaving-brushes were congealed into a frozen extension of the handle.
It was a valiant man who, having pounded them out into a sort of
individuality, ventured to use a razor: the blade seared like a knife
of fire.

The sun shone bravely, but could not touch the stubborn ice of the
ground. That night was, to denizens of tropical Australia, incredibly
frosty. There was no breath of air. The cold bit through six
thicknesses of blanket and lay like an encasement of ice about your
limbs beneath the covers. Few in Turkey slept two hours that night, and
those by no means consecutively.

Next morning the slush oozed out to the sun, and the whole position
was as an Australian cow-yard in the winter rains. And that's how the
glorious month of November made its _adieux_ to Gallipoli.

Yet it's an ill blizzard that blows nobody good. Recent storms had
played Old Harry with the landing of supplies at Anzac. In especial,
the water-barge had been cast high and dry on Imbros. Warfare is not
easy in a country where every pint of water consumed must be landed
under fire. Though summer was past, men must drink; salt bacon, salt
"bully," dry biscuit, are thirst-provoking; and beside that "insensible
perspiration" of which De Quincey was wont to make so much, there is
activity on the Anzac Beach, if not in the trenches: a normal activity
intermittently stimulated by the murderous shriek of shell from the
flanks.

The reserve-supply of water had been already tapped. For a week we had
been on a quarter-ration. This eked out at about half a mug of tea
per man _per diem_. You ate salt beef for the evening meal without
tea; went to bed thirsty, dreaming of the rivers of water, woke to a
breakfast of salt bacon unmitigated by tea; and entered on a burning
day--though it was winter--a day relieved only by the half-pint at
lunch, at which you crunched biscuit and jam.

Men were foregoing their precious nightly issue of rum because it
wrought a pleasant fire in the veins, and they had already had enough
of fire in the veins. Not only were you drought-stricken, but frozen
too, and that to a degree from which heating food would have saved you
in part. But there was no water for cooking the heating oatmeal waiting
to be issued, nor for the heating rice, which could not be boiled in
sea-water.

Though the blizzard came in the midst of this drought it changed all
that. Rum-jars, buckets, biscuit-tins, water-cans--yea, the very
jam-tins--were filled with snow and there was the precious potential
water. Parched and frozen throats were slaked, beards shaven, porridge
boiled, bacon and beef defied to do their worst. Removed from the fire,
it had a dusty smack. But it was water!



CHAPTER VII

EVACUATION


There will be a leavening of Egyptian in the Australian vernacular
after peace has broken out. It will persist, and perhaps have a weighty
etymological influence--at any rate on the colloquial vocabulary.
"Baksheesh" will be a universal term, not confined to sketches of
Oriental travel. "Baksheesh" is merely one of the many grafted Arabic
terms, but it will be predominant. "Sae'eda" will be the street
greeting (varied by the Sikh "Salaam, sahib"). "Feloose kiteer,"
"mafish," "min fadlak," "taali hina," "etla," and the rest of them,
will be household words. Other phrases, not remarkable for delicacy,
will prevail in pot-houses and stable talk. Forcible ejection from a
company and polite leave-taking will both be covered by an "imshee";
there will be "classy" "imshees" and "imshees" that are undignified.

Such an evacuation as was effected at Anzac was distinctly "classy."
When first the notion of evacuation was mooted there was misgiving.
We were with our back (so to speak) to the sea, hemmed in in a narrow
sector of coast, with no ground whatever to fall back upon. There
was no one who did not expect disaster in evacuating a position such
as that; the only debate was as to degree. What would it cost us in
lives and money? And there was a greater fear unspoken--the hideous
reflection that an evacuation would make almost vain the heavy losses
of eight months' fighting. Everyone hoped against a giving-up. But
soon there was no mistaking the signs of the times--the easing off in
the landing of supplies, the preliminary and experimental three days'
restraint from fire all along the line, the added restriction upon
correspondence--in especial the order to refrain from any reference to
the movements of troops either present or prophetic, and either known
or surmised; the detailing of inordinately large fatigues to set in
order once more the last line of defence.

The most obtuse soon saw his worst fears realised. Notice to quit was,
in general, short. On Sunday afternoon, the 12th, the O.C. came panting
up the gully. "Fall in the unit at once." They were given an hour and a
half's notice to have all ready for transport to the pier. Notice was
in many cases far shorter, resolving itself into minutes. But an hour
and a half is brief enough. Then there was bustle and feverish stuffing
of kit-bags. The dug-out which had been as a home for four months was
dismantled and left in dishevelment in a half-hour. It's hard to leave
a dug-out--your shelter from shrapnel and the snowy blast and the
bitter Turkish frost. It's here that you have smoked the consolatory
pipe for so many months--consumed the baksheesh steak and marmalade,
read the home letters and the local sheet of home from Australia,
played nocturnal poker, yarned with a fellow-townsman, and spread the
frugal late supper. It has been home in a sense other than that you ate
and slept there; it was home indirectly--by virtue of home mails, home
talk, home memories, visualisations nurtured under its shelter in the
night watches. Home because it was in Turkey, and that way duty lay.

Now, in a few desecratory minutes, it was rudely stripped, bunks
overturned, the larder ratted, the favourite prints brushed from the
hessian in the bustle. The vultures from neighbouring dug-outs flocked
round for the spoil; the men who yet had no notice to evacuate came
for baksheesh. With a swelling heart you disgorged your little stock
of luxuries, that you would have taken but had no room for. It breaks
your heart to give over to the hands of strangers your meagre library
amassed during a quarter's residence, your little table, your baksheesh
butter and strawberry jam, potatoes and oatmeal, surplus luxuries in
clothing, the vital parts of your bunk, the odds and ends of private
cooking utensils that have endeared themselves by long and frequent
service at the rising of the sun and at the going down of the same, and
late at night. Though the life of a soldier is checkered, without any
abiding city, shot with hurried moves by flood and field, yet we had
had so many months in Anzac, in the one spot, that we had broken with
tradition and had made a sort of home in a sort of settled community.
And this was the rude end of all.

We took a hurried snack as the mule-carts were loaded. The cooks made
merry (cooks, somehow, always contrive to have a convivial spirit at
hand), calling on all and sundry to drink a farewell with them while
they scraped and packed their half-cold dixies. Nevertheless--for
reasons explicit and subconscious--it was a melancholy toast. We
followed the transport to Walker's Pier--taking the sap, though,
without exception. This thought was uppermost; "What if Beachy Bill
should get us now?" To a man we took all the cover there was. No one,
at such close prospect of deliverance for ever from that shell-swept
beach, neglected precautions.

Round at Walker's the beach was thickly peopled with units awaiting
embarkation. The bustle and shouting were almost stupefying. The unit
"pack up" had been this in a small degree. That was bad enough. Here
our own little preparation was both magnified and intensified. It
was growing dusk. A whole brigade was waiting with all its Cæsarian
_impedimenta_. Impromptu piers had been run out, and were lighted
by smoking flares. Pinnaces and barges moved noisily between them.
Military landing-officers and naval transport-officers, and middies and
skippers of trawlers, bawled orders and queries and responses. On the
beach the men lay about on their baggage. Non-commissioned officers
marshalled and moved them off. Mule transports threaded a way amongst
the litter of men and kit-bags. Officers who knew their time was not
yet stood in groups chatting and joking. The men, always free from
responsibility, played cards and formed schools of two-up, dipped into
their haversacks, and munched and raised to their lips vessels which
were not always mess-tins, and did not always contain cold tea only--or
even cold tea at all.

We waited. The hour of embarkation was postponed from six to nine. At
nine most of the excitement had subsided, and the men lay quiet--except
where they revived themselves with a dark issue-liquid. There was
melancholy abroad--more than that of weariness in physical exertion.
As the hour of embarkation drew on (it was now postponed to ten) its
significance came home to their bosoms. The rifles cracked on the
ridges, the howitzers spoke, the din of bombs came down the ravine.
There were those fellows in the trenches being left to see the last
of it, and to get off if they could. Not the most resolute optimist
could look towards the bloodless evacuation which the event has shown
to an astonished world. Every flash of the guns in the half-moonlight,
every rifle fusillade, called up the vision of a last party attempting
to leave, and perhaps failing fatally to its last number. "If I could
get drunk," said a man wearing his equipment, "I would--blue-blind
paralytic. I never felt so like it in my life."

We lay about another hour and a half. Then the order came suddenly to
go aboard--so suddenly that the half of the equipment had to be left.
The first load was got down; a return was being made for another.
"Can't wait," roared the N.T.O.; "leave your stuff or get left. The
barge is leaving now. Cast off, for'ard. Go ahead, cox'n." This was not
bluff. There was a scramble for the barge. There up in the sap lay the
cooks' gear, and half the private kit, to be despoiled (so we said)
by some barbarous Turk. "Put that match out. No talking." We puffed
out otherwise in silence, into the Ægean darkness. Liberty to talk, to
smoke, would have been a boon. There was talking in whispers--worse
than nothing. Cigarettes were quenched--and the spirits of that
unhappy, close-packed, silent load of silent men. The spent bullets
sang overhead in a kind of derision, getting lower and more intimate as
we moved on. Soon they were spitting about us and tapping the barge,
coming unreasonably near to tapping skulls and chests.

But we got to the side of the darkened transport untouched, after long
wandering and hailing of many ships in the darkness. There was complete
exhaustion at the end. The men dropped down against their kits and
slept fitfully (it was bitterly cold) till the dawn. This was the last
look on Gallipoli; it had been a penultimate sight we had of it in the
dusk of the previous Sabbath evening, though we knew it not. For a
time we could only see the great grey mass flecked with an occasional
spurt of flame, where the guns were still belching. Then the glorious
sun slowly uprose, and threw up the detail. There were the old and
well-remembered and well-trodden heights of Anzac, and lower down we
came abreast of all the positions we had known, afar off, and now saw
more clearly than ever before. We looked along the deadly Olive Grove.
There lay the Beachy Bill battery, which every day had rained screaming
hell over the Anzac Beach, and was even now speaking sullenly in the
early morning glow.

Achi Baba rose up to the south in a sort of soft splendour; how
different from the reality! That rosy tipped mountain, could we have
seen its detail, would show looming bastions, high forbidding ridges,
and galleries of guns, and rugged ravines that had well-nigh flowed
with the blood of our storming parties. Now it stood there, sloping
gently down towards Helles, behind the high, quiet headlands and
the bays of the coast. Soon we were abreast of Helles, then of the
multitude of shipping in the Straits mouth, and so on down behind
Imbros and under Tenedos, and away over the freshening sea to Lemnos,
a pale cloud, bigger than a man's hand on the starboard bow. And by
mid-day we lay in the quiet waters of Mudros Bay, looking over the
canvas-clad slopes.



BOOK III

BACK TO EGYPT



CHAPTER I

LEMNOS


After many delays we landed, and after many wanderings arrived at a
camping-ground, and went supperless and tentless to bed--too tired to
remark, rolled in our blankets, either drenching dew or stony ground,
but not so weary as to be unconscious of the absence of shell. Our
Last Post for many months had been sounded by bursting shell (for
many a man it had been Last Post indeed); the massed buglers of the
battalions seemed now a voice from the land of spirits. There were men
(they are to be believed) literally wakened by the stillness in the
night, restless through the sudden deprivation of the midnight shriek
from the flank and of our own roar of discharge from above. For the
nocturnal crack and whistle of bullets, here was the distraction of
utter quietness. For a week it was disconcerting.

The _réveille_ which wakened you at dawn was hard to place in the
first few moments of semi-consciousness. "Am I dreaming? Back in
camp at Melbourne?" The flood of consciousness sweeps off that sweet
delusion--however sweet this island of rest may be.... A woman's voice
draws you blinking to the tent door--"_Vashung! Vashung!_" It has a
Teutonic gerundial flavour. But it's only the Greek ladies soliciting
in the mist the soiled garments of soldiers. They move about the camp
until the sun is well transmuted from that dull-glowing ball into the
mist-dispelling Day's-Eye, stripping the whole landscape down into
stony detail and making those volcanic peaks in the north to glow.
Before breakfast is well on the women have amassed their huge bundles,
and the 'cute Greek boys, in pantaloons and soldiers' cast-off tunics,
have sold you a day's store of oranges and chocolate.

The days are easy. We know we shall move to Egypt (or "elsewhere")
incontinently, and will take the leisure the war-gods provide us while
we may. Only the fatigues necessary to camp cleanliness and to eating
mar the day. Most of it is spent lounging, reading, smoking, yarning
reminiscently of Anzac, and scrambling. Write letters we may not at
this stage. The general order prohibiting letters dealing with the
evacuation and with movements of troops either known or surmised has
never been revoked; and has been reinforced by a prohibition against
correspondence of any sort--except upon field-service cards--those
"printed abominations" for which correspondents at home "thank you very
much indeed for sending me."

"What'll we do to-day? Go to the village or to Therma or to the
stationary hospital?--to the Greek church or the monastery?--or on a
voyage of discovery nowhere in particular?--or just have a loaf?--or go
and see if there's any mail in?"

The Australian general hospitals claimed a high average of visits from
those men who made friends there. They lay across the water. The Greek
ferry-men transported passengers in their gaily coloured craft for as
much as they could get. A fare was "laid down," but the Greek is as
inveterate a bargainer as your Egyptian, and the Australian's hobby is
to elude a fleecing. So that the burden of the conversation on the way
over lay mostly upon fares, conducted in as good Grammar-School Greek
as could be resurrected: which was not very good. But the cardinal
numerals were all that was really necessary: gesture and other physical
complementaries did the rest.

The stationary hospital is a township, downright, with canvas blocks
and a main street and side-roads. Hospital _marquees_ of the larger
sort always convey a sense of permanency. But when pitched in such
numbers and with a view to such a lengthy sojourn as these Lemnian
hospitals anticipated, they gave an impression of stability not
ordinarily associated with even a base. The huts of the Sisters'
quarters, dental huts, canteen shacks, X-ray huts, and so forth,
deepened the impression. And the furnishings took nothing from it: the
matting, the iron beds, the chairs and lounges, the lockers, tables,
medicine-chests. The blue suits of convalescents were in sympathy, too,
though they smacked rather of the permanence of the penitentiary. And
the traffic in the motor-lorries sometimes added the _quasi_-roar of
street traffic.

The Sisters entertained friends at tea in their recreation-tent--a
luxurious red and yellow snuggery, one of the largest _marquees_,
furnished in a way quite adequate to the tone of a vice-regal
garden-party. Distinctions in rank were deleted. Privates, and officers
of the General Staff, hobnobbed as though in mufti. The recreation-tent
was a great leveller; there a sergeant presumed with impunity to argue
the point with a Colonel from Headquarters. It was the most democratic
assembly active-service had yet produced. The common bond may have
been the dainty afternoon-tea--the fine china; the tiny sandwiches,
furnishing half an active-service mouthful; the fine linen of the
table-cover; the gentle tones of the hostess's voice: all these were
as unaccustomed to the Brigadier-General as to the Private on the
Peninsula. There was here the sweet half-delusion of a tea-party at
home, which broke down, for a couple of hours, barriers of rank. You
can conceive the exquisite contrast of the whole thing (you who rail
at afternoon-tea conventions--deliciously absent here, though!) with
the enforced boorish ruggedness of Anzac. And there was the walk after
along the ridge of the Peninsula on which the hospital lay, commanding
the fine harbour both ways: on the south bulwarked by precipitous hills
rising sheer as from a Scottish lake, and to the north checked by the
gentle slopes of that rich-hued country, volcanic to the core, from
which the afternoon sun drew out the warm, unnatural colour; and the
purple of the peaks lay beyond by the seaboard. "Is there a war on?"
The question recurred again and again, audibly, and was answered, not
by the company, but by the blue-clothed figures hobbling painfully upon
the broad road or lying helplessly in the warm December sun.

One of the finest churches stands on the border of Portianus, the
village that was nearest to our Sarpi camp. It is richly decorated
with a profusion of Apostles, Saints, and scenes from Biblical history
on walls and roof. The altar stands beyond a screen as wide as the
building, fairly overcrowded with symbolic paintings. The sanctuary
was filled daily with soldiers, who placed baksheesh in the plate as
they emerged past the old priest, smiling a Benediction at the door.
Those who could make anything of it crowded round the fine black-letter
vellum Greek Bible at the reading-desk--a treasure indeed. The rest
made an attempt at transliteration of the titles daubed beneath the
pictures of the Saints. (Most men on Lemnos acquired at least a
nodding-acquaintance with the Greek alphabet.) The old priest had
little English, but he was very willing to make a shot at exegesis upon
the Biblical pictures. There was an enormously large group of them at
the door of exit. He liked best to explicate, in his broken English,
a painting of the Last Judgment--God, a stout and irascible-looking
old gentleman sitting aloft upon the bench, with the Head-Saints about
him, suspending above a mortal the scales of Justice; on the right
the gaping mouth of hell, belching flame, and Satan uprising from the
heat; on the left the golden gate of heaven, with St. Peter graciously
admitting one of the approved, and a condemned wretch cowering
towards Hell.... The realism of it appealed to the priest's powers of
exposition. The others he passed over with a mere cursory indication
of the subject. He was a genial old man--genial even when he took us
out to the sepulchral yard behind the church and showed the vaults of
departed parishioners, with the bones deposited upon the slabs.

Christmas came upon us in Lemnos. There was leisure to be unreservedly
merry, and that was much. The Billies came a couple of days before. No
one who does not remember well the unloading of Christmas stockings
can have a notion of the merriment that was abroad. Santa Claus is
not dead. Had the evacuation been timed a little later he would have
visited the trenches. As it was, he came out of the mythological past
as another Greek god to Lemnos. And the Greeks, in the whole gamut of
their worship, never evolved a deity more beneficent. Psychologists
may debate the point whether Santa Claus, had he visited Australians
in the trenches, would have brought a keener zest of enjoyment with
his gifts than in the quiet of Lemnos. But the luxury of appreciation
of all things Christmas was upon the Australians at rest on this
beautiful island, and what is certain is that had the blessed donors
seen the distribution and the opening-up they could have had no more
precious reward. The Peninsula would have offered a sharper contrast of
enjoyment, but less leisure to enjoy. On the whole, it was probably a
good thing that we got our Billies during a respite.

The letters enclosed mostly assumed the men in the trenches on
Christmas Day. Other assumptions were made, notably that in the
cartoon, on the Billies, of a conquering kangaroo and the inscription:
"This bit o' the world belongs to us." That hurt.

Soldiers are children the world over--that is to say the best and the
worst of them. In the throes of Turkish toil and peril they had read in
the mailed newspapers of the initiation of the Billy-can scheme. Enemy
submarines were uncommonly active at the time. Hypothetical philippics
used to be launched at night against the submarine that might yet sink
the transport conveying the Christmas mail. Men threatened to desert to
the Navy for purposes of revenge in any such event.

Nothing was lost through the mundane fact that the Billies were a
regimental issue--like bacon and jam and cheese. We forgot that. For a
half-day (they came in the afternoon) the camp went mad. We masqueraded
in fools' caps, swapped delicacies--and swapped (above all) letters.
Whatever may have become of the age of chivalry since Edmund Burke
mourned it in Europe, the age of sheer kindness-of-heart is vouchsafed
to us for ever since reading the letters in our Billies. Those letters
stand worthily beside the finest utterances with the indelible pencil
from the trenches; for, after all, true heroism resides as much in
those who wait and work in quietness at home for their men as in those
at war. Some day an anthology of those letters should be made and
published to correct selfishness and churlishness on the earth. For
that there is no kind of space here. But it may be well to say, in all
moderation, that no such fillip had before been given to the men in the
war zone as came with those missives which lay beneath the treasures in
the Billies. This was not Christmas at home; but it brought us near to
it, and proved again unanswerably (if proof were needed) that intrinsic
values in the gifts of this life are very little at all.

The revelry of Christmas had hardly subsided when embarkation orders
came again. In the mist of a December morning we struck camp and moved
out from the stone pier to the waiting transports--wondering, most of
us, when embarkation in the service would cease to recur, and how long
it would be before embarkation would come for that long voyage across
the Pacific to a Christmas under the Southern Cross.



CHAPTER II

MAHSAMAH


"The ----th and ----th Divisions will move from ---- to ---- in flights
of ---- thousands daily. Two hundred and fifty camels will be allotted
to each flight for baggage-transport. Mahsamah will be the end of the
first stage.... You will proceed to Mahsamah, taking with you ----
thousand rations, establish a depôt, and issue rations to the flights
for twenty-four hours."

So ran the order. Confound the flights! Why can't they train it?
Mahsamah's out of the world. These camps in desert places are ghastly.
We shall be enforced hermits. Entraining, they could get the whole
thing over in four days; this way it'll take fourteen. The weather's
getting midsummer. The battalions have just had a fresh boot-issue.
They'll be sore-footed and sick and sun-stricken. What's the game with
Headquarters--to harden the men or impress the natives?

What's that to you? You've got to go, whatever garbled motives
Headquarters may have. So get your supplies aboard, and your men, and
leave in the morning.

So we found ourselves sweeping over the desert at 9 a.m., with tents
and camp equipment in the guard's van and half a dozen trucks laden
with supplies trailing behind. The sweet-water canal tore beside us,
and patches of irrigated land emerged at intervals into the field of
vision, and the low sand-dunes standing away towards Ismailia grew
higher; and before the canal fir-groves could become more than a blur
in the east we halted and got down, and had our trucks detached, and
the train moved off canal-wards, and we set about looking for a site on
which to build.

And there was no time to waste. The first flight had left Tel-el-Kebir
that morning, and any moment their advance-guard might loom up on the
heat-hazed horizon and come in soliciting grub.

A permanent camp of Royal Engineers close at hand lent a fatigue. By
three o'clock the virgin depôt was well established.

At four, through a cloud of dust, the advance-party (mostly Staff
Officers on horseback) rode in very hot and very thirsty. Brigade
Majors boast a thirst at any time and in any weather. Aggravated now,
it had first to be assuaged. The Battalion of Pioneers who followed us
by train had mapped out the plan of camp on paper, and now proceeded
to conduct battalions; for they followed close in the heels of their
staffs, dusty and sweating under their packs, and dragging a weary
way through the yielding sand. Lucky Majors rode, and surveyed their
perspiring men from the cool and luxurious height of a horse. The
battalions plumped down in the sand and the sun where they stood.
The camel-trains followed, plonking along with their flat-spreading
feet and aspiring noses and loads of ration, blankets, tents, tables,
and general camp _impedimenta_. Their Indian "dravees" led them by
the nose. They gurgled with the heat, and foundered on very slight
provocation indeed.

By five the whole flight is established in bivouac lines. For a couple
of hours there is feverish bustle at the supply depôt. Half the issuing
is carried out by lamp-light. The battalions settle down to sleep with
the sun, and there is little energy left for horse-play, though there
is a good deal of singing, and even concerts improvised.

But the whole camp is quiet by nine; the men are sleeping in the sand
under the moon; there are no lights except in the two tents erected for
Staff Officers.

You're wakened at four the next morning by the camp astir, to be off at
sunrise. But they have their ration, and you don't get up, but thank
Heaven you're a part of no flight.

A part of nothing--for the moment. That's the beauty of this mission.
You're subject to nobody. You've brought your own supplies, built
your own depôt, and can dictate to Staff Captains and Colonels and to
all the tin-hats who may approach you for ration. A supply officer is
deeply respected, _ex-officio_. Though he be a mere Subaltern, it is
known he holds the distribution of fleshly favours. The officer drawing
ration who is incivil is in danger of being the worse for it; only the
respectful get baksheesh.

The Fortress Company of Anglesey Engineers camped permanently, who had
lent an emergency fatigue, turned out to be a boon and a blessing.
It took less time than usual to penetrate the admirable English
reticence surrounding their companionable qualities. The penetration
began with a neighbourly invitation to their regimental sports, held
conjointly with those of a detachment of Hyderabad Lancers camped at
Mahsamah for patrol purposes. They united in a half-day's competition
in foot-racing, football, jumping, tug-o'-war, cycle-racing, and the
rest of the athletics common to Indians and Britishers. Beside, the
Hyderabads gave exhibitions in horseback-wrestling, tent-pegging,
cleaving the lime at the gallop, and allied exercises, in which
Englishmen do not compete. The Captain of the Lancers was a young
Indian aristocrat who spoke English faultlessly, and was a regular and
interesting member of the Anglesey mess.

The English gentlemen who drew him and the Supply Officer were in no
way roughened by a six months' campaign at Suvla Bay. Gordon was an
Irishman from Trinity College, Dublin, who had preceded his course
in engineering by reclining in Arts three years and browsing richly
and refraining resolutely from cram--an engineer balanced ideally
between the world of mere mathematical horse-sense and a gentle
other-worldliness, and rich in a fitful and whimsical Irish humour
that was good to live with; a man devoted to duty (when any was put
in his way, which was seldom), otherwise exercising himself genially
upon self-appointed surveys, geological rambling, artful shooting,
photography, and banter. No tongue in the mess was a match for his;
he emerged from argument with ease and credit always, and left his
opponents floundering. A fearless, tender-hearted, courteous Irish
gentleman, modest to the point of self-effacement and able to the point
of genius. His mother was a friend of Edward Dowden and his circle,
and Gordon had in store a rich fund of anecdote relating to academical
Dublin.

The Medical Officer--"Doc," familiarly--was a Scotchman with a
burr and a subtle uncaledonian quality of humour, and a sparkling
intellectuality quite out of harmony with the traditional Scotch
lumbering cerebration. Doc was lovable; and a butt through his
popularity, though not a butt who took it lying down. But he was never
a match for Gordon, though he usually routed the Captain--also a
Scotchman--whose hobby was the facetious discussion of ways and means
to getting a competent M.O. attached. The Doc's duties were purely
nominal, the care of any who might fall victims amongst the Angleseys
to toothache, boils, vermin, colds, gashes--any ills, in short, to
which men in a desert camp might be liable. For the rest, he shot
with the mess, dawdled with "films," perused his Scotch newspapers,
improvised schemes in sanitation, dabbled in canal parasites and
mosquito larvæ, and forged jokes.

Seymour was a highly-intelligent animal (taking seven-and-five-eighths
in hats), who argued with a kind of implacable ferocity, and when he
sat down to bridge would never stop before two or three. But all his
argument was for mental exercise and not from conviction, and his
fiercest encounters were wont to end in a thrust of bathos at which the
mess roared. He was a fine intellectual and physical animal, as keen in
riding and shooting and bathing as in dialectic.

The Captain was a diminutive, ceremonious Scotchman, commanding
deference out of doors, bullied to death in the mess by his Subalterns.
The contrast between out- and indoors was striking. The last letter of
the law in discipline and ceremony was observed outside the mess, but
at table no Australian officers' mess was ever more informal. Barriers
of rank were thrown down, and none but surnames tolerated by the least
even unto the greatest.

That mess was as luxuriously appointed as a civilian home. Easy-chairs,
writing-tables, messing-tables and their appointments, punctilious
servants, matted floors, made one forget for a few hours daily that a
war was in progress. For the man who makes himself at home on service
you are commended to the English officer. And in a permanent camp such
as this he excelled himself. Eating was delicate, glass and silver
shone and prevailed. Hours for meals were late and irregular: breakfast
at 8.30; lunch light, and at any time; dinner at any hour between 8 and
9.30, and long-drawn-out, so that you generally rose from table between
10 and 11, and sat back for pow-wow after.

It was a rare day there was not game in the mess. Adjoining the
sweet-water canal was a lagoon, reed-fringed and with reed-islands
where you could row a mile and believe yourself in Australia; no sand
to be seen. Three times a week we shot. There were duck and snipe and
teal. The Sheikh of the village furnished half a dozen shot-guns and as
many boats and boatmen, and came himself, carrying a gun (and proud he
was of his shooting--and justly so).

One man one skiff was the order. We would set out at 4.30, after tea,
and return at 8. The danger was to forget the duck in the still beauty
of the evening. As you watched the reddening west over the reeds, the
birds coming across the ruddy ground would recall you to business.
Shooting was easy, so we got a lot. The place was untrammelled. Except
for an occasional General who came up for a day's sport (the Staff
had got to know the Mahsamah Lagoon), there was little shooting done,
and the water had not yet become a scare-area. The Sheikh did a little
on his own account. The underlings he provided knew their work, and
would ejaculate and advise in Arabic: _Talihena! Bakaskeen kebir!_
(snipe--big one!)--in a hoarse, excited whisper, as the birds rose
on the breeze. _Aywah_, you mutter, making ready. They would strip
and go into the reeds waist-deep for birds fallen there. _Quaiys
kiteer!_ (fine), greeted a hit; and if you missed, a consolatory
_Malish!_ (never mind), _Bukrah_ (perhaps to-morrow), uttered with a
gentle ironical intonation. Rowing back there was always baksheesh in
cigarettes or cartridges--or both; and some, with their skins wet and
muddied from wading, deserved it. Some did not.

The natives fished the lagoon systematically with nets, at night. You
encountered them as you pursued duck. They regularly exported crates
of fish to Cairo and Zagazig. When the nets were spread they would
"beat-up" the fish with tomtoms in the boats. You might hear their
solitary cries and their rhythmic tattoo on the water all night.

They fished with lines, too--to order. If you gave them an order at the
camp for a dozen they would have them back in half an hour, wriggling
on a string. They were proud of their craft, and would throw you a
triumphant glance, as who should say, "Let's see you do that!"

The Arab village lay on the banks of the canal. Comely villagers they
were, with well-featured women and men with a continent, contented air,
living by fishing or growing of crops. The camera they funked, and
that distinguished them from the raucous, dissolute denizens of Cairo,
who delight to ape attitudes for the photographer. They showed all the
best qualities of the fellaheen. There was no obsequiousness in the
men, as in the capital. There is no crowd more cowardly and villainous
than the Cairene mob. But the men at Mahsamah, when the sojourning
Australians attempted to commandeer their canal-ferry, pushed them
incontinently into the stream. This was conduct unprecedented in the
Egyptian. A town-and-gown fight ensued. Skulls were cracked, and the
Australians had by no means the better of it. There was a dash of
the old fighting Bedouin blood in these fellows. There was to be no
bullying here; and there was none.

Only the station-master had forfeited his independence of spirit. He
alone of the whole village was in habitual contact with "the public."
It had wrought in him a fawning plausibility the more contemptible by
its contrast with the sturdiness of the surrounding natives. He lied
by habit; the fictitious way was more natural with him than the way
of truth. In official dealings he lied first, and afterwards modified
it into truth. Regardless of consistency, he said invariably what
he thought would please. Railway time-tables with him varied with
the estimated temper of the inquirer. This seems incredible, but it
is true. He was the only village inhabitant who ever invited you to
take coffee; and he (the potentially dignified station-master) alone,
in all the village, was ever known to solicit baksheesh--an oily,
yellow, perennially-smiling, small-bodied, altogether small-souled
railway-official, in him seemed incarnated the slavish spirit of
officialdom in all Egypt.

Bathing in the Canal was forbidden along its whole length. There lurked
a parasite that played Old Harry with livers. It ravaged the natives in
rare cases, though, having drunk and washed in the canal from infancy,
a sort of immunity was claimed for them. But there were victims to the
parasite to be seen amongst them--no pretty sight.

A favourite walk at sundown was the canal-bank. The reed-shot lagoon on
the east, traversed by sporadic, crying duck; the gentle wind, blowing
warm off the Libyan Desert, drifting the silent dhow; a solitary
fellaheen on his ambling beast; an Arab doing his devotions in the
tiny praying-crib on the water's brink; the west darkening behind the
palm-tufts over the illimitable sand. There was a peace here little
known in our other halting-places in the Delta.



CHAPTER III

CANAL ZONE


At Serapoeum, sprawled upon the Canal-banks just above the Bitter
Lakes, you are sufficiently far from Cairo to be delivered from the
hankering after the city such as gnaws you intermittently at such
a place as Tel el Kebir. From the old battle-ground you may run up
in a couple of hours; from the Canal the length of the journey is
trebled, and encroaches seriously upon your _feloose_, and that is
a consideration which ought not to--which will not--be despised on
service. And beside the fact that the rail journey is trebled from
the desert camp, there are some miles of dismal sand-plodding between
you and the railway-station, and the desert has inspired you with the
Sahara lassitude and an unfevered frame. You feel, in this waste of
brown sand, the incipiency of the mood of the contemplative Arab, to
whom the whirl of the metropolis is anathæma; but only its incipiency,
because there is still in your blood the subconscious resentment of
eight months' enforced inactivity on Anzac. Compulsory monotony,
whatever its form, raises a temperamental hostility: whether the
monotony of geographical confinement, limited vision, shell-scream,
innutritious food, inescapable dirt and vermin, or that of wide and
sand-billowed outlook, delicate messing, tranquil sleeping, luxurious
Canal-bathing, heat, and flies. Cairo is Cairo. The Peninsula, as
comfortable as this, would have been far less intolerable. But so long
as it is something less than the trackless Ægean that divides from the
glamour of Egyptian cities, you clamour for leave.

This is unintelligible--this _blasé_, surfeited mind of the Australian
soldier, in Cairo. "Never want to see it again! I'm fed up with Cairo!"
is a judgment strangely prevalent in the army of occupation. How
any land and people so utterly strange to the Australian can become
indifferent to him is incomprehensible. Every Cairene alley is a haunt
of stinks and filth--but a haunt of wonder, too. Cairene habits that
are annoying and repulsive are at the same time intensely interesting.
To get behind the mind of this people and hazard an estimate and a
comparison of its attitude towards life is an occupation endlessly
amusing.

But you may clamour for leave here with little effect. Divisional
orders have minimised it to men going to Cairo on duty. Duty-leave is
a time-honoured slogan that has been accustomed to cover a multitude
of one's own ends. But the added stringency of leave regulations which
preface a projected move of the division scrutinise very closely all
that is connoted by the term "Duty-leave," and lop away a good many of
its excrescences. So that, on the whole, you end by settling down in
the great sand and feigning a lively response to the call of the desert.

You do respond. You must. Anyone would; but not ardently.

We are on the Sinai side of the Blue Trough which colours richly
between its shores of light sand. We also are colouring richly. It's
far too hot for representative uniform clothing. Yet the clothing is
uniform--uniform in respect of a discardment of tunic and cap and a
ubiquity of shirt. The broad-brimmed hat and the gauze shirt and the
half-bared thigh for us; and the daily bathe.

The soldier is very busy indeed--too busy to live--who cannot get time
to trudge over to the blue water, doff, and disport himself in that
cool, tideless limpidity, which recreates (we are gross, material
creatures) his world. The banks swarm with brown, deep-chested nudes;
the water is strewn thickly with smooth-haired, colliding Australians,
elated by the bodily change almost beyond belief. Desert livers, desert
lassitude, and desert shortness of temper, cannot persist in this
medium. And the rest of the day is transmuted by it. The Canal adds to
efficiency.

Ships of all nations pass daily, and ships of all classes at Lloyd's.
Those are reckoned A1 which bear women-passengers. Raucous warning to
those men who are back to nature on the bank is given as the mail-boat
creeps up. Everyone who is wearing his birthday garment plunges and
swims out. The ship is surrounded by a sea of heads, and greeted with
all the grafted Arabic phrases that Australians have acquired--no,
not all; but with all those suited to polite society. The facetious
cry for baksheesh rises with a native Arabic insistence (but is
responded to with a freedom not customarily extended to natives):
"_Sai-eeda!--Baksheesh!--Gib it!--Gib it baksheesh for the baby!--Gib
it!--One cigarette!--Gib it tabac!--Gib it half-piastre!--Enta
quies!--Quies kiteer!--Kattar kairak!_" as the shower descends: tins
of cigarettes and chocolate, and keepsakes that are not edible.

There is as much excitement on deck as in the water. There is monotony
of sea-travel as well as of desert life; the same encounter interrupts
both. And apart from that, one can believe that these peoples are
genuinely glad to see each other. The soldiers have looked in the face
of no woman for far too long, and the admiration of the women for the
fellows is not necessarily feigned. They throw over greetings with the
other baksheesh luxuries, and these are returned in kind. The girls are
sports in the Australian sense, offering suggestions to come aboard,
and go tripping with rather more freedom than they would probably
use were there any possibility of an acceptance of the invitation.
Inevitably there is one woman (never a girl) in fifty who spoils it all
by a touch of Jingoism--calling them brave and noble fellows to their
faces, and screaming "Are we downhearted?" in a way Stalky would have
disapproved. This is volubly resented in responses to that oratorical
question which have no direct reference to the state of their spirits.

The boat moves on, fluttering with handkerchiefs, to the transport
staging, always crowded with men, who are not nude. The shower of
baksheesh is flung over again. Women are not notoriously good shots.
For the packages that fall short the men leap in, clothes and all,
and scramble, and reckon themselves well repaid. One afternoon the
largest package for which clothes were wetted proved to be a bundle of
_War-Cries_ and allied journals, dropped either by some humourist or
by one sincerely exercised for the spiritual welfare of the troops.
The latter was the inevitable assumption. The donor was greeted by the
dripping warriors with a chorus of acknowledgments that could leave no
doubt as to their spiritual needs. Soldiers have a religion, but they
are not accustomed to make it explicit.

The passing ships lighten the dulness. They bring a whiff of the great
British civilian world that is otherwise so unrelentingly far removed,
and which Cairo (when one does get there) brings very little nearer.

The Canal is crossed at Serapoeum by pontoon ferry, row-boat, and
pontoon-bridge. Take your choice. But that is not always possible.
Sometimes the bridge is swung open for hours on end to allow liners,
tugs, dhows, and launches to pass. It was built for vehicular and
animal traffic--for the transport of supplies, in fact, from Egypt to
the troops in Sinai. When open it therefore bears a constant stream of
G.S. waggons loaded with army stores. It's one stage of the journey
of beef from the plains of Queensland to the cook's "dixies" in the
Sinaian desert trenches. Supplies are disembarked at Suez and Port
Said, entrained to Egyptian Serapoeum, transported by waggon across
this bridge to the desert railway terminus on the opposite bank; they
are trucked out to railhead beyond the sandy horizon, and thence Canal
trains bear them to the desert outposts for final distribution. And
that is the chequered career of the Argentine ox, who never dared
hope for himself any such distinction as that of contributing to the
efficiency of His Majesty's Forces in the Peninsula of Sinai.

The miniature desert railway is no despicable contrivance, puffing
there and back-firing from its nuggety petrol engine. It can make
fifteen miles an hour with fifteen trucks of supplies lumbering behind.
Sometimes it leaves the somewhat flimsy track; sometimes it runs down
an unaccustomed Arab in a desert dust-storm; and sometimes it "sticks"
quite as annoyingly as any petrol-driven vehicle can do. Whatever the
nature of the obstacle--mangled Arab or jibbing engine--there is lusty
swearing; for the business of the desert railway is of more urgency
than that of most links in the lines of communication. For instance,
it--and it alone--can furnish with anything approaching expedition the
daily water-supply of the advanced trenches in the April Arabian sand.

It was during the first day of the _khamseen_ that the engine-wheels
became clogged with the remains of a man whom the whirling dust
prevented from seeing or hearing anything of engines. The violence of
the annual April _khamseen_ is incredible by those who haven't suffered
it. The initial days of the _khamseen_ period the Egyptians celebrate
in the festival of _Shem el Nessim_. They go out into the fields of the
Delta (of the Delta, mark you) with music and with dancing. There's no
disputing about taste--if, that is, the _khamseen_ is blowing "up to
time." Nothing more distressing you'll meet amongst desert scourges.
It's the _khamseen_ which kills camels in mid-desert by suffocation.
That is a fair test of the driving and dust-raising powers of the storm.

It begins with a zephyr for which the uninitiated thanks Allah in
the first half-hour. By the end of an hour he is calling upon Allah
for deliverance. At the end of a day he speculates upon his chances
of seeing the morning. At the end of the second day he calls upon
Allah to take away his life. The _khamseen_ this year lasted two days
without intermission. It began at dark without further warning than
that of a leaden sky and a compression of the atmosphere. But these
are indications that are, in Egypt, so often indicative of nothing,
that they lose significance altogether. On the 20th of April they
proved to have been highly charged with meaning. In forty minutes the
gale had reached its height. And there it stayed. Men expected relief
momentarily; but it never came that night--nor the next day--nor the
night following. "Such violence cannot last," said the Australian. In
twenty-four hours he was not sure it might not last for ever. Few tents
stood the strain longer than an hour. Men grumbled and turned in with
a half-sense of security from the tempest without. They hardly looked
for their house to come tumbling about their ears before midnight.
But few escaped that; the others spent the night under fallen canvas.
Sinaian desert sand cannot be expected to bear an indefinite strain
upon tent-guys. Those tents which stood at sunrise (if sunrise it
could be called) were kept up only by the frequent periodicity of the
mallet's application in the thick night. As soon as one tent-peg left
earth, the beginning of the end was come unless the inmate crouched out
and replaced it and strengthened the others. He came back with ears and
nose and eyes clogged and face stung painfully. At the third attempt to
keep his home up he said: "I'll go no more! Damn it! Let it come!"--and
it came.

The morning showed no sun--showed nothing farther than six yards away.
Men showed a face above demolished canvas and drew back hastily, stung
and half-choked by the driving grit. In those tents still standing
the furniture could not be judged by appearances. Thick dust covered
everything as with a garment. Regimental office tents that had fallen
before the gale had lost documents that could not be replaced or easily
recreated. Food in the mess was inedible; no one ate except to satisfy
the more urgent demands of hunger. The outdoor work had to proceed. You
couldn't see more than in a North Sea fog. Collisions were inescapable.
You couldn't smoke; you couldn't speak, without swallowing the gale.
Men got disgusted with continuing to live. On the third morning the
desert smiled at you as though nothing had happened. The quiet and
the purity of the air were like release from pain. Men set to work at
cleaning their hair and alleviating a desert throat.

Anzac Day came upon us at Serapoeum--the first anniversary of the
day of that landing which has seized and fired the imagination of
the Empire. No doubt there are other empires than the British which
marvelled at the impetuousness of that maiden proving of Australian
temperament; for it was temperament that carried us up. The world had
no sound ground for being surprised at success on the 25th of April,
except in so far as the world was ignorant of Australian temperament.
Yet surprise contended with adoration in the newspaper headings
which announced our success in planting a foot on Turkish ridges.
But inaccuracy in a use of terms is a quality not inseparable from
journalistic headlines in times of public excitement. The fact is that,
notwithstanding the world's expectation of the fatal elaborateness of
the Turkish preparation to receive us, there was no call for surprise
at the event in people that knew Australian conditions of life and
resultant Australian character. And, granting that as known, the fact
that we were fleshing virgin swords was no legitimate further ground
for surprise, though it was commonly published as such. It should
have been anything but that. People knowing Australians would be due
to recognise that, in all the circumstances, they would fight better,
under the eyes of the world, in a probationary struggle calculated to
establish their reputation than would experienced soldiers who knew
more than they of what the task exacted and of its possibilities.
Ignorance of warfare other than theoretical was in no sense a handicap
to men of Australian temperament: to such men it was material aid. In
a word, Australians could not help themselves at the Landing. Were
it otherwise, our troops would not have overstepped requirements to
the extent of unorganised and spasmodic pursuit of the routed enemy.
Success at the Landing was the inevitable result of temperament rather
than the contrived result of qualities deliberately summoned up on the
occasion....

The supreme charm of the desert resides in her nights. Long purple
shadows spread over the sand-tracts before evening. This gives to the
sand-sea an appearance of gentle undulation which is virtual only, but
none the less grateful for the delusion. The distances are shortened; a
crushing blow is dealt by the peace-loving evening to the desert curse
of monotony. The Suez hills transform to rich purple masses, splendid
in the depth of their colour. The Bitter Lakes sleep in the south. The
Canal settles down to gleam stealthily between its amorphous banks.
The fir-groves on the shore thicken; the dancing daylight interstices
in their meagre ranks are filled by the on-coming darkness until you
feel there are acres of thick plantation; they moan quietly in the
dusk in relief from the pitilessness of these burning days. The little
rivers of water scooped about their roots are filled, and the delicious
absorption begins.

Down-stream the coolies are chanting together in response to an
improvised wail unerringly consistent with the rhythm of their chorus.
You will hear nothing more pathetic than this song removed by distance.
The solo comes down the water in the cadences of desolation. It may be
the irregularity of the cadence that gives the sense of lamentation;
it may be because the enunciation is never full-chested--nor even
full-throated. It is as though extorted by a depth of desolation of
spirit that cannot stoop beneath the dignity of rhythmic utterance.
Near or far, the coolie choruses bear the same import of pathos; and,
indeed, there is little happiness amongst the Egyptians: nothing
buoyant (their climate forbids it); nothing approaching French vivacity
of spirit. There is a profound solemnity in the heart of the Egyptian.
It sometimes finds exaggerated vent in an unnatural but curtailed burst
of merriment, which quickly repasses into the temperamental sombreness.
The folk-songs and chants of a people are a safe index to temperament:
nothing more consistently pathetic than this will you hear without
travelling far.

The chant ceases as the bow searchlight of a vessel turns out of
the Lakes into the Canal channel, and illuminates it like a walled
street. There are ships that pass in the night, and they light their
own way with a brilliancy that takes no risk of collision. The tiny
wind-ridges in the banks are in relief; for a mile ahead the minutest
floating object is discovered. The coolies hail her as she passes. The
night-gangs at work on the barges that bear supplies from Suez and
Port Said interrogate hilariously, out of harmony with the still glory
of the night, but consonantly enough with the brilliant illumination.
There is not much dialogue. Most of the hailing is from the shore
alone.... She moves on. The banks close blackly about her stern. The
lanterns swing again about the barges.



CHAPTER IV

ALEXANDRIA THE THIRD TIME


It's like returning to visit an old friend--rushing towards the sea
of masts behind the sea of white towers glittering beside the sea
of Mediterranean blue. At the first glimpse of that multitudinous
shipping you lose interest in the sea of green delta through which
you are rushing; the mud-walled village-islands rising from it lose
charm in anticipation of the big city you know so well. You remember
it with a sort of yearning for its nobility. For noble it is. There
is no nobility in Cairo, except seen from the fringe of the Mokattam
Hills as you stand on the Bey's Leap at the Citadel looking down on the
busy expanse under its wealth of minarets. Cairo is more interesting,
because more truly Oriental; it has the charm of utter strangeness.
Alexandria is better built, more stately, less evil-smelling; it's the
charm of a well-ordered European city that holds you; and there is
always the loveliness of that Mediterranean outlook from the clean,
generously-broad esplanade. The sea about Cairo is true desert-sand,
unending, which is not lovely, except at the dawn and sundown, when the
colour leaps up about the far horizon.

For three hours, since leaving Cairo, you have been scouring the
green plain in a train of the Egyptian State railways, which bears
comparison well with most other rolling-stock that a limited knowledge
of the travelling world has given you. The Delta is unnaturally rich
and almost unnaturally green. Many centuries of Old Nile depositing
of fat mud have seemed to concentrate within that Nile Valley all
the richness that is in the soil of Egypt. Nor is it a green that is
ultra-rich by contrast with a desert background, for as far as you see
either way there is no sand; you're in the heart of the crops. There's
a monotony of level cultivation which tires you in the end, however
rich; a monotony broken only by a monotonous succession of out-cropping
palm-groves, sleeping canal, white creeping sail, mud-walled village,
and dilapidated mosque. You tire of the regularity of recurrence.
There is a hankering after the quiet stir and variety of the city of
Alexandria quite as strong upon you as Johnson's fervent passion for
the atmosphere of London.

There is a simple crudity in the man who persists in being an
Englishman to the backbone in the land of Egypt. The Australian enters
much more aptly into the spirit of the country--worms his way into
the intricacies of the bazaars and markets, and talks much with the
Alexandrian denizens, if only in pantomime. He "does as they do" far
more consistently than the restrained Tommy--even to the extent of
consuming their curious dishes, riding on their beasts and in their
vehicles, tasting their drinks and smoking their pipes. The Englishman
tends to call always for English beer and for roast beef, and sticks
tenaciously to his briar.

Alexandria has changed, too, at the quays. The transports are no longer
lading noisily, nor, when they are lading, taking in ammunition.
Mostly they are lying out quietly in the harbour, waiting. In March of
last year the harbour was alive with barges bearing fodder and supplies
and ammunition, and with motor-launches rushing to and fro carrying
officers of the General Staff. Now an occasional Arab dhow drifts
lazily, bearing nothing in particular, and the quay-sides are noisy
only with a sort of civilian bustle.

And the ubiquitous nursing-sister was not ubiquitous last year; she
was rarely to be seen in the streets; then she was like the motor-car
twenty years ago: you turned round and looked until her gharry was
swallowed in the traffic. Now she is, in twos and threes, in the cafés,
the Oriental shops, the car, the post office, the mosque; on the
esplanade, on the outlying pleasure-roads of Ramleh, the golf-links,
the race-course; the Rue Cherif Pacha teems with her, shopping or
merely doing the afternoon promenade. She is sprinkled among the
tea-parties at Groppi's; her striking red and grey adds colour to the
Square of Mahomet Ali, the Rue Ramleh, and the Rue Rosette.

Do not infer, gentle reader, that there is nothing to be done in
hospital. There is; but less. Gallipoli wounds either are healed or
sent to Australia to heal in the fine St. Kilda air. It's mostly sick
in hospital now, and sick requiring merely routine attention. And,
beside, there are more hospitals than a year ago. Since the Turkish
fight began they have been increasing; and now it's over, the Lemnian
hospitals of the advanced base have sailed back, and, in cases where
they are not yet re-established, their Sisters are running about the
capital unchained, revelling in a well-earned respite, with the Ægean
roses blowing in their cheeks.

Of hospitals there is no end, in the airy suburbs. The splendid
houses of rich Beys fly the Red Cross at unexpected stages of the
ride to Ramleh. An amazing number of private houses are in use thus.
The convalescents wander over the lawns and through the shrubberies
and perch on the balconies. There is evidence of the havoc played by
Turkish weapons and Turkish sickness on all hands. The impression is of
Alexandria's having been hard put to it to find hospital accommodation.

In these respects Alexandria has changed, but not in itself. It has the
same well-bred appearance as a city. There is the same absorption of
its regular population in business or in pleasure. The Bourse, the hub
of the city, is as animated as ever with bearded, gesticulating French,
Italian and Greek financiers taking their coffee on its verandah
looking down the Square. The Rue Cherif Pacha is as close-packed as
before with the carriages of rich French dowagers and pretty French
aristocrats. They have their coachmen in livery, and they know how to
dress irresistibly. There are not many finer human sights in this world
than is made by a young French mother, gowned and toileted with an art
that conceals art, reclining in the barouche with her daughters in the
Alexandrian winter afternoon sunshine. The Melbourne "Block" brags of
its reputation for beauty, but here is a fine essence of beauty such
as Paris at her best would own, which Paris, one suspects, actually
does flaunt in the summer. The best beauty of Paris, Milan, and Athens,
winters here. So does much of England. At present it is chiefly the
wives of officers; and they are no mean stock.

That Place Mahomet Ali is endlessly interesting and endlessly
picturesque. The gamut of the city's life is run-over here any
afternoon. It's a stately Square: stately in the buildings that
surround it--Stein's and the majestic Bourse and St. Mark's and the
best hotels. There are the rows of well-kept gharries and well-groomed
horses--kept as well as most private carriages. The two well-planted
islands stand green and quiet in the midst of the gentle roar and
moving colour, and the fine equestrian statue of Mahomet Ali looks with
dignity down upon it all. It's perhaps the most cosmopolitan crowd
in the world that moves about the Square. The typically Arab quarter
is segregated--lies in a labyrinth of bazaars in a well-defined area
off the Square. Cairo is flooded with the life and business of the
Arab in every quarter. Cairo, too, is compassed about with so much of
Ancient Egyptian relics as to distract you from the occupation of first
importance: looking upon the living. They are of more import than the
dead. In Alexandria the ancient monuments are few, but those few are
well preserved and mostly confined within the walls of the Classical
Museum. You may watch the life of Alexandria undistracted by any
subconscious urging to be out stooping and panting through the Great
Pyramid for the fifth time (that nothing be lost), or wandering among
the silent Tombs of the Caliphs.

A right good sight in Alexandria is the broad, mansion-skirted
promenade of the Rue Rosette on a Sunday morning. The French "quality"
of the city seems to reside there, and the best of it all is to watch
the dainty little French girls going to Mass in the pleasant sunshine.
They promenade that street in groups for two or three hours until
all are retired into the residences for the mid-day meal. There is a
delicacy of beauty in these little girls that affects one strangely
after eight months from the haunt of woman and child.

The Rue Rosette in the morning, or the Quai Promenade Abbas II.,
fronting the lovely Crescent of Port Est: this is the place to laze
away a morning, hanging over the broad stone wall on the water's edge,
or lounging in the open cafés behind the smooth road. There is that
generous expanse of glittering sea heaving gently between the horns
of the bay. The Fort Kait Bey lies brown on the western lip and Fort
Sel Sileh on the east, half embracing the blue. A rich mellow colour
they have, and a richer blue it is for that. And the white piles of
Alexandria thrust up all about the bay's brink, fringing the clear
basin with a sort of stately splendour. It's fine, too, the comfortable
laziness of the red-tarbushed fishermen on the wall, smoking and
fooling away the morning in the soft landbreeze blowing sweet off the
city. The only movement is with the Arab boys racing along the parapet
or the quiet motion of the fishing-smacks lying off. An old Russian
aristocrat is taking the air in a gharry; the nursemaids are out with
the babes; the well-dressed unemployed Egyptians (they throng the city)
are sipping their morning coffee in the glass-walled cafés. Alexandria
often gives the impression--except in the Square--that there are no
livings to be made. There is a luxurious spirit of idleness abroad in
the place, which appears on the balconies of the houses, in the cafés,
in the carriages of the suburbs. The idle rich--who are largely not
the vulgar rich--are here, whole battalions of them. There is nothing
like the studied idleness of Edinburgh Town or of Naples--nor of Cairo.
There are plutocrats who know how to dress and how to take their ease
without boredom, and to pursue pleasure without apparent _ennui_. All
these things (you feel) have they observed from their youth up; they
practise none of them crudely. They are well schooled in a placid and
luxurious enjoyment of life.

The Alexandrian night begins about 9.30. It is for that hour the opera
overture is timed; then cafés and music-halls begin to be thronged.
At one in the morning it is at its height. The opera may conclude at
two; and after that is the supper, and after that the drive. Far the
best way to see it all is to sit up in the diggings of your friend
overlooking the brilliant Rue Ramleh from twelve on toward the dawn.
There are sacred pipes and Alexandrian fruits, and other things; they
include the conversation of the man who has lived in Alexandria a year
and looked about him not casually, and who realises the import of all
he sees in the pulsing street below.

This is the fine side of Alexandrian night life. There is the sordid
aspect, not good--_i.e._, pleasant--to look on nor to relate.
Alexandria cannot compare with Cairo in lasciviousness. Perhaps no
place on earth can, nor any under earth. For crude carnality you
are to be commended to the Wazzia of Cairo; there the flesh-pots of
Egypt are seething and steaming. Apart from the temperately-conducted
biological friendships of the leisured French and Russians and
Italians, the carnal traffic of Alexandria is limited very closely.
It does not clog the alleys, as in Cairo, on every hand. Indeed, it
is rather the pot-house and the tavern, where the sole business of
the waitresses is to bring traffic in beer, that is the scourge of
Alexandria. Their blandishments mostly are content with coquettish
inducements to "fill 'em up again"; to achieve that they will perch
on the knees of the soldiers and stroke their visages in a fashion
not just maidenly, but effective in the eyes of the beer-boss. These
taverns are at close intervals in all the poorer streets. There is
always a piano, at least, and an employed performer; sometimes there
is an embryonic orchestra--harp and fiddle--whose _répertoire_ is
Tipperary and another--or perhaps two others. There is a continuous
fierce roaring, which subsides only when a Tommy rises to sing. The
pianist ramps out an improvised accompaniment. No pianist has ever been
known to decline to make an attempt. Everybody joins in the chorus.
By the time the chorus of the fifth stanza is under way, there is a
rare drunken hullabaloo, and spilt beer and broken glasses. Ogling
girls and flushed, embracing Tommies, yells for more beer, and drunken
miscalculations of the score and feebly thundering band--all are
checked with a parade-ground suddenness when the red-caps appear with
their roars of _Nine o'clock!_ And the pot-house, so to speak, closes
with a slam.

The picquets are irresistibly strong and numerous. They parade in
squads in half-sections, each under an officer. The Provost-Marshal,
with a scrape o' the pen, has placed out of bounds most of the
danger-zones which a year ago were open territory to the soldier.

The Arab quarters are at their best at midnight. They have their
music-halls, blatant and raucous and evil-smelling. The star performers
are usually confined to one bloated, painted woman who screams an
Arab rhythm at intervals under the influence of hasheesh, to the
accompaniment of an orchestra of pipes and drums whose performers
are elated by the same familiar spirit. Arab music is strident to a
degree that sears the nerves. No drunkenness in the audience ever
drowns _that_. It soars like a siren above the frantic mirth of the
drinkers. Applause breaks forth at unprovoked intervals. The lady is
never perturbed. She is reinforced occasionally by the brazen-throated
orchestra, which is chorus too. The din is unimaginable when they are
working in concert. The Arab sense of rhythm is unerring. Their rhythms
are irregular and without consecutiveness in their habits, to the
European ear that is not closely attentive; drawn out, as it were, into
irregular strands--totally unsystematised, it seems--with the intervals
at cross-purposes. They despise the Western mathematical rhythmical
"groups" and the regular Western recurrence of stresses and intervals.
English rhythm is as much unlike it as the characters of a London
morning sheet differ from the gracefully irregular type of the native
Egyptian press; the difference is as striking as between the tortuous
Eastern mind and the British downrightness; as between an English tweed
suit and the Arab flowing robe. Yet in this rhythmical maze no member
of the orchestral chorus ever loses his way. There is perfect agreement
in the disclosing of the scheme, which, after half an hour's turbulent
listening, begins to show its shape through the rhythmical murk. And
you know before you leave that though English music may make a sweeter
sound than this, the Arab mastery of rhythm is mastery indeed. And that
knowledge is, of course, deepened if you'll stop any day and listen to
a group of Arab workmen chanting at their job.

So long as you withstand the glad-eye of the serpent of Old Nile (who
descends now and then from the boards and collects baksheesh piastres)
and keep to coffee, you will find these Egyptian music-halls absorbing
enough. There are never women in the audience. The Egyptian woman--at
any rate in the lower and middle classes--is never a "theatre-goer,"
as far as can be judged. She earns most of the living. All the
_feloose_ would seem to go into her lord's mighty hand, which does the
spending--mostly on himself. Night after night he comes there in his
red tarbush and sees the evening out with liquor and vociferous talk.
Somewhere in the small-hours a gharry comes for the lady, and the hall
noisily gets emptied. And as you climb up to your room in the hotel
opposite, you can hear the dispersing throng in argument and criticism
far along the emptying street. Standing at your balcony door, it merges
imperceptibly into the subdued murmur of the city, broken by a belated
wailing, street-cry.

In the morning you wake at some hour later than _réveille_, and gloat
for a time that is indefinite over the luxury of a spring-mattress
and of a day's time-table that is of your own framing--that shall
be when you summon up energy sufficient to begin upon it. The city
wakens almost as late as you. By the time you have bathed and dressed
at exaggerated ease and meandered round to the Italian restaurant
it is ten o'clock. Exotic Italian dishes are good for all their
strangeness.... Across the peopling Square you get a car to Pompey's
Pillar, towering above the Arab cemetery. The green mound bearing that
granite column is an oasis in the desert of squalor about it. From the
crest of the hillock you see Lake Mareotis spread out like a cloud in
the morning mist--those shores now waste that grew the wine beloved of
Horace.

The old municipal guide totters up the slope and offers you below,
through the Catacombs. You have seen the other Catacombs, beside the
Lake, which alone are really worth seeing. He shows you the Roman
mortuary-chapel in sandstone at the entrance to the galleries, lights
up his candle-lamp, and you traipse after him through the labyrinth.
The niches in the wall are robbed of their mummies; all epitaphs are
long since gone--assuming there ever were any; there is hardly anything
to be seen that is even symbolic. The old fellow mutters continually in
a lingo quite unintelligible, except in short and isolated fragments.
The linguistic accomplishments of many of the official attendants on
the ancient monuments of Egypt are deplorably shallow. You notice it
far more at places that are of far more historical importance than
the Catacombs. The tombs of the Sacred Bulls at Sakkhara afford the
most striking instance. A relic so bound up with the ancient religion
as is the Serapoeum ought to be in charge of an attendant who not
only can speak English fluently, but is beside alive to the import of
his subject. The old dotard at the Serapoeum has no further English
(obviously) than: _Sacra' Bool! Sacra' Bool!_ and _Bakshish_ and _T'ank
you, Sair!_

The Catacombs _par excellence_, lie along the Rue Bab-el-Melouk south
of Pompey's Pillar; but since we've been there before rather more often
than once, they must be passed over.

And so must a great deal else.

The Greek and Roman Museum hard by the Rue Rosette is hard to find,
retiring into a side-street with a true classical unobtrusiveness. It
is less famed than the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, but more interesting.
Most people have at least a nodding acquaintance with the history of
the classical occupation of Egypt--and here are the relics of it;
whereas Egyptian history is not popularly read, even in a cursory
fashion. In any case, for the inveterate Egyptologist there is a small
mummified Egyptian section. The Cleopatra relics are well preserved,
and especially a magnificent bust of the Siren. Mural and portal
decoration of Roman and Greek houses are there in fine fragments, and
there is a legion of vases and other ornaments from the living-rooms.
Probably the most significant specimens, historically, are the coins;
of them there is an enormously large collection. And the priceless
papyri lie near at hand. Of sepulchral emblems there are a great many,
but none beautiful except the laurel-crowned cinerary urns.

The museum is small but highly charged with meaning. There is a
courtyard attached for the preparation (and restoration) of specimens,
and it has some Roman monuments and gateways too huge for the interior.

The faithful Soudanese are the janitors and the conductors. Here,
again, they are ignorant and English-less, and you sigh for a
well-informed, well-paid, and intelligible informant. Only within
the last fifteen months has a catalogue been compiled; and that is
in French--though in that there is hardly any legitimate ground for
complaint.

Most Australians at home will have heard of the Nouzha Gardens lying
along the Canal Mahmoudieh: the gardens in whose café their men have
sat listening to the band and drinking afternoon beer and watching the
youngsters romp--and even joining in the sport; and finding a welcome,
too. But few Australians will know of the Jardin Antoniadis, beyond
Nouzha, and only half as large; but finer, which is a bold saying. It's
the garden of a rich Greek Bey who has attained almost the splendour of
the Hanging Gardens. He employs sixty men. In theory, you cannot enter
without a pass--to be obtained, Heaven knows where; perhaps "at the
warehouse." But five piastres in the palm of the trusty _sa'eda_ at the
gate passes you through, and you wander amazed for a couple of hours
amongst those flowers and lawns, fountains and nymphs, ghouls and fauns
and satyrs and dryads, and centre about the master's palace buried in
the heart of the garden. It is gardening on a scale of magnificence
and ingenuity--so it is said. Any public map of Alexandria will show
the Jardin Antoniadis in bold letters. The afternoon we paid a visit
we were puzzled to know the motive which could have obliged a dozen
stalwart gardeners to stand at intervals of a dozen yards beating tins
and howling at the sky. When questioned, they pointed alternately at
the heavens and the freshly planted lawn, and we thought they must be
calling primevally upon the water-gods for rain. But on consideration
the unromantic conclusion prevailed: merely scaring birds or locusts
from the springing grass.

The fine drive is from Nouzha round the shore of Lake Mareotis and
back to the Square by way of Ramleh--the Toorak of Alexandria. You
are defied to conceive a suburb better bred. To drive through it in a
gharry is to put yourself in the dress-circle.

If you are back in time--that is, by 6.30--you may perhaps go to the
weekly organ-recital at St. Mark's. Nothing will bring Home before
you more vividly than the tones of a pipe-organ. But you must close
your eyes, for almost everything else in the church tears you back to
war. There's more khaki than tweed in the pews, and most of the women
present are Sisters from the hospitals. And the organist is a private
who plays at an Edinburgh church when peace is on, and the soloist (and
well he can sing) is an A.M.C. Sergeant. The "Gyppo" hired servant is
even here--as he is everywhere--creeping up and down the aisle in his
incongruous colours: none the less incongruous for his brushing against
the Cambridge graduate's gown of the Assistant-Chaplain, distributing
programmes. Music of Handel and Bach sends you aching back to your
hotel. That night you do not want to go into the Arab quarter.



CHAPTER V

THE LAST OF EGYPT


The map shows Port Said dumped at the end of a lean streak of sand
flanking the Canal. For half the distance from Ismailia the train
sweeps along this tract. There is the Canal on your right, rich-blue
between its walled banks and foiled by the brown heat-hazed world
east; and on your left are the interminable shallows exuding the stink
of rank salt, and traversed drearily by fishing-craft. Port Said at
the approach much resembles Alexandria: the same brown, toppling
irregularity, and the multitude of masts protruding.

The Canal at its city mouth is fretted with rectangular berthing-basins
crammed with craft, very busy and noisy. A network of railways threads
the quays. The green-domed Canal company's offices tower above the
smoke and din, redeeming them; they make a noble pile. All the shipping
is on the west bank; the east is bare, but for some sombre stone houses
and a Red Cross hospital in the sand, and a self-contained Armenian
refugee camp south of the city-level. The Canal mouth is stuffed with
cruisers and commercial ships anchored between the two stalwart stone
sea-walls. They protrude two miles into the Mediterranean, keeping the
channel. That on the west is crowned by the de Lesseps monument.

The lean sand-neck that you traversed by rail from Ismailia takes a
right-angled turn at the head of the de Lesseps mole and runs seven
miles west into the Mediterranean. It begins with a fine residential
quarter standing behind the firm beach and the horde of bathing-boxes;
west still, and safely segregated from the decency of the city, is the
seething Arab quarter, of enormous dimensions and smelling to heaven;
and beyond Arab Town the promontory bears the city's burial-ground,
lying desolate in the sand-neck; and then peters out dismally in the
shallows.

A new-comer takes in the straightforward geographical scheme of the
place at a glance. It's a small city, lying, as it does, midway on the
sea-road linking the East and West worlds. Its atmosphere is intensive
rather than extensive. It is highly charged with busyness. The little
area of the city is thickly peopled with every nationality (excepting
German and Austrian), promenading or sitting at the open cafés. The
shipping is congested to a degree that is apparently unwieldy. And the
period of war has taken nothing from the atmosphere of bustle. This is
the main supply base for the whole of the Canal defences and for a good
deal of Upper Egypt too. An enormous levy is made daily on railroad and
on Canal barges for transport of Army supplies. The supply depôt has
commandeered half the Quay space and receives and disgorges day and
night without intermission.

For that reason (as well as because shipping is thick in the Canal
mouth) the place is good game for hostile aircraft. The morning after
our arrival Fritz came over before breakfast and dropped six bombs
and left two Arabs stretched on the quay. Anti-aircraft guns let fly,
and innumerable rifles. The din of bombs and guns and musketry took
one back for a vivid twenty minutes to Anzac--for the first time
since leaving that place of unhappy memory. No damage was done--to
the raiders. But the two coolies lay there, and the rest (seven
hundred strong) fled like one man to Arab Town, and neither threats
nor inducements would bring them back. For forty-eight hours the work
of the depôt would have ceased had not the Armenian refugees been
requisitioned--a whole battalion of them. They were glad to come, and
they worked well. It was better for them than being massacred by Turks:
and they got paid for it.

The second raid happened a week later, at three in the morning, under
a pale moon. Four 'planes came with sixteen missiles. This was more
serious. Our guns could shoot only vaguely, in a direction; and ten to
one the direction was at fault. Four bombs dropped in the main street.
The terror by night seized the civilians. There was a screaming panic.
The populace poured into the streets in their night garments and rushed
about incontinently. So a few who would perhaps otherwise have escaped
met their end. A night raid over Anzac when the guns were speaking
without intermission was hardly to be noticed. But this onslaught upon
civilian quietness in the night watches was heart-shaking. The deadly
whirring of the engine in the upper darkness; the hoarse, intermittent
sobbing of the missile in descent--none could say how near or far; the
roar of explosion checking the suspense momentarily, but only until
the next increasing sob touches the ear; the din of our own wild and
random fire and the crackle of the sentries' rifles; the raucousness of
the sirens, the piercing screams of the women, and the cries of little
children in the extremity of terror; the misdirected warnings and the
disorganised directions of the men--these all combined to make an
impression of horror of a kind unknown on Anzac.

The visitation lasted half an hour. That half-hour seemed to endure a
whole night. Four were killed outright, five died soon of their wounds,
seven were wounded who would recover.

Shooting a man from a trench is one thing; this potential and actual
murder of women and little children is altogether another. One wishes
it could be made to cease. It calls for reprisal, or revenge, or
whatever it should be called; but not in kind.

That was a Sunday morning. The Anglican parson at matins later tried
lamely to reassure a sparse congregation by preaching futilely from the
text: "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night." The latter
end of his discourse was drowned in the pitiful _Zaghareet_ raised by
the Egyptian women next door: they had lost a man in the night. Their
shrill, ear-splitting wail submerged the sermon. There was an end of
reassurance--even supposing it had ever begun.

The raid had come close on the heels of the Casino dance. The Casino
is the best hotel in Port Said, which is to say a good deal. Every
Saturday night the Casino "gives" a dance to the quality of the
Port. There you will see the best. It's always worth going to. Quite
half the European population of the town is composed of the British
Government officials and their wives and daughters, English visitors
from the mail-boat _en route_, the French Canal Company's officials and
their families, and the wives of British naval and military officers
stationed here. There is probably as pure a quality of European beauty,
well-breeding, and accomplishment as you'll meet outside Britain and
France. The women and the naval officers know how to dance. So much
cannot be said of the Army's representatives. They consist chiefly in
stout Colonels and somewhat young and frisky Subalterns. But apart
from that, they may not carry with them the ballroom gear that a naval
officer can stow in his quasi-permanent home. A valise or a kit-bag
is another thing from a sea-chest, nor is a moving tent a snug and
cupboarded cabin. Especially the French flappers, with their delicate
transparent beauty, dance with an exquisite grace, and the French
dowager-chaperons sit at an end of the room far less sedately than
British duennas. The English Subalterns who can speak French find the
flappers rising easily to the level of their spirits in the intervals
on the dimly-lit piazza; and they probably are not ungrateful that the
fear of a nocturnal bombardment from the sea has extorted from the
authorities an order obliging the proprietor to subdue his sea-front
lights.

They're great nights. There's no such stuff in anybody's thoughts as
Taubes. Yet on that Sunday morning many a girl and many a dowager could
hardly have put head to pillow before the first bomb crashed. A little
earlier timing on the part of Fritz, and the sound of revelry by night
would have been far more rudely hushed than was that of Brussels long
ago by the distant gun on the eve of Waterloo. The period of this war
is surcharged with dramatic situations more intense than were held by
Belgium's capital then. But there is no Byron to limn them.

The Casino denizens you will find in the surf before the hotel any
morning after eleven. The girl who was so charming last night is no
less charming now, as she moves across the sand. She wears almost as
much this morning. All that this means (whatever it may seem to imply)
is that her bathing-dress is ultra-elaborate. There is a great deal of
it; and it includes stockings; and is so fine in texture and harmonious
in colour that you wonder she has the heart to wet it. But there--she's
in. You wait till she comes out, and marvel that she hardly has
suffered a sea-change.

The surf between eleven and one any day; the Eastern Exchange open-café
from eleven to five on Sunday; and the de Lesseps Mole from three to
six on a Sunday afternoon: it is there and then you will see Port
Said representatively taking the air--or the waters. The Eastern is
the heart of the City; to sit sipping there during a pleasant Sabbath
afternoon is the equivalent of doing the "Block" in Melbourne. The de
Lesseps Pier will reveal the utterly cosmopolitan character of the
populace: all classes promenade it. And the great bronze engineer
towers over them and points his scroll down the mouth of his handiwork;
and embossed boldly on the pedestal is his own boast: _Aperire
terram centibus_. The gigantic de Lesseps is a landmark of the whole
sea-front. He faces, and points the way to, every East-bound ship that
enters his Canal. There is a sort of pride in his bearing.

The streets are tree-lined and over-arched, and the tables are set out
beneath the boughs; and there is singing and dancing in the open air
at every café. There is a finely fashioned and adorned Greek church.
Nothing expresses the cosmopolitan nature of the floating populace
better than the extraordinary notice on the inner wall of the Roman
Catholic Cathedral: _Proibito di sputare in terram_.

There are two cabarets--Maxime's and the Kursaal--where wine and
fornication is the business, driven unblushingly, as one has come to
expect in any part of Egypt. As these things go in the land, Port Said
is amazingly clean. It was not ever so. A deliberate campaign was
lately organised to purge. The segregation of the Arab quarter did much
to effect that. Five years ago the Port was the carnal sink of Egypt.
Now Cairo is.

We were hurried back to Serapoeum for the move. This had been pending
any time the last two months: the Turkish feints beyond railhead
had delayed it. But it had come now. We were in the desert a bare
thirty-six hours. We entrained in the scorching afternoon. The
_khamseen_ was whispering potentially, but not menacingly. We moved
out in the cool of the afternoon. Nefisha was passed, with its hordes
of bints and wales hawking chocolate, fruits, and fizzy drinks--and
hawking successfully ... on through Ismailia cooling off under her
fir-groves beside the delicious lake ... up through Mahsamah, where
the flights to the Canal had made their first footsore halt ... on and
on, taking our last look on the soft evening desert, and keeping the
placid sweet-water Canal. We felt we were seeing it all for the last
time. And we hoped we were, though now it looked inviting enough. But
it was not the desert normal, and well we knew it; we had seen too
often this seductive evening gentleness turn to relentless blistering
heat in the morning.... On through Kassassin, always--since reading the
Tel-el-Kebir epitaphs--the scene of that "midnight charge" ... up to
Tel-el-Kebir itself, its miles of tents darkening beside the hanging
dhow-sails ... through Zagazig in the late dusk, with its close-packed
houses and its semi-nudes in the upper stories ... and so on into the
night, with snatches of sleep, until we were wakened at 2 a.m. by the
sudden stop and the bustle at the Alexandrian quays.... The three
hours' embarking of men and baggage, and so to bunk, and white sheets
and yielding mattress and the feeling of a _room_ about one--and to
sleep.

There were a few hours' leave next day, when we took a last
affectionate perambulation about the well-loved, well-bred city. And as
we breakfasted next morning we were moving out of the inner harbour.
By ten we could look back at the brown towers, and see the place as
a whole from the low strip of Mex, away to the eastern sand-dunes at
Ramleh. Alexandria had been good to us, and it was hard to leave her,
whatever the exaltation of anticipating the new field. Egypt as a
whole, despite its stinks, its filth, its crude lasciviousness, its
desert sand and flies, heat and fiery, dusty blasts, had charmed and
amazed and compensated in a thousand ways. It was our introduction to
foreign-ness, and, as such, had made an arresting impression that
could never be deleted. France may cause us less discomfort, and may
hold a glamour and a brilliance of which Egypt knows nothing; but the
impression left by France can hardly be more vivid than that of Egypt,
our first-love in the world at large.



BOOK IV

FRANCE



SECTION A.--A BASE



CHAPTER I

ENTRÉE


You can conceive the sense of exaltation with which one would enter the
South of France in June, after five months in Egypt. You can conceive
better than describe it. So can the writer. In a moment it comes
back from this distance, with a reality that elates; but it defies
description. The universal sand of Egypt: the timbered heights and the
flowered valleys of the Riviera; the stinks of the Egyptian cities: the
June fragrance breathing down from the hills of Marseilles; the filth
and deformity of the Cairene denizens: the fair women of France and the
lovely grace of the little children; the searing heat of the desert:
the tempered sunniness of this blossoming land. If you can make these
things explicit to yourself, you may know something of the high sense
of emancipation with which we left the ship. For we had been looking
on Marseilles and sniffing the air from the harbour for two days. And
in the last hundred miles of the journey by sea we had skirted the
Riviera coast, gazing absorbedly on verdure and perching _château_, and
nestling, red-topped village and silver sand-strip. Then the cliffs of
the harbour mouth--that hide the city--uprose, and we threaded a way
beneath them and about the titanic rocks towering in the bay; and a
sudden turn to starboard threw all Marseilles into the field of vision
in five minutes--red tiles along the water's edge in great congested
blotches; thin red patches straggling back in the green up the hills;
and in the near, high-reared horizon, grey scarred cliffs overlooking
all; and on the main harbour headland Notre Dame de la Garde, dazzling
gold in the setting sun, gazing benignly over the city.

We looked and pondered till darkness came on, and in the morning were
on deck early to see it all by the eastern sun. But they wouldn't let
us land. So we spent two days explicating the detail with glasses.

We moved in suddenly and entrained at once. By the goodness of Heaven
we were detailed to proceed by a slow passenger-train, as distinct from
a fast troop-train. A troop-train rushes express, and is crowded; ours
stopped at every station, and gave room to sleep. At the big towns we
stayed as long as four and six hours. For all this we were commiserated
by the French: "_Ah! trois jours dans la voiture!_" But we could have
wished it would last three weeks.

Think, patient reader! Three days across France from Marseilles to
Rouen in the gentle French midsummer; and time to look about you at
every village.

Four impressions will always remain: the desecration by war of this
beautiful land; the inescapable evidence that the last fit man in
France is in the field; the ravages upon these quiet civilian homes
by death in the front line; the incontinently affectionate welcome of
Australians by the French girls.

It was, above all, pitiful to know that somewhere to the east Teuton
shell was ravaging country such as this. You found yourself saying:
Is it such a valley as that in which the trenches are dug? Are German
shell (and French shell, too) changing the whole topography of a
province such as this?--smudging the sleeping landscape and tearing up
the smiling crop. Is it in such a grove that the sacrilege of the guns
is perpetrating itself? "Gad!" you would hear, "this country's worth
fighting for!"

In Egypt it's another thing. It is less unnatural that the godless sand
of the desert should be stained and erupted; but this is different. And
the old consolation comes--that has always consecrated the sacrifices
of Gallipoli--that the ideals in question are more precious than any
land, however fair.

In the fields of the provinces it's women and bent old men who are
working--and boys. They wave pathetically as the train rushes on. And
in the towns there is not an eligible man to be seen--except in uniform.

Seven in ten women are in mourning at any stage of the journey. One
attempted at first to be consoled by the notion that the French
temperament would put on mourning for a second and third cousin. But
conversation with Frenchmen soon corrected that. Six in ten of these
women wear weeds for a son or a brother or father or lover fallen in
the two years that are past.

It was a welcome and a half that the girls gave. Apart from all
fighting, the deep-lined, barbed-wire Australian visage attracts in a
land where the men are smooth-faced. And the notion of men fighting
for France from the other end of the earth made no favour too much.
Troop-trains had been passing at regular intervals for a month, and
they were on the lookout for khaki. They swarmed to the stations with
favours of fruit and flowers and embraces. They waved as the train came
in; they chatted sweetly and unintelligibly at the platform; and they
waved long and friendly as we moved away. The little children came with
lilies and roses (little French girls are the loveliest things God ever
made), and held up their faces to be kissed. And their big sisters not
only did not blench at embraces, but invited them; and would get up and
ride five miles _pour compagnie_.

We stayed three hours at Avignon--at night. An Englishman we
encountered on the station was so glad to see men of his own tongue
that he took us about the streets and the cafés to show us the city
proper, and missed his train without a pang. This was about midnight,
and Avignon was just fairly awake. Trade in the cafés was at its
zenith. Amongst other things we saw (for the first time) how tactful,
shrewd, and charming a waitress a French provincial girl may be.

Lyons we reached at 2.30 a.m., and had time for a four hours' walk.
The inevitable route was over the Rhône, mist-laden, and up the
villa-crowned hill in the midst of the city; and, when the sun had
overspread the wakening valley, down into the strawberry markets, and
away to the station, threading a way amongst the strawberry waggons,
bearing in the fruit in voluptuous piles.

Macon, the next long stop, we remember for the provender we put aboard
there. This is mere carnality, but the capons and fruits and pies and
pastry of Macon were unforgettable.

This lasted us to Dijon. Dijon we shall always remember as the city
where the girls were hungriest for souvenirs. Souvenirs had been
demanded (and sometimes given) at any stage of the journey. But at
Dijon the houris were infected with a souvenir madness; and since they
were the prettiest girls we had yet seen, we departed stripped and
deploring we had not brought from Australia each a bushel of badges.
For there were bound to be more girls, quite as irresistible.

Then there was Laroche, where more rations had to be got. This was a
hungry business--and even a thirsty.

And between Laroche and the great city an unhappy thing occurred. We
were due to change at Villeneuve, a Parisian suburb. But at Villeneuve
(2 a.m.) no one seemed to be awake; and at 3 we were in Paris,
forlorn and regretful (though in a thoroughly half-hearted fashion)
of the oversight which had disorganised our movement-order. There was
therefore nothing to be done but hastily swallow _café au lait_ in
a matutinally busy eating-house, and hail a taxi in the Place de la
Bastille: this after learning that the Rouen train would not leave
before 7.30. "_Vue Générale de Paris--trois heures_," was the order,
in crude English-French. And the chauffeur put down the dividing glass
window behind him, and in his taxi-jargon showed us everything--Hôtel
de Ville, Notre-Dame, the Pantheon, l'Académie de France, Palais du
Sénat, the Invalides, the Champs-Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, Place de
la Concorde, l'Église de la Madeleine, round about the Louvre and the
Luxembourg, and the rest of them.

This was vulgar Americanism; but nothing else was to be done. And so
we got back to the Gare Lyon, and in the half-hour to spare descended
and gaped unsophisticated at the Parisian tube railways disgorging
their freight of men and women (mostly women) who had found their work.

Then the train began its crawl up to Versailles and its loveliness,
nestling in the thick wooded heights, and by many blessed stops and
shuntings we came by Juvisy and Achères to Rouen, late in the drizzling
night, took a cup of steaming coffee at the Croix Rouge Cantine pour
Permissionaires, and marched out to camp; and didn't care much where it
might be, so long as we had where to lay our head.

Three days in Rouen left one with the knowledge that it is dangerous
to transport suddenly a body of Australians, after eighteen months'
residence on Anzac and in Egypt, to a land where the wine is cheap and
every girl is pretty.



CHAPTER II

BILLETED


The natural course was to advertise. The _Journal de Rouen_ received
us tolerantly, even compassionately. No one of us could speak French,
but one pretty member of the office staff (more accurately, one member
of the pretty office staff) could speak a kind of English. The first
demand was for a _petite annonce_ in French. And when the lady saw this
was out of the question for us, she offered a translation of an English
paragraph.

It brought a shoal of responses in French. A kind of horse-sense
had led us to get them addressed "to this office," where the fair
translator could be requisitioned. They were seductive replies--in
the inevitable language of proprietresses. Some offered rooms and
meals; some rooms and breakfast; some rooms and no more; others
specified a _femme de chambre_ of the first quality (and these were
looked at twice). None offered a bath. This is the most extraordinary
country. It drives you to the conclusion, anyhow, that a bathroom is
necessary neither to health nor good looks, and thereby runs counter
to a long-established English prejudice. A bathroom is by no means a
necessary part of the furniture of a good hotel. Those that have been
driven by the English occupation into adding one, brag about it in
their advertisements and charge "a franc a time." Those that steadily
decline to add it are losing custom.

The conclusion of the matter was we yielded to none of their
blandishments, but went to an hotel, and that for good reasons. They
resolve themselves into a question of feeding--_i.e._, of meal-hours.
You go into lodgings in a flat, and of necessity there are more or less
definitely limited periods for meals. This is killing, even when not
regarded in the light of irregular working hours. To be tied to 8 for
breakfast, 1 for lunch, and 6 for dinner, is to be in gaol. The chief
beauty of an hotel is that you may have breakfast from 6.30 to 10,
lunch from 12 to 2.30, and dinner from 6 to 9.30. This leaves you, to
some extent, at freedom with the leisure an exacting Headquarters does
sometimes throw to you.

Breakfast is altogether French. You'll get no more than _café au lait_
and roll--not even _confiture_, without paying through the nose for
this violation of French usage. If you order eggs or _omelette_ (or
both) you not only wait long for it, but are looked on with disfavour
even in a first-class establishment. But the coffee is so rich and
mellow and the roll so crisp and the butter so creamy that you can make
a large meal of them. You usually eat and drink far more than it's good
form to consume. He's a barbarian who asks for anything better.

This you take in the early morning almost alone in the winter-garden
looking on the courtyard. The matutinal _femme de chambre_ is frequent
and busy about the place. The call for hot water and for grub in the
rooms is insistent. If you want to be called early and to shave, you
write up on the blackboard in the bureau the formula: 31 (_no. de
chambre_)--5-1/2--_e.c._ (_eau chaude_)--_entrez_; that is, let the
damsel enter without knocking. And enter she does with the steaming
jug; and, with a charming frankness, wakens you by the shoulder, and,
if not abnormally busy (and she's seldom too busy for that), sits on
the edge of the bed with her shining morning face, telling you sweetly
the quality of the weather, and that it's time you were out, until
satisfied you are on the way to uprising, as distinct from turning
over again. And morning greetings of the most refreshing sort have
been known to be exchanged thus over the edge of the bed. One of the
satisfactions of such an exchange (though not necessarily the chief)
would be that you know the sweet creature associates nothing sordid
with the greeting--even though this is a bedroom and you're in your
'jamas. An English maid in the circumstances would probably begin with
a hostile shriek, and end by relating to the manager how a base and
licentious soldier had made violent overtures to her; and you would
suffer ejection with ignomy.

And so the French (and especially the French women) score in morality
at every turn.

You see nothing of the hotel all morning. But on returning for lunch
your _chambre_ is "done" with a taste and thoroughness that delight,
and drive you to register a vow you'll never more be guilty of
untidiness. British officers in France have a reputation for hoggishly
littering their rooms that requires a lot of redeeming. But the French
maid is not dismayed. She returns to the attack daily, with a pride in
her art which no piggery can dissipate.

Luncheon has the light touch that's the prime charm of French cooking.
There's endless variety without heaviness or monotony: a whiff of _hors
d'œuvre_, a taste of fish, a couple of "made" dishes (made well), a
scrap of delicious cold-meat, salads, fruits (who shall do justice to
the fruits of Normandy in June?--her strawberries, peaches, plums,
grapes, melons, and cherries), _crême_, cheeses, biscuits, _cidre_ and
coffee. Then you hear a barbarous Captain beside you blaspheming: "The
first thing I'll do when I get leave is to go to the Savoy and have a
decent English feed. I can't stick this French grub!" This is the sort
of man that ought to be suppressed by the State and debarred from going
abroad. It's with justice that the French taunt us with our English
"heaviness"--heaviness in eating, in drinking, thinking, and doing. One
of the privileges of being in France is that of eating what the French
alone know how to prepare.

All the same, one does not immediately get used to horse. _Cheval_, in
some form or other, is served out every dinner. There's not nearly so
much beef as horse consumed. The French like it better. The sign of
a golden horse's head surmounts the doorway of most butcher's shops;
many a shop displays the severed head, as the English do those of sheep
and pigs. The Parisian taxi-cabs are ousting the horse-cabs fast.
Proprietors are selling off their beasts. The newspapers, announcing
the result of the sales, will tell you most of the horses went to
butchers, as a matter of course.

In the medley of French on the menu-card (which you don't scan very
closely) you miss _cheval_ until it's pointed out to you: it's
disguised. You then discover you've been eating horse for weeks,
unwittingly, and enjoying it. It's too late to turn back, even if you
didn't like the beast. So you continue to eat and relish the faithful
defunct friend to man.

Dinner begins about nine. That's the meal for which people who don't
live at the hotel "drop in"--people from the suburbs and the country:
wounded and base-Colonels, with their wives and daughters; music-hall
artistes, business-men. The place hums and echoes with high-spirited
chatter. Much wine gets drunk--as much by the women as by the men. At
the end of an hour the place is fairly agog. The proprietor himself,
dressed in his best--as though persisting in the time-honoured practice
of a tavern-host--carves an enormous joint (a kind of half a pony)
in the centre of the room, under the apex of the dome. This is very
interesting. Only one thing is awry: the women eat greedily. The
prettiest of them (and whether they take wine or not) masticate with a
primitive eagerness and _abandon_ that is disgusting.

The late-sitters remain until eleven over their wine and cigarettes,
and then adjourn to the courtyard and sit and call for coffee and
liqueurs. If they move before midnight, it's unusual. The courtyard
resounds until the small-hours have crept on. And in those hours the
maids on duty are busy enough answering the call of the chamber-bells
with drinks. You will see them hurrying up and down the lighted
staircases and in and out the rooms of the brilliantly lit front,
muttering (one imagines) the complaint of the frogs: "It may be sport
to you, but it's death to us!" But they never let you think so: at two
in the morning they will smile and rap out repartee with a good-humour
that it's hard to believe feigned. And who's to say that it is? These
people are unfeignedly light-hearted. They satirise us for our moods
and our livers; and tell us (not without justice) we don't know how to
live. By comparison, we're not happy unless we're miserable....

You will catch the youngsters in the courtyard only by dining at six.
You can play with them an hour in the twilight after, and that's a joy
not to be lost, recur as often as it may. You can talk their language,
even if you can't talk French.



CHAPTER III

THE SEINE AT ROUEN


I don't know what the Seine at Rouen is like in times of peace-trade.
They say war has quadrupled its congestion. I well believe it. The
pool is crammed below the Grand Pont--there's nothing above but barge
traffic--with ships disgorging at a frenzied rate at the uneven cobbled
quays.

One can imagine the port lazing along before the War in the informal
and leisurely way that is French. The French enjoy living. They are
industrious enough for that. But they don't take their work hardly
nor continuously. They take it in chunks. It gets done. But there is
no sort of inflexible determination in their method. The Egyptians,
too, have not continuity, but with them the work does _not_ get done.
Both peoples work sporadically. But the Egyptian takes his chunk of
work because he has to; the Frenchman because he likes it. That is the
difference. The Egyptian is not industrious. The French like work, and
therefore take it in tastes, never hogging it. They like to get the
flavour of work. The Englishman who eats it down misses all that, and
is commiserated by the French for the desecrating greed with which he
attacks his task.

So you can envisage the quay in peace-time: the unsystematic and
picturesque dumping of merchandise in the open quays, and the hum of
leisured talk; the additions to the acres of wine-barrels under the
elms beyond, and the subtractions from them; and the rich fruitiness
of the _bon arome_ soaking out of those casks. You get it now if you
walk amongst them: walk through the shadowed wine-store on a hot day,
and the odour hanging beneath the trees is a refreshment in itself.
But in these days the lading and the discharge of the wine-ships is
done feverishly and raucously, and too hurriedly for any attempt at
arranging them on shore. The wine-ship lies there with the stuff piled
monstrously on every yard of her deck, and it's being slung off as fast
as may be. It's the only drink of the French soldier; there's as much
urgency for its transit as for the off-loading of English supplies.
Huge tanks stand as waggons on the adjoining railway and they wait to
be filled, and so the _vin ordinaire_ goes up in bulk that exceeds the
content of many score of barrels.

The same urgency hurries off supplies from the ships. The Admiralty
is shouting continuously for the completion of discharge. No ship, at
this time, lies there at her ease. She fairly groans and creeks in
travail of discharge. It proceeds as vigorously at night, under the
flares, as by day. Hordes of labour battalions are handling it into
the store-hangars, or into the waiting supply-trams, or into lorries.
The parti-coloured French are trundling the wine-barrels hither and
thither for store or for despatch. The rattle of cranes, the panting
of lorries, the scream and rumble of trains, the shouting of orders,
are deafening and incessant. Supply-ships, timber-ships, coal-ships,
wine-ships, ammunition-ships, petrol-ships, are strung down-stream in
a deafening queue. The base is a distractingly busy place.

Over against all that is the quiet domesticity of the barges. War
doesn't hurry them, nor sap at the foundations of their family life.
They'll sleep along the river, happen what may. General Joffre's
professed aspiration _après la guerre_ is to retire to a Seine barge,
and finish there. He could choose nothing in sharper contrast with the
turmoil of war. The reaction from Generalship could not well be borne
in more complementary circumstances. The comfortable somnolence of a
Seine barge is invincible. They are not yet requisitioned for the base
purposes of war. They are a thing apart, and therefore have no call for
busyness.

They are enormously long, and have a grace of outline unexampled in the
world of barges. A Thames barge is stumpy and crude beside them. There
is scope in their length for grace of line. Look down on them from the
heights of Bonsecours, packed orderly amongst the Seine islands. Look
at them in queue dreaming along in the wake of some fussy tug; either
way you'll get their nobility of contour.

Each is a microcosm. They are self-contained as to family, burden,
poultry, pony, cat and dog, rabbit-pen, and garden. The mother and
daughter and the small boys all take a hand in pushing on the business
of _le père_. In fact, it is they who do the thing: he lounges and
smokes and directs the policy. In the waist of the ship is the stable,
with a pony that usually is white, and perhaps a cow, and the pens of
hens, and the basketed rabbit-hutch. The boys pursue the dog round
the potted plants when there's no work. In the same circumstances
the mother and daughters sun themselves on the hatches. Children
are born there to a lifelong sojourn in the craft. There they get
their schooling, and there, until adolescence, they acquire their
knowledge of the world. There probably is scope for a science of
barge-psychology. Can one in reason expect a world war to intrude far
into the life of a Seine barge? Hardly that.

They hold as much as a small ship; the journey to Paris is far and
slow. They are cut off from the world almost as effectually as a
marooned Swiss Family Robinson.

Hospital ships berth below the bridge, and are filled from the motor
ambulances with an awful celerity. You may always know when an
ambulance train is at the Rive Gauche Gare by the long procession of
Red Cross motors streaming from the station over the Grand Pont to
the hospital berth, and by the wide-eyed crowd making a slow-swaying
cordon round the military police to watch the procession of stretchers
ascending the gangways. The Red Cross ship may get her complement in
two or three hours. Then she turns business-like and heads down-stream
for _le Havre_. And then!--_Blighty_, for comfort and fitting
alimentation, and _home_ for the tortured.

The Seine is a tragic stream at Rouen. Corpses are fished up daily.
Parisian suicides float down and are intercepted, and dogs and other
beasts seem to get drowned in plenty. This is hard on so fair and happy
a city. Why can't Paris look after her own weary-of-breath?

The Ile la Croix stands at the heart of the city. The Pont Corneille
rests across it. The island is a town in itself, with theatres,
churches, factories, baths, and thick residential quarters, and groves,
and well-defined streets. Here is another little world in itself,
consistent with the barges that lie about it.

All over the island--and, still more ubiquitously, all over the
quay-sides--are girls and women hawking fruit and cakes and chocolate.
The girls are pretty. They better custom by fooling English Tommies to
the top of their bent by that French-Arcadian intersexual frankness
of discourse and gesture of which English girls know so little,
and which Tommy adores so ardently and furtively. This gives the
right to put up the price. Tommy, in this land of vines, and in the
season--finds himself paying her two francs a pound for grapes. "_Très
cher aujourd'hui, Monsieur!_"--"_Mais oui, m'selle--voulez-vous
m'embrasser?_"--."_Nothin' doin', ole shap!_" ... These girls are
quick-brained, as alertful in mind as you could expect by their
well-moulded features and their lithe, straight bodies. There is no
insistence, in France, upon the ugly vulgarism of rotundity in women
and girls. The girls of France spell, in their bodies, anything but
sombreness in spirit or clumsiness in brain. They have never been out
of Rouen, but they fling repartee in Arabic at Australians as though
they had lived in Cairo. Their only source of such an accomplishment is
the Australian soldier himself, and the persistence of Arabic with him.
And he does not go out of his way to teach anyone. He learns French
with halting slowness, even when some Rouennaise is making efforts
to teach him. But these girls take up his English and his incidental
Arabic in their swift and light mental stride.



CHAPTER IV

ROUEN _REVUE_


Except when Lena Ashwell comes with her English concert-party, evening
entertainments--that is, public entertainments--in Rouen are limited
by some cinemas and two theatres that stage _revue_. The cinemas are
like all other cinemas, except that the humour is broader and sexual
intrigue is shown in a more fleshly and passionate form. The audience
differs from an English, not in that flirtation is more fierce, but
in the running fire of comment directed at the film, and from the way
in which crises in the plot are hailed. Everyone smokes who has the
habit. The women who do not, masticate noisily at sweets. The girls
in the front row of stalls playfully pull the hair of the orchestra,
specialising in the 'cello: his deep, detached notes amuse them. This
is their way of showing he attracts their attention. The conductor is
the pianist too. In his dual capacity he displays astounding resource
and agility. The combination of these functions is diverting, even in
an Englishman. The films present a preponderance of carnal domestic
problems.

_Revue_ is another story. An Englishman has no right to attend French
_revue_ without being prepared to discount it at a rate governed by
the difference between the national temperaments. Where English
_revue_ suggests and insinuates, French explicates the detail. French
insinuates too, on occasion, but with the motive of subtlety as
distinct from that of English furtiveness: the difference between
cleverness and morbidity. All this applies to _amours_, chiefly
between the already-married. French _revue_ goes further, and deals
disgustingly in physiological detail which the English stage declines
to handle even by implication. And the ladies on the stage are
obviously amused by the cruder passages to an unprofessional degree.
They giggle outright. The work on the stage, in fact, is curiously
informal. Dialogue _sotto voce_ in the corners is not make-believe--nor
rehearsed. They carry on a genuine conversation, much of which is
criticism of their colleagues at work, much personal comment on the
advanced rows of the audience. A French company is never afraid to let
you know that, after all, it's only acting you're looking at. English
downrightness would maintain the delusion at all costs.

A lot of improvisation goes on--some by choice, some of necessity.
French versatility flashes out brilliantly here and there with
something that's not in the book; and when a fellow's memory fails
he improvises with convincing readiness. There's no such thing as a
breakdown, though _revue_ here runs for so long a season that actors
might easily be forgiven for growing too stale to improvise. But that
they avert by the habit of improvisation from choice.

When, therefore, there comes a "turn" which purports to be classical
poses, the effect is blasphemous rather than ludicrous. The spectacle
of thick-painted whores clutching clumsily at the spirit of Greek
motion and Greek suspension-of-motion, with their lewd simperings and
vulgar disproportion of bust, is repellent. At the critical moment
someone giggles in the wings and the goddess baulks. The orchestra
swells to cover the gaping _hiatus_ which no improvisation can bridge.
The Salome-dance and the _ballet_ are quite other things. They perform
them here to perfection. Their temperament provides the _abandon_
without which such turns fall stodgy. But classical poses? No!--hardly
that!

A French audience in war-time clamours for a military turn or two;
and gets them. There's a scene from the trenches presented with a
convincing sort of realism--from the death of a comrade to the exchange
of fornicatory ribaldries and the pursuit of vermin. Asphyxiation is
effected, not by the enemy, but by the corporal's removing his boots.
The humour is broad and killing. Shrieking applause drowns half the
repartee. Judged by the accompanying gesture, some obviously good
things are missed. The delivery of the mail under the parapet, and its
perusal, leave little doubt as to the proper function of _la bonne
marraine_--the fair unknown correspondent acquired by advertisement.

Then there is a turn military which discloses the nature of the
friendly encounters between the _Poilu_ and the girls of the village
through which he is passing.

There is some really good singing. And there is always a song in
English, delivered with a naïve crudity of pronunciation, to which the
English soldiers respond at the chorus with allied fervour. "The Only
Girl," "Who were you with Last Night?" "Here we are Again," are the
favourites.

The ushers are girls. They know how to keep in order the crowd of lewd
French youths in spirited attire who affect the pit, who, without
restraint, would make the place unbearable. Mostly the ushers do it
with their tongues; where these weapons fail they cuff them, and cuff
them hard--no mere show of violence. The French termagant is a fearsome
creature. She's here, and she's conducting on the tram-cars. There she
is a match for any man. No lout is free to dispute her authority. She
always emerges from a battle of words master of the situation. _Master_
is the word. The conductors are the only girls (though mostly women) in
Rouen who are not pretty as a class. Individuals are, but the class is
unsexed, growing moustaches which are often more than incipient. The
only womanly thing about them is their black dress and perky, red-edged
cap. They give the impression that they would do well in the trenches.
The theatre ushers--who are "chuckers-out" too--are less masculine
and less plain-featured. The management chooses them with half an eye
to feature, with a regard chiefly to physical strength. The tramways
manager lays no store by looks. Why should he? Good looks don't draw
custom on the cars. But he does ensure that they shall be able to take
care of themselves, and "boss" the vehicle.



CHAPTER V

LA BOUILLE


The steamer leaves the Quai de Paris every afternoon at two. Most
days it is crowded. The War does not hinder women and the ineligible
and _les blessés_ from taking their pleasure down the lovely Seine.
Why should it? People should in war-time look to the efficiency of
civilians as well as of soldiers. It is as profitable, to this end,
that the Seine pleasure-boats should run as that the London theatres
should keep open under the darkened anti-Zeppelin sky.

It's women who crowd the boat, with their sons and their younger
brothers. There's also a leavening of handsome women who go down
for purposes not considered virtuous by the British. There are many
soldiers--_en permission_, with powers of enjoyment equal to those of
the Tommy who shouts to the liftmaid in the Tube: "Hurry up, miss! I've
only got ten days!" These fellows from the trenches, with their women
hanging upon them, are prepared to compress much into their leave.
There are a few wanting limbs, who are not on leave.

The boat races down the pool of Rouen through the gauntlet of colliers,
timber-ships, supply-ships, multitudinous barges, and swinging cranes.
Once past the island, the commercial river-side is done with, and
the journey proceeds through some of the most exquisitely beautiful
hill-country in Normandy. Rouennaise merchants have grown fat on the
trade of decades of peace, and have built their _maisons_ on the grand
scale on the slopes of the Dieppedale and Roumare Forêts. The forests
clothing this Seine Valley are famed through all Europe for growth and
colour. The _maisons_ lie buried in their depths, thrusting up their
towers and high gables. The slim Seine Islands are thick with groves,
and mansions stand in the midst of them too. And for many miles down
the right bank under the chalk ridge the houses stand trim in their
orchards on the river's brink. Their little summer-houses overlook the
road, seated and cushioned; and the old people sit there looking on the
river, watching the youngsters play and the old men and the soldiers
fishing from the wall.

These banks are castled, too, like the Rhine. The potentates of
Normandy chose the heights of this river basin from all the rest of
Normandy, for reasons that are obvious. Apart from the elevation of
these hills, the beauty of the sites is something to aspire to live
in the midst of. Many of these old seats are crumbling. Some are so
strongly built they will last for ever. All were built by men with some
force of personality. Famous amongst them is the fine old castle of
Robert le Diable, the rough parent of William the Conqueror. It's the
oldest, and half decayed, but its strong points are still reared up
there on the hill-brow.

You move on under these noble hills, broken rarely by a timbered
valley. There is nothing sombre aboard. Whatever the French can or
cannot do, they can talk--gratefully and incessantly. The Norman
tongue, however unintelligible, is incredibly pleasing in the mouths
of its women. It is as free from harshness as the landscape. And the
prattle of the children is music which a river orchestra would defile.

The beautiful La Bouille is the objective of most passengers.
_Untrammelled_ is the word for this little town. The women are fresh;
the men are simple; the houses straggle quaintly and cleanly along the
front; and the white walls and the gables climb in an unsophisticated
fashion up the wooded hills beside the white, winding road. There is a
_Place_ set out by the landing-stage, lined with cafés under the trees.
The river-men in their wide _pantalons_ and loose corduroy blouses sip
wine with their women; their children romp in the centre of the square.
You will be nobly entertained if you do no more than sit there and call
for refreshment to the red-cheeked waitress. But you will probably
not be content without wandering up the hill-road after an hour at
the tables. And if you do not grow envious of the youths who sit on
the bank with company by that road-side, you are more than human. In
Normandy love-making there is nothing embarrassed, but an unforced give
and take that is not traditionally reputed to lie along the path of
true love. Whether this is true love or not (and it probably isn't), it
looks quite as delicious, and it sufficeth them. One wonders whether,
after all, they are due to demand much more. The girl looks at you
frankly from the midst of it, as who should say: "And why do not you,
in this land of sweet sunlight, fulfil, too, the law of your existence?"

From almost every house, as you ascend, some houri smiles a
half-welcome at you and would not be greatly confused or displeased if
you took it for a whole, and, entering, made yourself at home.

At the hilltop you'll come on the old _Maison brûlée_, with a café in
the recess, and much merry company. If you stay there as long as you
want to, you'll miss the last boat to Rouen. So you quit drinking-in
the Seine beauty revelling below you up and down the river basin, and
saunter back to the steamer. All the town is there to see her leave.
Everyone smiles and "waves" and says _Come again_ in no uncertain
pantomime. And all the journey back in the soft evening you say you
will.



SECTION B.--PICARDY AND THE SOMME



CHAPTER I

BEHIND THE LINES--I


The road between ---- and ---- is a fearful and wonderful place in
the swift-closing winter evening. The early winter rains are drifting
gustily across it. The last of the autumn leaves are whirling away. The
far western valley is a gulf of mist; the rain-squalls wash about its
slopes.

The road beneath you, between its low flanks, is a channel of mobile
black slush, too far churned for striation. Ever since the rains began,
two weeks ago, there has been a traffic on it that is continuous--a
traffic that has had to be directed and disentangled at innumerable
stages along its length. So the road surface (it washes over a solid
foundation) is a squirting slime.

The motor-lorry is the vehicle _par excellence_. The wonder is how
it is supplied and maintained at this rate. In most villages is a
tyre-press where its wheels are re-rubbered as often as need be--and
begad! that's often enough to keep a large and noble army of mechanics
hard-worked. Any day you can see the old tyre being prised off and the
new, smooth, full, blue one pushed on. The old is like nothing so much
as a rim of Gruyère cheese, with the perforations clean through to the
rim, everywhere. The question that always occurs is: Did the lorry run
to the last on a tyre like that? The answer is: Yes--had to.

The motor-lorry it is, then, that monopolises the road. There is a
stream of them passing either way which is not quite constant, but is
nearly so. Lorries are almost as thick as the trees that line every
road in France.

Between these honking, rumbling streams, and in the gaps of them, other
traffic goes as it can--that is, Colonel's cars, motor-cycles (there
are almost as many cycles as lorries; but they can pant an intermittent
course through any maze), motor-ambulances, tractors. There are French
Colonels, English Colonels, mere Majors, and even Generals, threading
impatiently through the maze. It is obviously aggravating to them, this
snail's pace. A Colonel likes to tear along, because he is a Colonel.
One is speaking now of a main road between railheads. Put them on a
side-road, where there is nothing in sight but a few ambulances, a
lorry or two, and some cows and women, and they move at a pace that
inspires an adequate respect in all who have to stand aside for their
necks' sake.

But in this horde of beastly lorries what can a Colonel do, more than
glare and gnaw a rain-dewed moustache? There are supply lorries,
ammunition lorries, Flying Corps lorries, road-repairing lorries,
lorries bearing working-parties, freights of German prisoners, lorries
returning empty. Beside, there are always a few 'buses moving troops,
and sometimes, participating in the general _mêlée_, is a troop of
cavalry or a half-mile of artillery limbers or a divisional train of
horse transport--or all three--making an adequate contribution to the
creaking, rattling, lumbering, panting, honking, shouting, cursing,
squelching, bobbing, swaying, dodging throng. A military highroad
in France behind the line, any time in the day or night, baffles
description--especially if it's raining.

Conceive (if you can) what this becomes at ten o'clock at night in an
advanced section of the road where lights would be suicidal. But I
doubt if you can--no, not unless you've been in the whirl of it.

Far the pleasanter journey you'll have by boarding your motor-lorry on
a fine summer morning. The country smiles all about you. _Smile_ is the
only word. You catch the infection of green bank, green plain flecked
with brown and gold stubble and streaked with groves of elm and beech,
poplar and plane: you get infected and rejoice. If you climb the crest
of one of the slopes less gentle than most slopes here, you may look
down on it all--on the double line of trees setting-off here and there
across the plains, up the slopes, down the valleys, marking the roads,
of which trees are the invariable index; at the winding stream, banked
with hop and willow, flowing through a belt of richer greenness: that's
how you know a stream from a height--not by the water, of which you see
nothing for the groves that border it, but by the irregularity of these
plantations (the roads are planted with a deliberate symmetry) and the
deepening in the colour of the lush grasses of the basin.

You'll look down, too, on the villages dropped irregularly along its
course. There's the low roof, the gable, the amorphous mass of greys
and yellows topped by the pyramidal church spire rising grey slate to
its summit. The number of villages you may see in thirty square miles
of the Somme district is amazing. The whole Somme Valley is a mazed
network of roads and streams, with groves and harvest-fields in the
crowding interstices, the whole teeming with grey villages. This is the
character of the country; and very lovely it is.

From your hilltop you'll see, perhaps, a bombing-school at play in
the valley--the line of murderous, irregular bursts in their white,
vapourish smoke, all forced into the extremity of unnaturalness by the
deep colour of the wood behind.

In June the depth of the colour in this French country gave the sky
itself a depth of colour not known in Australia. The cumulus resting on
the sky-line would be arresting in its contrast with wood and pasture,
and the blue of the gaps above it heightened too. Sometimes the days
were clouded in the vault, but with a clear horizon; then you would get
a kind of rich opalescence, the sunlight shut out above deflected and
concentrated in the glowing horizon, its streaks of colour intensified
fourfold by the depth of green in the landscape. Some such middle
afternoons I never shall forget.

Upon the less frequented roads civilian traffic is frequent. It's
mostly country-women in carts with pigs or oxen behind or with produce
(or merchandise) for a village market. The village markets for a whole
district are conducted by a sort of mobile column of vendors. They
move (under a pass issued from the _gendarmerie_) from village to
village in a species of caravan. Every village has a set market-day;
the vendors move in agreement with it. They sell under booths on
the pavements--sell fabrics, fruit, vegetables, fish, drapery, and
clothing; and at some corner agreed upon they have the cattle market,
with all the beasts tethered by a rope from horns to knee.

Approaching a village which is "holding" its market, you'll meet these
beasts being driven in gangs, united in sixes and sevens by a rope
connecting their horns. They are almost all conducted by women and
boys. The boys are incredibly cruel to them, not only _en route_, but
at the market-place.

It's not the women and girls conducting the market cattle who abuse
them. They (and those in the market wagons) give you a smile and "_Bon
jour, m'sieur_." There is a charm about this French usage of looking
you in the eye and giving you a frank smile and a cheerful _Good-day_
without ever having met you before.

You cannot go far without traversing some part of a military
highroad--such is the frequency and the height of mobility. Especially
is this so about those railheads adjacent to the line. Troops of
cavalry, infantry, and artillery and horsed transport crowd French
routes, even to the exclusion of the motor-lorry. For miles you may
see nothing but a sea of yellow, bobbing, wash-basin trench-helmets.
Unlovely they are, but useful. In such parts, too, the motor-'buses
for rushing up reinforcements prevail. They come in long, swaying
processions, filled with grinning warriors, who exchange repartee
between themselves and the freight of other 'buses, and spend a lot of
time in gnawing biscuit and jam. They gesticulate with these morsels.

The 'buses are just such as you see in the Strand, except for colour,
which here is, of course, a dingy khaki. Above and within, when they
are stuffed, they have an enormously useful carrying capacity.

At some stages of a route (and at very frequent stages) you pass a
lorry-park, in the vicinity of which you are ordered to reduce the
pace. There are whole battalions of lorries laagered and parked--miles
of them--lining the main roads, lining the side-roads, lined in the
fields; hordes of them radiating from the H.Q. at the main road. They
are splashed and streaked and pied with colour, like Jacob's ewes,
to baffle aircraft. They resemble, indeed, the streaked cruisers off
Anzac. Some columns have other decorations. You'll pass, for instance,
a Dickens convoy: the lorries are named from the novels--Sarah Gamp
preceding Mr. Pickwick, with Little Nell panting in the rear; Bill
Sykes, Scrooge, and the rest of them--with (in rare cases) crude
attempts at illustration by portraiture.

The fleets of lorries give a sense of efficiency and mobility--even of
dignity--as they stand ranked there.

Casualty clearing stations are very frequent indeed in these advanced
posts. With a curious appearance of contradictoriness, their marquees
are streaked and splashed against aircraft, but here and there bear an
enormous Red Cross glaring an appeal at the heavens. The language of
all this is: "We're hospital, and you know it from these outward and
visible signs. But if you're going to be frightful, we'll make it as
hard as we can for you to hit." ... Over the road is the burial-ground,
significantly full.

Mostly these hospitals are on a railway-line. Some are not. From the
latter the stream of motor-ambulances is continuous at certain seasons.
There are Sisters in these advanced stations; they are little more
than dressing stations, and more than seldom they are shelled. It's
no joke for women; they do not blench. There have been "honours and
rewards" made them for continuing to dress cases when suffering wounds
themselves.

And who shall describe the strafings suffered by some of the
advanced railheads? Shelling of clearing stations may be more or
less accidental, but railheads are good game and are shelled very
deliberately and very thoroughly. I visited one afternoon a railhead
supply depôt that had been shelled from five to nine that morning. The
havoc was good ground for self-congratulation by the enemy batteries
that caused it. Nine-inch shell for four hours, if well observed by
those who deliver it, can do great things. There were shell-holes all
over the station yard--lines ripped up, trucks blown to splinters,
supply stacks scattered to the fields, petrol dump smouldering,
station-house battered. This is horribly disorganising. Only one thing
is worse, of that kind: the strafing of a railway junction by bombs.
This is obstructive, and isolating almost beyond retrieve.

The villages about such stations suffer seriously. They bear the marks
about the house walls. Villages adjacent to batteries--apart from
railheads--get it even worse. Generally they lie behind a wood which
conceals our heavy artillery.

At any junction along a military road you are impressed by the
usefulness of the military police. They stand there directing the
traffic by pantomime, just as in London. Their word is law from which
there is no appeal. If a driver grows argumentative it is always
the worse for him. District A.P.M.'s will allow no dispute of the
directions of their minions. You must wait for their instructions
and obey them very exactly. If they tell you to wait you dare not
budge; if you do, there's your number glaring on your bonnet, and
your goose is cooked. The military police are all-powerful on the
road, and proportionately autocratic. A sergeant will step into a
stretch of clear rural road and address the driver: "What limit is on
your speed?"--"Six miles."--"My instructions to you are to go much
slower."--"Why" (irritably), "what am I going now?"--"Never mind that"
(with a conclusive gesture); "I've timed you from the last post, and
you're too fast. I'm not making a case of it, but you go slower. Hear?"
And this monument of British administrative exactitude walks off, after
saluting perfunctorily (he gives you no loophole), and throws you
permission to go on and behave.

You proceed, with the guns belching over the ridge, the observation
balloons overhanging the slope silently spotting and sending down
cool and deadly mathematical messages. The 'planes drone above; the
multitudinous machinery of war creaks and rumbles down the road; the
landscape lies around you incongruously quiet and lovely.



CHAPTER II

BEHIND THE LINES--II


The lines of communication one can expect to be trailed with interest.
There the strings are being pulled--though that is a pitiable figure.
It is more than a rehearsal for the soul-shaking drama enacting on
the Front; but it is as full of interest as orchestral rehearsal is
more interesting than the performance _coram publico_. Rehearsal in
orchestra shows the final performance in the making: here you see the
Somme Battle in the making. A French town that is within seven miles
of the guns, and is also the Headquarters of the ----th Army, unites
the ordered busyness of the base with the fevered activity of the
second line. It slumbers not nor sleeps. The stream and the screech and
roar of trains is intense and incessant. There is no more appreciable
interval between troop-trains, supply-trains, ammunition-trains,
rumbling through than there is between the decipherable belchings
of the guns over the north-east ridge. The buzz of 'planes is as
unintermittent as either. The Army Headquarters in the Hôtel de
Ville is as strident a centre by night as by day. "The sea is in the
broad, the narrow, streets, ebbing and flowing." These words recur by
suggestion with a peculiar insistence. It is the flood military; and
to this peaceful pastoral town it is as foreign and as ubiquitous as
an encroaching sea. The Hôtel de Ville is the centre of a wide area
of civil buildings commandeered for its purposes by Headquarters.
This sometime produce-store is now "Reports Office"; that hotel is
"Signals"; a private _maison_ adjoining is for "Despatch-Riders."
All civilian and pedestrian traffic stands aside for the horde of
despatch-riders and their motor-cycles. The cars of the Staff whirl
through the crowded streets with a licence which takes account of
nothing but their objective. Mounted officers are trooping day and
night.

More significant than all this is the unending stream of
motor-ambulances. They transport from the dressing stations behind the
line to the colony of casualty clearing-stations here; they transfer
from them to the ambulance-trains; and what these cannot take they pant
away with gently to the nearest base. You may stand on the upreared
Citadelle ramparts any night and watch these long processions of pain
throbbing quietly down the sloping road from ---- into the town. And
simultaneously you will see another column climbing the road to ---- at
the other side. The head lights make a long concurrent brilliance, like
the ray of a searchlight.

An advanced C.C.S. behind the line sees a constant ebb and flow.
Jaded Sisters will hear with a sense of relief the order to evacuate,
glimpsing a respite, however brief. But before the evacuation is
completed a causal connection is evident between the order and an
attack at dawn on the --st instant, and all its ghastly fruits. And
whilst the last of the old maimed are being put gently aboard, the
new-comers, stained with mud and blood, are being laid in the still
warm beds. There is no time for orderliness here. Life for the Sisters
is one fevered and sporadic attempt at alleviation--more than an
attempt: the relief is accomplished, but at a cost to the workers which
leaves its index on feature and figure.

All this is in piteous contrast with the healing peacefulness of the
country-side. If you climb the low ridge behind the town any evening
you can see the flap-flap of the gun-flashes like a disorganised
Aurora. And if you stay till midnight you'll see it intensify into a
glowing wall. So gentle is the landscape immediately about you that
you can conceive what it would be without that murderous wall of fire
and that portentous heart-shaking thunder. This is war, relentless and
insatiable.

The days open dewy and crisp with the first touch of winter's severity,
before his tooth is keen. The first breath of a French September
morning is elating. The harvest is just reaped and cocked, and stands
in its brown and yellow stubble. The head of a slope will give you
the landscape gently undulating under its succession of woods and
streams and gathered harvest, with frequent villages scattered down the
valleys and straggling up the slopes. Over all this you look away to
the captive balloons depending over the line spotting for the belching
guns; and the song of the little birds that the distant guns cannot
quench is swallowed in the buzz of the aircraft engines of a flight
of scouters setting off on patrol; to-morrow it will be the whirr of
a squadron of battle-'planes tearing through the upper distance on a
raid. And any morning the air above you is flecked with the puffs of
missiles sent hurtling after a Fokker out of its proper territory. As
the peaceful evening settles down you will see a whole school of our
craft coming home to roost at ----: eighteen to twenty, like a flock
of rooks settling at the end of the day. The _Angelus_ ringing in the
belfry of the village _Église_ is drowned in the hum.

The little wayside Calvaries are daily smothered in the dust of
motor-lorries. Peaceful French domesticity makes an attempt to live
its life in the welter of trains and 'planes, tractors and lorries,
cars and cycles, horse and foot. It will get it lived _après la
guerre_--not before. The children of the villages do not play much;
they gaze open-mouthed and wide-eyed at the incessant train of troops
and strident vehicles. Unless the War finishes soon, they will have
forgotten how to play. The village estaminet is no longer the haunt of
the light-hearted, light-speaking, wine-sipping French _paysan_; it
is overcrowded with noisy, sweaty Tommies who have no abiding city,
demanding drink. The air of it reeks. The girls are too busy for
repartee; they have time only for feverish serving.

Passenger trains are rarely to be seen--traffic _militaire_ by day and
by night. Rural domestic journeys on the _chemin de fer_ are over and
gone. It is supplies or troops or guns; a frantic railway staff and a
frenzied _chef de gare_ who has forgotten what smooth and intermittent
traffic on his line is like.



CHAPTER III

C.C.S.


The ----th C.C.S. claims to be the hospital farthest advanced on the
Somme. The claim is justified. Its grounds are lit at night by the
gun-flashes. The discharge of our own heavies rattles the bottles in
its dispensary and makes its canvas tremble. Sleep is sometimes driven
from the eyes of its patients, not by pain, but by the thunder of
bombardment. Convoys from the dressing stations have but a short run.
The wounded arrive with the trench-mud wet upon them. Clearing them up
is quick, if filthy, work, and in clearing them up is engaged a small
battalion of orderlies.

The whole hospital is under canvas, except the operating-theatre, which
is a hut, hermetically sealed, as it were, and heated to a working
temperature--and, incidentally, an even temperature--by some ingenious
device. Surgery cannot get done with numbed hands. Yes--and the
officers' ward is a hut, to deepen the great gulf fixed between Tommy
and his officer, even when they both are in mortal pain. The difference
in the degrees of comfort between a marquee and a hut, in the Somme
winter, is incredible. Unhappily, too, in these winter months there is
a horrible shortage of coal and paraffin. This tells again in favour
of the hut. The officers' hut is as warm as your civilian sitting-room,
and wellnigh as comfortably furnished. No ingenuity could make it
possible to say this of a marquee.

But it is only the wounded officers who are comfortable. The Medical
Officers freeze and soak in bell-tents. You'll see the batmen drying
their blankets nightly at the mess-fire before their "bosses" go to
rest. No artificial heating is possible in these tents, because there
is no fuel available for those who are well. M.O.'s retire after an
all-night bout in the theatre to their clammy beds, and sleep from
exhaustion; and for no other reason. They wake, and shiver into dewy
clothes. They shiver through their meals in the biting mess-tent,
and they plod through the sea of slush that surrounds the wards
incessantly, now that the winter has set in. For the ground is never
dry. When it's not raining (which is seldom) it's snowing--and snowing
good and hard, as a rule, in fat flakes as big as carnations.

But they're a cheerful mess, with work enough to save them from
dwelling overmuch on the discomforts of the Somme winter. There
are twenty of them. The Colonel is a Regular, with long years of
Indian service behind him, whose favourite table topics are big-game
and economic problems--particularly those hypothetical economic
difficulties which are likely to confront us after this war. His
customary opponent is Padré Thomas, the Roman Catholic Chaplain, who
took a double-first at Oxford and was one time an Eton master. He
receives weekly from a favourite nephew, reading for matriculation,
Latin prose exercises, the merits of which he discusses with those
members of the mess whose classical scholarship war has not quite
obliterated.

There is Wallace, the X-ray expert, whose chief topic is the shortage
of paraffin, lacking which his apparatus cannot carry-on. He's a
Scotchman who once graduated in Arts. He is chief consulting specialist
with the Chaplain on the merits of his nephew's prose composition.

The Anglican padré is a raw-boned Scot (six-feet four) who has lived
mostly in Russia and Germany. He talks a great deal of vodka and the
hoggishness of German manners. "What a treat it would be," he says,
"to march into Berlin with the pipes playing, go through to meet the
Russians on the other side, and have a foregathering! That night I
should cast away _all_ my ecclesiastical badges!"

He preaches to the camp of German prisoners close by with a grace that
is not altogether good. He cannot abide Germans. One envisages him as
delivering them fire-and-brimstone discourses and calling them weekly
to repentance.

The quietest members of the mess are the surgical specialists, P----
and R----. They are also the hardest worked and the most irregular at
meals. It is rarely that they are taking their soup before the others
have finished. This is perhaps a good thing, in the light of their
frank physiological discussion at table of cases just disposed of in
the theatre. On taking-in day they frequently do not come to table at
all. I doubt whether they eat; if they do, it is a snack between cases
in the _abattoir_. The hospital takes in and evacuates on alternate
days. Theatre cases must be done at once, for it may be necessary
to evacuate them to the base on the following day; it is, in fact,
necessary, unless they are unable to bear transportation, and many are
too critical for that--head cases, spinal cases, and the like. Cases
that suffer greatly are visited with the merciful hypodermic before
they start on their jolting journey in the ambulance-train. Not that
A.T.'s are rough: they're amazingly smooth. But however smooth, they
are agonising to the man whose nerves are lacerated and exposed, or
into whose tissue the scalpel has cut deep.

The A.T. draws into an improvised siding adjacent to the wards. There
is no question of mechanical transport to the train. It is the practice
to establish C.C.S.'s beside a railway, where evacuation during a push
can be facile and expeditious.

P---- and R----, the men of few words, but of great and bloody deeds,
have operated in some degree or other on wellnigh every case that
boards the ambulance-train.

Added to the shortages in fuel which hit the wounded so hard is
that other present hardship: the congestion on railways. As soon
as an A.T. is wired as having left the Army garage at ----, such
preparations must be made as will ensure that the wounded will be
ready to board her immediately on her arrival. They must be waiting
in the evacuation tents by the siding before the minimum time of her
arrival. But notwithstanding regulations which provide that A.T.'s
shall take precedence over all other railway-traffic whatsoever, that
requisitioned is frequently four or five hours late--such is the
present state of the roads. That means four hours of frozen agony in
the evacuation tents. Fuel cannot be spared for warming them, when it
is more than the wards can do to get warmed. A shivering padré moves
round amongst them administering comfort which makes no pretence at
being spiritual, except in a punning sense. That's one thing very few
padrés in the war-zone have been obtuse enough not to learn: that
attempts at spiritual consolation may sometimes be inopportune. Every
padré knows the full war-value of creature-comforts--even for his
spiritual ends. So he moves about the evacuation tent ministering to
the body rather than to the soul.

The surgical specialists have long since ceased to have connection with
this stage of their patients' movements basewards. They are in the
theatre making ready more for the journey down.

The mess harbours the O.C. of a mobile laboratory. He moves between
the hospitals within the Army testing serums. He wears the peering
aspect of a man accustomed to microscopic examination. All his table
conversation is of an inquiring nature--better, an investigatory
nature--into matters that are quite impersonal. During a whole meal
he will talk of nothing but the Northern Territory of Australia or
the structure of the Great Barrier Reef on the Queensland coast. If
he's talking of the Reef he deals in a series of questions and in
an examination of your answers thereto, until he has built up for
himself--with the aid of diagrams contrived with table implements and
slabs of bread--an accurate notion of the surface structure. He's
as much interested in modern history as in science. One evening he
edified the mess, by arrangement, with an hour's discourse on the
causes leading up to the American Civil War. For this he prepared
with academic care. It was curious to see how he could, for an hour,
sustain the interest of the mess in so remote and comparatively
insignificant a struggle, when that mess was stationed in the
heart of the Somme at the height of the push.... His laboratory
walls were decorated with pictures by no means scientific, and yet
physiological. They are extracted from _La Vie Parisienne_, a French
weekly illustrated journal of extraordinary frankness. But in this
man there is nothing lewd. But he has an unusual appreciation of
French cleverness; and that is a faculty alarmingly wanting in the
normal English officer. French drawings, which the English call lewd
are by no means lewd: merely intensely clever. They convey no notion
of lewdness to the French mind. But the English, except in the case
of isolated representatives of that race, will never understand the
French--in other matters than that of art. So great is the gulf of
miscomprehension fixed between the French and English that it becomes
a daily deepening mystery how they could ever have found themselves
Allies. Still more mysterious is it that they should continue so....

These are the men who impress you most in the mess. There's Wallace,
the Scotchman who never says more than he's obliged, but has the tender
heart with his patients. He always trembles when giving the anæsthetic
in critical cases. He calls himself weak-kneed for it, and reviles
himself unmercifully for a womanish fellow (he's intensely masculine);
but he can't help it.

There's Thompson, another Scotchman (the mess is fairly infested with
Scots) who is dental surgeon. His gift is disconcerting repartee, with
which he occasionally routs the C.O.

These are the officers. But what of the Sisters? There are eight
of them. When you have said they are entirely unselfish, you have
included most attributes. That includes an irrepressible spirit that
no continuity of labour can break. It includes gentleness which
familiarity with pain in others does not quench. And it includes a
contempt of personal comfort that must sometimes amaze even themselves
if they ever find time to grow either introspective or retrospective.
They sleep in tents; they lack fuel; they shiver by the hour in damp
beds unless exhaustion drives them to sleep; and they rise in the murky
morning to don sodden garments. They work hard and without intermission
for twelve to sixteen hours--and indefinitely when a "stunt" has
brought the convoys from the line. But none of these things beats them
down.

The theatre Sisters deserve immortalisation. All the qualities of
patience and gentleness, endurance and cheerfulness, seem intensified
in them. They have not the smallest objection to your watching them
work in the theatre; nor have the surgeons. Rather, they encourage you,
and get you to help in a minor way when the place is busy.

It is rarely on receiving-day that four "tables" are not in use
simultaneously. This makes it inevitable that the victims, as they are
brought in and laid out for the anæsthetic, see within six feet sights
not calculated to fortify them. Some smile in hardy fashion; some smile
in a fashion that is not hardy. The abject terror of those wretches out
of whom pain has long since beaten all the fortitude is horrible to
see. What must be the state of that man, made helpless by unassuaged
suffering, who sees the scalpel at work upon a fellow beside him--the
gaping incision; the merciless pruning of the shattered limb; the
hideous bloodiness of the steaming stump at amputation--and hears the
stertorous breathing of the subject and his agonised subconscious
moaning, which has all the infection of terror that actual suffering
would convey?

Yes; this is inevitable. There can be no privacy. Despatch is
everything. Nowhere is rapidity so urgent as in the theatre of a C.C.S.
It means lives. The hideous gas-gangrene forms and suppurates in a
single hour. This is the worst enemy of the field hospital surgeon.
Half an hour's postponement of operation--even less--may mean death.
And in other cases, if the preliminary operation is not performed in
time for the case to move by A.T. for finishing at the base, it may
cost a life equally. The surgeon has not time to fortify his victim by
explanation or exhortation. He is lifted from stretcher to table; the
anæsthetist takes his seat at the head, sprinkles the mask and applies
it; the surgeon moves up (he has already seen the case in ward); the
stertorous breathing begins; the Sister attends and places ready to
his hands what the surgeon requires in swabs and implements; and with
the impressive directness of long and varied experience the incision
is made and the table is in a moment stained. But let there be no
confounding of rapidity with haste, despatch with carelessness. As
much time as is necessary, so much will be given; but not more. Most
striking feature of all is the curiously impersonal and scientific
thoroughness of the surgeon here; this, and the providential faculty
of humour in both surgeons and Sisters in the throes of it all,
without which the tragedy of the place would be overwhelming. The
case is treated with the impersonality (and the persistence) due
to a scientific problem, and as such is wrestled with. Three hours
will be given, if necessary; and sometimes they are. It is a grim
and continuous fight with death, without intermission. But, like any
successful warrior, the surgeon jokes in the midst of it. A smile--even
a gentle guffaw--comes with a strange effect in this place of blood,
but it "saves the situation." This, with the marked impersonality of
the surgeon, can be nothing but reassuring to the potential victim,
waiting his turn on the adjacent table.

One does not realise until he sees it what hard physical labour an
amputation involves, with scalpel and saw; nor how bloodless it can be;
nor how revolting is the warm stink of steaming human flesh suddenly
exposed; nor how interest swamps repulsion as you watch a skull
trephined; nor how utterly strange, for the first time, is the sight
of a man lying there with his intestines drawn forth reposing upon his
navel.

A man can suffer many wounds and still live--one man with multiple
bomb and shell wounds; not a limb untouched; an arm and a leg gone; a
skull trephined; fragments extracted from thigh and chest and shoulder;
the other hand shattered; to say nothing of wounds and bruises and
putrefying sores innumerable. Human endurance and survival can become
incredible.

There are sessions in the theatre at which an orderly is kept almost
busy passing between the M.O.'s, registering, for purposes of record,
the nature of the operation.

"What shall I enter, sir?"

"Appendicitis, acute--abdomen closed," says P----.

"If you had not added _abdomen closed_," says R----, "would one be at
liberty to infer it had been left open?"

"Get your head read!" says P----.... The orderly passes on.

"What's this, sir?"

"Damn you! Can't you see I'm busy?" K---- is boring, with all the
strength of his massive shoulders, into the skull of his case.
Trephining is, literally, hard work; but not that alone. L---- is
cutting, cutting, cutting, at the buttock of the wretch, paring the
hideous gas gangrene as one would pare the rottenness from an apple.
A third surgeon is probing for bomb splinters in rear of the thigh;
and getting them. The man is splintered all over. For one horrible
moment you conceive him as suddenly and treacherously deprived of
unconsciousness, with ---- boring here to the brain membrane, ----
slicing generously at his buttock, and ---- probing relentlessly to the
bone in the gaping incision.

"Well, it certainly looks as though we are doing what we like," says
----. "It _is_ rather bloody; yet the C.O. says the most revolting
operation to watch is that of the removal of a finger-nail."

"If we go much further, he'll drop his subconscious ire upon us," says
----.

"Yes, I suppose his subconsciousness is protesting in blasphemous
silence: '_Pourquoi_'?"

"Stitches, Sister," says ----, at the head. The blood-clot has flowed;
and in a twinkling the triangular exposure of skull is covered by the
stitched scalp.

"He'll be easier," says ----.

And then begins the tabulation of his multiple wounds. They cover half
a page. It's a miracle of symbolism which can suggest all that man has
suffered (and has yet to suffer) in the handwriting of half a page....

"Clear, thank God!" says ----, as Multiple Wounds is borne out
insensible half an hour later. "It's eleven, and I've been here since
the middle of the morning; and I could almost sleep. Good-night,
Sister! I'm off."

So they go to the freezing dampness of their camp stretchers. The
orderlies set about "cleaning up."

But at one they're all called. The railhead, three kilometres off, has
been shelled. A convoy has brought forty casualties. Half of them must
pass through the theatre without delay. So the nerve-jangling work
recommences, and goes on past the murky dawn, beyond the breakfast
hour. It is snowing hard. They are hard-pressed to keep the theatre
warm enough for delicate surgery. To equalise the temperature has
become impossible. But things are as they are, and cannot be bettered;
and there will come an end to this spurt, though how long will be the
respite, who can say? It would be longer if the surgeons were not so
dangerously understaffed. There's ---- on a long-deferred and necessary
leave; there are ---- and ---- who have fallen ill: one through the
overstrain of incessant surgery; the other a victim to his sopping,
inclement tent. The watchword is _Carry on_. There may be assistance
by importation to the staff; on the other hand, there may not. There
will be, if possible; but the pressure is severe all over the Somme
Hospitals during the offensive, and the bases are drained.

The hospital railhead was shelled one afternoon. One may have the
charity to surmise the Hun was shooting at the aerodrome; which stands
seven hundred yards from the hospital; for the shell fell about the
aerodrome rather than in the C.C.S. However that may be, shell did
burst in the hospital, either by accident or design.

The order was to evacuate immediately. The Colonel ordered the Sisters
to enter a car and be transported beyond range. They declined. The
Colonel, a bachelor, not skilled in negotiation with the long-haired
sex, commanded the matron to command them. Matron ordered them to their
tents to prepare to flit. She went to them in ten minutes' time. "Are
you ready?"--"No, Matron; there's a small mutiny brewing here. If the
patients are to go, we're going with them."--"I'm not going; I was just
in the middle of my dressings; I'm going to finish the others."--"They
shan't go without us, Matron!" ... So with a splendid indignation
they disobeyed. The Matron is accustomed to obedience, but she didn't
get it. She went to the Colonel and explained. "Well, damn 'em! the
witches! Let 'em have their way!" The Matron broke into a run. "Take
your flasks and your hypodermics; you can go!"

So they superintended all the removings, attending here and there with
the merciful preliminary syringe; and, when the preliminaries to the
journey were over, jumped up with the car-drivers, and the evacuation
began into a field on the ---- road. Those that could walk, walked; and
some that couldn't well walk had to do so....

They laid them out in rows, by wards. Some were dying. Some died on
the way. Some died in the grass, cut by the bitter wind as they lay
there gazing into the unkindly heaven. The rain came in frozen gusts.
Those still hovering on the border-line were blown and soaked into
death. The groaning of the wounded was hideous. Shattered limbs are
hard to bear in the complete comfort of a civilian hospital. What
is a wounded man to do but die, exposed to the pelting rain of the
Somme winter? Brandy and hot tea and cigarettes brought a transient
consolation: most men were insensible to aid from such fragmentary
comfort. It began to be plain that the risk from shell-fire was not
more dangerous than this from exposure; a return was ordered. Sisters,
doctors, patients, concurred with equal fervour. And so they were taken
back.

The shelling had ceased.

Next morning came the ambulance-train.



CHAPTER IV

THE FOUGHTEN FIELD


I visited the fields of Beaumont-Hamel and Miraumont and Bapaume soon
after they had been abandoned, in the pleasant sunshine of an April
Sabbath afternoon. It was the abomination of desolation I saw--and
felt. Of Beaumont-Hamel there was not a stone left standing, it was
not until I had been told that a village once stood there that I began
to distinguish the powdered rubble from its surroundings. There was
difficulty in doing that, for not only were the buildings demolished,
but their bricks crunched and crumbled.

As we approached the old line from ----, the degrees of demolition
in the villages showed clearly how near they had stood to the field
of fire, and how systematic had been the German bombardment. The
remoter villages showed merely sporadic gaps in the walls--which might
have been the result of accident rather than of purpose--or a church
spire tottering. Nearer villages showed large areas containing not
more than the skeletons of houses. The villages which had been in
occupation--such as Beaumont-Hamel itself--had not one stone left upon
another. The twisted wire straggled through them; the battered trenches
wormed about.

We left the car at Miraumont and walked up the old road overlooking
the village and Grandcourt Wood. They call it a road for the sake
of topography. But did you ever see ring-barked trees standing in
a morass?--that is it, with this difference: that these trees are
branchless. You can conceive nothing more gaunt and desolate than that
colony of splintered trunks standing down in the grassless valley of
pools. The pools are shell-holes, so frequent that they have the aspect
of a morass striated by thin ridges of black mud. The ridges are the
lips of shell-holes.

Miraumont stands down the slope above the wood. It is less completely
ruined than Beaumont-Hamel, but by that the more pathetic to look on.
You can see what it has been: you cannot judge what Beaumont-Hamel may
have been.

As far as you can see in any direction there is no blade of grass,
though the spring has begun, and all the earth untouched by war is
greening. Between ---- and ---- the loveliness of the early spring is
upon the land; the primrose and the violet are starring the grass in
the woods, and all the terraced slopes of the valleys are fair with
the young crop. Here you see nothing but brown clay pocked by shell,
the graceless grey zigzag of the ruined trench, the litter of deserted
arms and equipment and smashed shelter, battered frames of village
dwellings, and the limbless deformity of the splintered woods.

We walked up the ruined road beyond Miraumont. Both sides were thick
with dug-outs. The road had been a kind of shelter between its low
banks. I thought what the traffic on this road must have been when
it was ours and the Germans were entrenched beyond it; how it would
be shelled because it was low and naturally congested with British
traffic; how the dug-outs would be peopled continuously by passers-by
flinging themselves in for a momentary respite when the bursts were
accurate.... The dug-outs were deep and littered with cast-off
great-coats, tunics, scarves, boots; with jam-tins, beef-tins, rusted
bayonets, clips of unused cartridge, battered rifles. It had been
a road for the supply of ammunition to the front line. Its corners
were choked with bombs, shell-case, and small-arm ammunition. In its
excavations were dumps of barbed wire unused. You could infer all the
busyness and congestion, the problem and the cursing of harassed and
supercrowded transport in this road.

We reached the crest of the hill and struck to the left across the old
field. This brought us upon a plateau. There had been more intense
fighting here than on the slopes. There had been rain incessantly,
too. The shell-holes were filled, and they were so frequent that the
landscape resembled nothing so much as a coral reef at low tide. It was
with the risk of slipping in that one made a way along the field at
all. To have fallen in and taken a mouthful of that green liquid would
have meant death. Those pools that were not green were red. Either
colour implied only the degree of putrefaction of the corpses that lay
beneath; but not always beneath. Here protruded a head, there a knee
or a shoulder or a buttock; sometimes a gaunt hand alone outstretched
from the stinking pool. The pools stunk; the ground stunk; the whole
landscape smelt to heaven. My friend had brought, in his wisdom, some
black Burmah cheroots. They were as strong as could be got, but they
could not overwhelm the revolting stink of human putrefaction that
rose all round. One asks what will it be when the spring is advanced
and the pools are dry. One asks, too, when and how this land will be
re-farmed. It is sown with live bomb and "dud" shell. One foresees the
ploughing peasant having the soul blown out of him one spring morning.
It will be long before the sword becomes the ploughshare. In the making
of the _via sacra_, too, will there be many casualties.

Fighting on this plateau must have been hellishly intense and deadly.
The only conceivable cover was the trench and dug-out: no natural mound
nor sheltering bank. The dug-outs were correspondingly deep, burrowing
down into the bowels of the earth. Like pimples on the broad face of
the plateau were machine-gun and artillery emplacements. These had
plainly been built extraordinarily strong, but not strong enough to
stand the direct fire to which they had been exposed inevitably. How
any structure--or any excavation, indeed--withstands the intensity of
modern artillery fire is inconceivable.

The tangles of wire that traversed this high ground were gapped and
contorted. A rifle was wrapped about in the murderous mesh; it had
been grasped by a human hand; beyond was the man to whom it may have
belonged, caught in the same gentle embrace. The steel helmet beneath
the network, the rag of tunic flapping in the breeze from the jags,
were all-expressive. You needed not to be told explicitly of what they
were the symbols.

Near the edge of the plateau was the crater of an exploded mine. It had
been sapped from beneath the brow of the rise. Now it was a pond. The
hideous deep green hue of the water betrayed the full meaning of that
formula: "We exploded a mine and occupied the lip of the crater." Some
of them were still occupying it: others were lying in the foul mouth of
it.

To look on the whole of it--mottled acres, pimples of emplacements,
streak of trench, wall of wire--was to know something of the
hellishness of life here when this area was the field of battle.

We stumbled off the tableland into ground which had been German.
Immediately beneath the crest they had had their howitzer emplacements.
There were battered guns of theirs still there. We nosed down into
their dug-outs, built well, and to a depth that was safe. They had
been artillery dug-outs; the telephone-wires still crept down the
wooden wall beyond the entrance. Below we found hideous dead, some
shattered, as though bombed by an invader; heaps of beer-bottles, too,
and many German novels. You could visualise these fellows having nights
of revelry down there, drinking themselves oblivious to the roar of
the guns above. It was possibly in the height of mirth that we broke
through and bombed them where they reeled below in festivity. One does
not know. This may be maligning them. Possibly they were a temperate
lot, filled with zeal for the Fatherland. These bottles may have been
the moderate collection of months. They may have been bombed beneath
because they had decided to die hard. The facile assumption is far too
common that the German is a drunken brute whose hobby is debauchery.

The area about the gun emplacements was littered with scores of tons of
ammunition, which will probably never be salved. Littered with bombs it
is too, and with trench helmets, and the leather and brass and iron of
equipment. We got many souvenirs here, creeping about like ghouls among
the dead and the heaps of material.

We returned to the main road past the groups of irregular graves, past
the French labour-parties at work upon fresh roads and upon salvage,
back to the skeleton of Miraumont. Then the car swept down behind
Beaumont-Hamel, through the woods to Albert, which we skirted by the
putty factory. The Virgin with her Child looked down, hideously maimed,
from the cathedral spire. We came home through the ridges and the
avenues of Acheux, down the valley of the Authie.



CHAPTER V

AN ADVANCED RAILHEAD


At an advanced railhead one has to contend with other difficulties than
that of the congestion of railway traffic, which is inevitable near the
line. There are the French, who control all the traction. This includes
the shunting: you must not forget the shunting. It's the shunting
that kills. Your pack (_pack_ is the technical term for supply-train)
may arrive at railhead at 5 p.m.; but it may not be in position for
clearance by divisions until midnight. This plays the devil with
divisional transport. You advise them by telephone that their pack will
arrive at railhead at 5: let them get their transport down. Transport
arrives at 4.30, to be "on the safe side"; but it waits impatiently six
and eight and ten hours to clear. Very hard on horses, this; almost
as hard on lorry-drivers, if the division is clearing by mechanical
transport. There is language used by drivers waiting thus for hours in
the snow or the bitter wind. The language of a horse-transport driver
is a very expressive thing; it has a directness that is admirable.

At ---- the transport--and especially the horse transport--got tired
of this system, if system it could be called. They got to the stage
at which they posted an orderly at railhead to watch the shunting of
packs with his own eyes. That orderly was not to move off until he
not only saw the train arrive, but saw it in position too. Not until
he returned to Headquarters with this doubtfully welcome news were the
horses taken from their lines.

It's urgently necessary that packs should be "placed" early, for more
reasons than one. But one is that the men in the line are depending
on a prompt delivery of rations by the divisional transport. If,
therefore, the pack arrives twenty-four hours late (as frequently
it does), it is manifestly undesirable that the French should delay
its clearance ten hours more. Another reason is that if you have
four packs arriving in the day--as many railheads have--your _cour
de gare_ will not accommodate them all for clearance simultaneously;
usually it will not accommodate more than two at once. For yours
are not the only trains whose clearance is urgent: there are
ammunition-trains, stone-trains for road-making, trains of guns and
horses for disembarkation, trains stuffed with ordnance stores and
canteen stores, trains of timber for the R.E.'s. The clearance of any
is needed urgently at any railhead. The term "railhead," by the way, is
interpreted somewhat foggily by the popular mind. There used to be a
notion abroad that it connoted a railway terminus. That is, of course,
not so. It does connote a point in the line convenient for clearance
by divisions. There may be five railheads in eighty miles of line, and
the last of them not a terminus. A railhead, therefore, because it is a
point convenient, is inevitably busy.

If tardiness in despatch from the base or railroad congestion _en
route_ should congest your railhead suddenly, it may be necessary to
indent for fatigue from the corps whose railhead yours is. Usually
it is a night fatigue that must be requisitioned. Conceive the
attitude of the fatigue that marches to railhead at 9 p.m. through
the snow-slush, for eight hours' work. Conceive, also, the ingenuity
with which, during operations, they secrete themselves in the nooks
and crannies of supply-stacks, out of the bitter blast, until the rum
issue is made. Half the energy of the N.C.O.'s is dissipated in keeping
their disgusted mob up to strength. Conceive, too, the appropriation
of "grub" that goes on in the bowels of these supply-stacks, and the
cases of jam and veal-loaf dropped and burst by accident in transit.
All-night fatigues that are borrowed are the very deuce.

The winter-night clearance at railhead goes on in the face of much
difficulty and hardship. The congestion of transport in the yard is
almost impossibly unwieldy: it moves in six-inch mud and in pitch
darkness, except for the flares of the issuers, and except when there
is neither rain nor snow, which is seldom. The cold is bitter and
penetrating, so is the wind. Horses plunge in the darkness; drivers,
loaders, and issuers curse; and to the laymen, who cannot be expected
to see the system which does lie beneath this apparent chaos, it is
miraculous that the clearance gets done at all.

The mistakes occur which are inevitable in the circumstances. The
divisions clear by brigades. One brigade sometimes gets off with the
rum or the fresh vegetable of another. Sometimes this is accidental,
sometimes not. In any case it is a matter for internal adjustment by
the division itself.

The adjustment of packs is a matter of extreme difficulty at the
railhead of a corps whose troops are mobile. Any corps railhead in the
Arras sector in March, 1917, furnished a good example of that. We were
to push at Arras. This meant that reinforcements whose arrival it was
difficult, if not impossible, to forecast, were constantly coming in
and raising the strength of the divisions drawing. It takes three days
for orders on the base increasing the packs to take effect at railhead.
An increase of five thousand in ration strength may be effected at half
a day's notice only. They must be fed. The pack is inadequate to this
extent. The division must be sent to another railhead to complete, or
to a field supply depôt, or to a reserve supply depôt. It may take them
a day to collect their full ration. You immediately wire the base for
an increase in pack. By the time the wire has taken effect at railhead,
the reinforcements (in these mobile days of an advance) may have moved
on beyond Arras; you have all your increase as surplus on your hands.
They must be dumped, and the increase in pack cancelled. It's not
impossible that, the day after you have cancelled it, you will have
need of it for fresh unadvised arrivals.

The thaw restrictions in traffic hit very hard the clearance at
railheads. For seven days during the thaw, such was the parlous
softness of the roads, it was out of the question to permit general
traffic in lorries. All the clearance must be done by horse transport,
which, by comparison with M.T., is damnably slow. It delayed the
clearance of trains by half-days. Divisions which had to trek by G.S.
waggon to other railheads to complete were hard put to it to get their
men in the line fed.

Units which had no horse transport available had been instructed
beforehand to draw thaw and reserve rations to tide them over the
period. They stuck to their quarters, and ate tinned beef and biscuit.

But special dispensations had to be granted for traffic by lorries.
When a coal-train arrived at railhead it was unthinkable to clear
it by H.T. General Service waggons would take a week to clear four
hundred tons of coal. Dispensations had to be granted for other urgent
reasons. The cumulative effect was that of lorry traffic to a dangerous
extent--dangerous because the frost bites so deep that when the thaw
is at its height ruts are two feet deep. It bites down at the soft
foundation beneath the cobble-stones of the village streets; and on
the country roads the subsoil has no such protection as cobbles from
the oppression of loaded lorries. But it was curious to see, in the
villages, the cobbles rising _en masse_ like jelly either flank of
the lorry, or rising like a wave in the wake of the lumbering thing.
Lorries got ditched in the country roads beyond immediate deliverance
by other lorries. Nothing less than a steam tractor could move them. A
convoy of tractors was set aside in each road-area for no other purpose
than to obey calls to the rescue of ditched lorries. Certain roads
were so badly cut that they had to be closed to traffic of any kind:
motor-cycle with side-car that ventured on was bogged. The personnel
of the road-control was increased twenty-fold to check speeds and to
indicate prohibited roads. The worst tracts of the roads in use were so
bad as to be paved with double rows of railway sleepers until the frost
had worked out. Some roads will never recover; they will have to be
closed until remade.

This advanced railhead was so near the line as to be full of interest
on the eve of the April push. It was here you could see the immediate
preparations and the immediate results of the preparatory activity.
The local casualty clearing stations gave good evidence; you could
tell, by watching their convoys, and talking with the wounded, and
observing in the operating-theatre, what was going on. Such significant
events as the growth of fresh C.C.S.'s and the kind of reserves they
were putting-in, were eloquent. Talk with the legion of Flying-Corps
observers who were about railhead was enlightening; so was the nature
of the reserves they were laying up. The bulk and description of the
supply-reserves dumped at railhead for pushing up by lorry-convoy to
Arras told their tale also. Every night a convoy of lorries would
load and move up under cover of the darkness. There was no mistaking
the meaning of such commodities in their freight as chewing-gum and
solidified alcohol. Do not suppose, reader, that chewing-gum is for
mere distraction in the trenches. Neither is solidified alcohol for
consumption by the addicted, but for fuel for Tommies' cookers when
coal and wood are impossible of transport. Commodities such as these
make one visualise a sudden and overwhelming advance. ---- tons of
baled straw were dumped at railhead. This was not for forage, but
to strew the floors of empty returning supply-trains for wounded.
Each C.C.S. in the area had to be prepared to improvise one such
ambulance-train per day when the push was at its height. The handling
of these things makes one abnormally busy; if he gets four-hours' sleep
in twenty-four he is doing famously. But one is never so jaded as not
to be interested in these portentous signs.

Once I went up to Arras on a night lorry. The convoy crept up into
the lip of the salient. The guns flashed close on either flank; the
star-shells lit the road from either side. The reserve dump was in
an old factory in the Rue ----. An enormous dump it was. The Supply
Officer lived next it on a ground-floor. His men burrowed in an
adjacent cellar. He had laid on the floor of the attic above him eight
layers of oats. A direct hit would have asphyxiated him with oats.
His dump was unhappily placed. There were two batteries adjacent.
Whenever there was a raid and the batteries let fly, they were
immediately searched for. In the search his dump was found, on more
than one occasion. There were ugly and recent shell-holes about it. The
off-loading convoy was hit many nights at one point or another. He took
me to the bottom of the road after dark. The scream of shell was so
incessant that it rose to a melancholy intermittent moan.

Next day he took me about the town. Civilians were moving furtively.
They were not used to emerge before night. In any case such shops and
_estaminets_ as remained were prohibited from opening before 7.30 in
the evening. Wonderful!--how the civilians hang on. They have their
property; also, they have the money they can always make from the herds
of troops who make a fleeting sojourn in the place. Apart from the
proprietors of cafés and _estaminets_, they are mostly caretakers who
stay on: caretakers and rich old men with much property who prefer the
chance of being hit to leaving what their industry has amassed over
thirty years of labour....

The German fatigue on the railway was useful, if slow. It was supplied
from the prisoners of war camp near the station. When the thaw was in
progress we lost them, so heavy were the demands upon the camp for
road labour. The O.C. the camp sometimes visited to see what manner
of work they did. He threw light on their domestic behaviour in camp:
"The greediest ----s on earth!" he would say. "If one of them leaves
table for two minutes, his friends have pinched and swallowed his
grub. They steal each other's food daily--and they're fed well enough.
They're a sanctimonious crew, too; most of their post-cards from home
are scriptural, laden with texts and pictorial demonstration of the way
the Lord is with them. The camp is half-filled with religious fanatics;
they sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs when they're free. But
there's not much of the New Testament notion of the brotherhood of man
amongst 'em; they do each other down most damnably!..."

When the Arras advance was imminent their camp was moved farther back
from the line, and we lost them. The Deputy-Assistant-Director of
Labour sent a fatigue of 125 of the halt and the maimed--the P.B.'s;
altogether inadequate.

A Permanent-base man may be incapable of lumping. And even if he is not
incapable, he is usually in a position to say he is--none daring to
make him afraid. P.B. fatigues are highly undesirable.

"Pinching" supplies was by no means unheard of amongst them.
(Amongst whom at all is it unheard-of? Australians themselves are
the arch-appropriators of Army supplies.) But P.B. men do not pinch
with that faculty of vulpine cunning which is clear of detection.
One morning, after an all-night clearance, the A.P.M. found one of
the P.B.'s sneaking back to billet in the cold grey dawn with three
tins of pork and beans, two loaves of bread, six candles, imperfectly
concealed. He promptly put him in the clink. There was a court-martial.
The unhappy fellow got three months. Pinching in the Army should be
done judiciously. It is not a moral crime. Getting caught is. At any
rate, that is an intellectual, if not a moral crime.

I messed with a C.C.S. Most messes of medical officers are interesting
and varied. The Colonel was a Regular--an accessible and companionable
Regular. An Irishman he was, kind of heart and quick of temper; and so
able that it was never dangerous for him to allow his Captains to argue
with him on questions of administration, because he could always rout
them: he was always right. A less able man would have taken risks in
permitting argument on the subject of his administration.

He was the fiercest smoker and the ablest bridge-player I have ever
known. He used to complain bitterly of the standard of bridge played
by the mess in general. He put out his pipe chiefly to eat--to eat
rather than to sleep. He was a hearty, but not a voluptuous, eater.
His appetite was the consequence of genuine cerebration and of hard
walking. He walked, unless hindered by the most inevitable obstacles,
five miles a day--hard, with his two dogs and the Major. He was very
deaf, and very fond of his dogs. They slept in his room, usually (one
or other) on his bed. He slept little. He read and smoked in bed
regularly until about two; was wakened at six; took a pipe (or two)
with his tea before getting up; and sometimes--though rarely--resumed
his reading in bed until eight, or spent a happy hour in earnest
conversation with the dogs before rising.

His officers liked him; the Sisters loved him. To them he was
indulgent. The day before the push began a Sister approached him in his
office. She said that although it was her afternoon off, the Matron
had advised her against tramping, lest a convoy of wounded should
come in suddenly. He said: "My dear, you go."--"And how long may I be
away?"--"Well, you don't go on duty until eight in the morning; as long
as you're back by then, it's good enough. But mind--don't come reeling
in at 8.30 with your hair down your back! That's all I ask." She left,
adoring.

The Major was a mid-Victorian gentleman, with the gentlest manners
and language, except when it came to talk of Germans. He got an acute
attack of _Wanderlust_ soon after I came--felt the call of Arras--and
got command of a field ambulance up in the thick of it. The last I
heard of him was that he was hurrying about the city under a steel
helmet, succouring with his own hand those stricken down in the streets.

A French interpreter was attached to the hospital. He was a man of
forty-five, with the heart of a boy of fifteen. He would sit at the
gramaphone by the hour, playing his favourite music and staring into
vacancy. His favourites were: a minuet of Haydn, Beethoven's Minuet
in G, selections from the 1812 Overture, the Overture to _Mignon_,
and the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy. Everyone "pulled his leg";
everyone liked him--he was so gentle of heart, but so baffling in
repartee. They called him the _Pawkie Duke_, a name that came to him
through his comments when the facetious song of that title in the "St.
Andrew's Song-Book" was being sung. He lived in a hut in hospital. Part
of his duty consisted in mediation between the civilian sick and the
English M.O.'s; for by international agreement they were due to treat
any civilian sick who needed it. I first met Pawkie waiting in the
anteroom of the operating-theatre with a distracted mother whose child
was within under operation for appendicitis. She was a lovely girl of
ten. The mother was weeping anxiously. Pawkie was almost in sympathetic
tears himself. He made excursions of high frequency into the theatre
to report progress to the mother. I went in. He came after, fumbling
nervously with his hands and regarding the surgeons with a gaze of
appeal. He would whisper to the Colonel, who reassured him. He tore
out, colliding with the orderlies who were bearing in another "case."
Seizing madame by the hands, he cried: "_Bien, madame! Elle va bien!
La pauvre petite fille fait de bon progrès. Les chirurgiens-major sont
très adroits. Le Capitaine est le chirurgien-spécialiste. Le Colonel
assiste aussi. Ça ne fait rien, madame!_" And he left madame with the
conviction that nothing could go wrong.

But it was pathetic to see that beautiful child, her fair face
smothered under the mask. At the end, when the wound was stitched, the
surgeon took her up as gently as though she were his own offspring and
carried her to her mother, and so on to the ward. There she stayed two
weeks, tended by him with the affection of an elder brother.

On the eve of the push, during the preparatory and retaliatory
bombardment, the theatre was a ghastly chamber. An abbatoir it was,
five hours after the arrival of the convoys, when the preparation of
the cases for operation had been completed. Five "tables" were in
continuous use. On "taking-in" night the surgeons invariably worked
through to daylight. This is very exhausting, so exhausting that they
never worked continuously. At about two o'clock they adjourned to
the mess for a rest and a meal--a solid meal of bacon and eggs and
coffee. For the push there came reinforcements--_teams_, as they were
called. They amounted to eight fresh surgeons, ten Sisters, and fifty
additional orderlies.

The Colonel called his M.O.'s together in the anteroom the Sabbath
before the attack, and gave them plain words of warning and advice.
In a push they were not to be too elaborate; it would lead to
injustice. Better twelve "abdominals" done roughly but safely than
four exquisitely finished operations. In the former case all twelve
would be rendered safe as far as the base; in the latter, the remaining
eight would probably die on their hands.... The examining officers in
the reception-room must come to a complete agreement with the surgeons
as to what manner of "case" it was imperative to operate upon before
evacuation to the base. There must be waste of neither surgical time
nor surgical energy in operating upon "cases" that would carry to the
base without it--and so on....

Anything one might say of Nursing-Sisters in France must seem
inadequate. The wounded Tommy who has fallen into their hands is making
their qualities known. They work harder than any M.O., and M.O.'s
are hard-worked. Indeed, I defy a man to bear indefinitely the kind
of work they do indefinitely--its nervous strain and its long hours.
The M.O.'s do their examinations and their dressings and pass on;
they are the merest visitors. The Sisters stay on and fight for the
man without cessation, and then see him die. Five and six deaths in
the ward in a night is horribly hard on the Sister in charge of it.
No one but a Sister could do the work she does, in a ward or in the
operating-theatre. It is nonsense to speak of abolishing women from the
medical service; it would be inadequate without them. But their work
will leave its mark upon them for ever. They have not a man's faculty
of detachment.

Because they are so absorbed by their work---as well as for other
feminine reasons--they see the ethics of the struggle less clearly than
a man.

Sisters on service are more prone to depression out of working hours
than are men; which is not amazing. They are more the subjects of
their moods, which is but temperamental too. But in the reaction of
elation after depression they are more gay than any man--even in his
most festive mood after evening mess. They smoke a good deal (and they
deserve it), but not as heavily as their civilian sisters in general,
though in isolated cases they smoke more heavily than any civilian
woman. But no one blames the fair fiends, however false this form of
consolation may be.



CHAPTER VI

ARRAS AFTER THE PUSH


The traffic on the cobbled road to Arras raises a dust--although it is
cobbled. The spring green of the elms that line it is overcast with the
pallor of a man under the anæsthetic. The fresh breeze raises a dust
that sometimes stops a motor cyclist; sometimes it is the multiplicity
of traffic that stops him. His face and hair are as dust-pallid as the
trees.

The push is over. The traffic in and out is as heavy as it could be.
There is no intermission in it. It files past the road control in a
procession in which there are no intervals.

The ingoing traffic is not all military. Incongruously among the
lorries lumber civilian carts stuffed with all the chattels of
returning refugees. One knows not whether it is more pathetic to see
these forlorn French families returning to the desolation of their
homes or flying from it. They will lumber down the flagged streets
lined with houses, rent and torn and overthrown, that were once the
homes of their friends and the shops of their dealers. Here at one
time they promenaded in the quiet Sabbath afternoon sunshine. Now the
pavement is torn with shell-holes and the street is ditched with them
and defaced with half-wrecked barriers. The Grand Place, where once
they congregated for chat in the summer twilight, or sunned themselves
in the winter, is choked with supplies and sweating troops. The troops
are billeted in the half-wrecked houses of every street. The refugees
will drive through to the place of their old homes and see the spring
greening the trenches which zigzag through their old gardens, and
clothing the splintered trees in their old orchards. This is worse
than fleeing from the wrath of shell to come. But they love their town
so intensely that they rattle through the city gate with an aspect of
melancholy satisfaction.

The push has left its mark all over Arras. There was desolation before
it. But such was its punishment when it was the centre from which we
pushed, that destruction has spread into every street. Intensity is the
quality of the destruction. And it is still going on. Shell are still
screaming in.

The splendid cathedral is an amorphous heap of stone; there are
infrequent pillars and girders that have escaped, and stand gaunt among
the ruins. The Hôtel de Ville retains but a few arches of its beautiful
carved front. Splendid _maisons_ are in ruins. In the streets there
are the stone barricades and entaglements of barbed wire. The _gare_,
as busy as the Amiens _gare_ before the war, and as fine, is rent and
crumbling. The network of lines under its glass roof is grass-grown.
The fine _Place_ before it, where you can envisage the peace traffic
in taxi's and pedestrians, is torn by shell, or by fatigues which have
uprooted the stone for street barricades.

Most people who see for the first time the desolation of such
buildings as the cathedral cry out angrily upon German vandalism,
with the implication that it is because they were fine and stately
that the cathedral and the Hôtel de Ville were battered. This is not
only unjust, but nonsensical. The German has other things to think
of than the deliberate destruction of beautiful buildings because
they are beautiful. What he has to consider is their height and their
potential usefulness as observation-posts. And this is what he does
consider, as we would and do consider such features too. Had we been
bombarding Arras, it is the tall and beautiful cathedral that we would
have shattered first. You may as logically rail against the Germans
for smashing down these potential observation-posts as object to the
prosecution of the War on Sunday....

The old warning notices persist, and have been put up more plain and
frequent: _Assembly-Point_, indicating the cellars of refuge; warnings
against touching unexploded shell; and so forth.

The Town Major, the Railhead Ordnance Officer, the Railway Transport
Officer, the Railhead Supply Officer, the Railhead Salvage Officer--all
are intensely busy, and all well sandbagged. The Salvage officer
is beset by his friends for souvenirs. The R.O.O. is beset by the
quartermasters of battered battalions for fresh equipment. The R.S.O.
is hunted by the hungry. The R.T.O. is at his wits' end to entrain and
detrain men and guns--especially men. The town teems with troops.

The returning refugees trouble none of these officials. They go to the
French Mission for directions as to resettling.

As soon as you emerge on the eastern side of Arras you see the line
from the rising ground. The captive balloons mark it well; they are
so frequent--huge hovering inflations with the tiny observer's basket
dangling, and the streaming pennon half-way down the cable to avert
collision with the patrolling aircraft. For they must be patrolled
well. The Hun has lately the trick of pouncing on them from aloft,
shooting the tracer bullet as he dives. The tracer will put the thing
in flames in the twinkling of an eye. The observer does not wait if
he sees a Hun coming for him. He leaps for it. His parachute harness
is always about his shoulders, and his parachute tucked beneath the
balloon. But even with the Hun making for him, this leap into space is
a fearsome thing. He falls sheer for some seconds before the parachute
is wrenched from its place. Then there is that second of horrible
uncertainty as to whether she will open. And if there is a hitch, his
dive to earth becomes a flash and his breathless body thuds into pulp
below. So ended the man who "made" the song "Gilbert the Filbert." So
end others, failed by their parachute.... Sometimes combustion is so
rapid that the parachute is burnt with the balloon; then he leaps from
the death by fire to death of another sort. Nor does a well-released
parachute always let you down lightly. If the wind is strong and
contrary, you may drift five miles and land 'midst Huns. If the wind is
strong and favourable, your pendulic swing beneath the parachute may
land you roughly with wounds and bruises. You may be smashed against
chimneys, torn by trees, dragged through canals, and haled bleeding up
the bank. But if the Lord is with you, you will swing slowly down in
the still air and be landed tenderly in a field of clover.

Sometimes balloons get set afire by lightning. If then the parachute is
saved, the observer is fortunate indeed. Lightning gives rather less
warning to leap than does the flying Hun.

All the country from Arras to the line bears the scars of recent
fighting. A great deal of it bears the marks of German occupation; you
see this in German _Verboten_ signs and in German canteen notices.

The dwellings of the eastern suburbs lie in ruined heaps of brick;
there may be the ground-plan indicated by the low, rugged remnant of
wall. A jagged house-end may still lean there forlornly, with the
branches of the springing trees thrusting through its cracks and the
spring vines trailing through its shell-rents. With the spring upon it,
the whole landscape is more pathetic than in the bareness of winter.
This ruination sorted better with leafless boughs and frozen ground.
The sweet lush grass smiling in the interstices of ruin is hard to
look on. The slender poplar aspiring with tapering grace above the
red and grey wreckage is the more beautiful thereby, but the wreckage
is more hideously pathetic. It would break your heart to see the
pear-tree blossoming blithely in the rubble-strewn area that was once
its orchard. The refugee who returns will know (or perhaps he will not)
that in place of this _débris_ of crunched brick, splintered beam,
twisted iron, convulsed barbed wire, strewn about the trenches and
shell-holes of his property, was once the ordered quietness of orchard
and garden--his ranks of pear and apple, trim paths, shrubberies, the
gay splashes of flower-colour and carpeted softness of lawn. This
will wring his heart more than the loss of furniture. Though much of
his furniture was heirloom, this little orchard and garden were the
fruit of his own twenty years of loving nurture. This little area he
idealised as his farmed estate, his stately _parc_. Here on Sabbath
evenings he walked down the shrubbed paths with his wife and children,
after returning from the weekly promenade of the streets of Arras. His
children romped on the lawn since they could crawl. Now not only is it
gone, but its associations too--torn by shell, defiled by trenches,
desecrated by the cruel contortions of rusting wire. The zigzagged clay
parapet winds about his well-beloved plots; the ruins of a machine-gun
emplacement lie about the remnant of his summer-house; beef-tins,
jam-tins, and undischarged hand-grenades, are strewn beneath his
splintered shade-trees. The old sweet orchard air is defiled by the
sickening, indefinable stink of a deserted trench; the broken sandbags
lie greening about the turf.

This is all ruin of a sort more or less inevitable. Follow the road
winding down the valley beyond the suburb, and you will see the foul,
deliberate ruin of whole avenues of trees that once lined the route.
You know how these stately elm and beech met overhead for leagues
along the pleasant roads of France; there they lie now naked in the
turf by the road-side, untimely cut down by the steam-saw of the
Hun. He traversed the whole length of this road with that admirable
German thoroughness of his and felled them all across it to bar our
progress. The shattering of Arras Cathedral was necessary; this is mere
expediency, and near to wantonness. Forty years of stately growth lie
there gaunt and sapless. Soon you will see the tender tufts of green
spring from the smooth-cut stump. They have been beautifully cut:
German machinery is unimpeachably efficient. McAndrew's song of steam
is the noble celebration of the triumph of human mechanical genius;
these bleeding stumps are the monument that will testify for half a
century to the blasphemous misapplication of German mechanical skill.
The steam-saw must have worked beautifully. You can conceive the German
N.C.O. in charge of it standing by emitting approval as the stately
beech crashed across the road from the fine, smooth cut--"_Schön!...
Schön!_" ...

This will hurt the French more than other peoples think; they are so
proud of their forestry; they plant with such considerate foresight
into the pleasure that posterity will have in their trees--with such
prevision as to the arrangement of plantations and as to the _tout
ensemble_ of the avenue and the _forêt_ when the trees shall be mature.
A tree is nothing until you have personified it: the French personify
the trees of their private plantations; they are like members of the
_famille_. And such is the State care of forestry that you almost
believe it has personified the State plantations in a collective
sort of way, regarding them almost as a branch of society or of the
nation. The national care of trees is with them a thing analogous to
the administration of orphanages. The German will have reckonings to
make after the War for maimed and murdered trees and for annihilated
orchards, as well as for fallen and deformed Frenchmen....

After the trenches of Anzac, you are overwhelmed in France with the
pathos of the contiguity of trench with dwelling. It is less unnatural
that the unpeopled wilderness of Anzac should be torn by shell and
scarred by trench-line. In France there is a piteous incongruity in
the intimacy of warfare with domesticity. The village that has been
the stronghold is shattered beyond all reviving; and inevitably the
villages of the fighting area have been used as a fleeting shelter
from the fierceness of the tempest of shell. _L'Église_ is a roofless
ruin. _L'Hôtel de Ville_ and _la Marie_ are amorphous masses of jagged
and crumpled wall. The trenches traverse the street and the garden and
the _cour de maison_. The tiny rivulet on the outskirts of the village
has been hailed as a sort of ready-made trench and hastily squared and
fire-stepped. The farm is pocked with shell-holes; the farmhouse is
notoriously open to the heavens and gaping about the estate through its
rent walls. On Anzac only the chalk ridges were scored and the stunted,
uncertain growth uprooted; there were not even trees to maim. Here the
cellars are natural dug-outs in the trench-wall; the _maison_ is the
billet for the reserve battalion; the communication trench ploughs
rudely through the quiet cobbled street. The desecrating contrast cries
from the ground at every turn. The village that used to sleep in the
sun with its pleasant crops about it now sleeps in ashes and ruination
for ever. The battle-lines of Turkey will be effaced and overgrown by
the seasons, but that which was a village in France will never more
know the voices of little children again in its streets, because it has
no streets, and because new villages will be built rather than this
hideousness overturned and effaced and built-upon afresh.

If you walk east an hour from Arras you'll get near enough to Tilloy to
see the shelling of our line. Again Anzac is superseded. Anzac never
saw shell of this size (except from the monitors that bombarded from
the sea); nor did Anzac know bombardment of this intensity, except in
isolated spurts. Here the normal bombardment is intense. This is mere
routine; but it's as fierce as preceded any attack on Gallipoli. What
chance has the individual when modern artillery is at work? Yet the
chance of death cannot be greater than say, one in four; otherwise
there would be no men left. The rank of balloons is spotting; the
'planes are patrolling them; other 'planes are circling over our
batteries--spotting; others are going in squadron over the line--"on
some stunt," as Tommy puts it. Our own guns are speaking all about, so
loud that the noise of crowding transport is altogether drowned: by
them, and by the crack of the German bursts and by the shell-scream.
The transport on this road is not mechanical; we are too near the line
for that.

A German 'plane is being "archied" to the north, and there is a barrage
of "archies" being put up behind it to give our 'planes time to rise to
attack it. Two of them are climbing up to it now over our heads. They
climb very steep. They are very fast 'planes. They are on the level
of the Hun very quickly: they are above it. The barrage has ceased,
because the Hun is trying to risk running through rather than waiting
to fight two Nieuports. But one has intercepted him and is coming for
him in the direction of the line. The other is diving on him from
above. There is the spasmodic rattle of Lewis guns. The Hun is firing
thick on the man rushing him. He has done it, too; for suddenly our man
swerves and banks in a way that is plainly involuntary, and then begins
to fall, banking irregularly. Suddenly the flames begin to spurt from
her body. As suddenly she seems to regain control and dives steep for
earth, flames streaming from the wings and in a comet-tail behind. She
tears down at a horrible angle. Then you know in a moment that this is
not steering, but a nose-dive to death, and that it is controlled by no
pilot. We can hear the roar of flame. She is nearer to us, making for
us. She crashes horribly a hundred yards away and roars and crackles.
The delicate wings and body are gone long before we reach her; there is
only a quiet smouldering amongst the cracked and twisted frame, and the
sickening smell of burnt flesh and of oil-fumes.

The Hun has escaped--at least, we fear he will escape. He and our other
man are small specks in the blue above the German line. They cannot
"archie" them together. Our man turns, and grows. Then he gets it--the
deadly white puffs on every hand of him. But he comes through, and
proceeds to patrol.



SECTION C.--FRENCH PROVINCIAL LIFE



CHAPTER I

A MORNING IN PICARDY


The beginning of spring in Northern France is elating above the month
of May in the Rhône Valley--not because spring in Southern France is
not more beautiful, but because it is less welcome. It is by comparison
that the loveliness of the Picardy spring takes hold upon you: by
comparison with the bitterness of the Picardy winter. You may walk
about Marseilles or Lyon in January without a great-coat; in Arras this
would be the death of you. The frozen mud, the sleet, the snow, the
freezing wind, the lowering sky, and the gaunt woods of Pas de Calais,
are ever with you, from September to April. But by the beginning of May
the leaves are sprouting and the greening of the earth is begun. There
is rain--much of it. But there are sunny days without the bitterness
of wind. There is singing of birds in the early morning. The children
no longer creep along the frozen street to school; they race, and fill
the street with their laughter. The 'planes whose hum fills the air
look less forbidding than they seemed a month ago. In February, in the
darkening heaven, they showed a relentless aspect; they seem to fly
now as though at sport. The old _citadelle_ has lost its grimness; the
ramparts are greening; the shade of blackness taken on by its grey
slate-roofs when the trees were leafless is gone now; the moat that was
a pool of mud is flowering.

The Authie flows below it, full-tided. The margin now is not snow. It
has been snow for long, and half the stream was murky snow-slush. Now
it is clear. The ducks from the château that looks up at the Citadelle
are sporting in it again.

Saint-Pol Road, Amiens Road, Arras Road, are beginning to stand grey
again. In the winter there was nothing but their bare trees to mark
them; they were the colour of the fields. Now both trees and fields
foil them, setting out over the slopes.

It is a joy to walk down the Authie on a spring morning. The Citadelle
towers above you on the left. You are conscious of its graceful
immensity long after you have passed it. The little French cottages
straggle down-stream from the Citadelle base. They are white and grey,
red and white--French in construction from their tiny dormer windows
to the neat little gardens with their bricked-up margins flushed by
the stream. Long tree-lined boulevardes start away from the road which
skirts the river; you can see for many kilometres along their length.
The wine-barrels are piled beneath the plane-trees. The children play
about them. You will come upon a château standing stately in its low
ground fronting the river. And beyond the château, which marks the
border of the town, you are in the richness of the river fields and
the river slopes. Here are the elm-groves, and the clumps of soaring
poplar, and the long lines of stubby willow clipped yearly by the hand
of industry; they sprout long and delicate from the head. _Groseille_
and hop tangle about the bank. Far off on the ridges the white road
traverses under its elms, picking a way among the hedged terraces. You
see no denizens here other than the old men and the girls who are at
work in the fields. From them you will have a cheery "_Bonjour_" and
some shrewd remarks on the weather: "_Ah, oui!--toujours le travail,
m'sieur--toujours! Mais ça ne fait rien: nous sommes contents--oui._"
And so they are.

Then you come to Gezaincourt. That fine old château in its _parc_. The
_parc_ is of many acres, and there are deer in the woods of it, and a
lake where the wild-fowl are.

To return we left the river and struck up into the ridge. We came to
Bretel, midway between Gezaincourt and the Citadelle. We entered a
private _maison_ standing back in its garden; it was, none the less,
marked _café_. Madame received us unprofessionally, inviting into
the kitchen to drink. There she was preparing the dinner. _Je ne
sais pas pourquoi_--but the French are deliciously friendly with the
Australians. They take us into their homes with a readiness that is
elating. They will not do it with the English. But, after all, they
are frank, and we approach them frankly. We are given to domesticity,
and they are intensely domestic. Indeed, the Australian temperament is
far nearer to the French than is the English. The Australian tendency
to the spirit of democracy finds sympathy in the provinces of this
splendid Republic. The national spirit of democracy has its counterpart
(may even have its roots) in the local trend towards communism which,
in France, makes you welcome to enter the _maison_, chatting easily
about its domestic affairs, and, in Australia, makes you welcome in
the house of the country stranger, where you drink and eat without
embarrassment at the hospitable table for the first and last time. The
Australian is guiltless of the habitual industry of the French--of
their intense interest in the detail of their lives and work; but he
has their unconventionality and their lightness of heart and their
hospitality. He understands their communistic way of life in the
provinces. And when a French girl on a country road looks him directly
in the eye for the first time, and with the smile of friendly frankness
gives him a "_Bonjour, m'sieur_," he is no more embarrassed than she.
He meets and returns the greeting with an understanding of which an
Englishman knows nothing. The French and the Australians are allies by
nature. There is nothing amazing in their immediate understanding of
each other. How, on the other hand, the English and the French continue
to do anything in conjunction is a source of continual wonder. Between
their temperaments there is a great gulf fixed.

So Madame takes us direct to the kitchen, where she is basting. She
makes exhaustive inquiries into the Australian methods of cooking. We
explain that the foods are largely the same--but in the mode, _quelle
différence_! She thinks the Australian practice of the hearty breakfast
an extraordinary beginning to the day. The drinking of tea she cannot
away with: wine and _cidre_ are the only fluids to be taken with
food--or without it. She prefers beef to horse; it is in Normandy they
eat so much horse. We express approval of the French universal usage
of butter in cooking: they fry their eggs in butter, roast their meat
with it, fry potatoes in it. She asks what is our substitute for it.
Lard and dripping. "_O, la la! Quel goût!_" And so it is; Australians
know little of the blessings of butter in cookery. She asks if we are
fond of salads. "Up to a point, yes; but not as you are." "_En France,
toujours la salade, m'sieur! Regardez le jardin._" She takes us to the
window and indicates the vegetable-garden with a proud forefinger:
"_Voulez-vous vous promener?_"--"_Oui, madame, avec plaisir._"

"_Madeleine!_" She calls her daughter. Madeleine is a comely girl who
has been at work in the next room. She shakes hands as though she had
known us as boys, and fills up the glasses again before we go out, and
takes one herself with the grace of a lady. For high-bred ease and
graciousness of manner, in fact, you are to go to the _demoiselles_
of the provinces. "_A votre santé, m'sieur._" She raises her glass
and smiles--as well as enunciates--the toast. "_A votre santé,
mademoiselle!_" "_A la paix, madame!_" "_Bonne santé!_"--"_Oui, à la
paix, messieurs!--nécessaire, la paix!_" ...

Madeleine leads the way into the garden. It is clear at once to what
degree the French are addicted to salads: canals of water-cress, fields
of lettuce and radish and celery. Most of the plants in that garden
are potentially plants for a salad. But there are some fine beds of
asparagus, and of these _le père_ is proud. He is obviously pleased
to meet anyone who is interested by his handiwork. It's politic even
to feign an exaggerated interest in every plot; you are rewarded by
the old man's enthusiastic pride: "_Ah, messieurs, le printemps s'est
éveillé! Bon pour le jardin!_" We finish by the rivers of water where
the cress grows. "_Regardez la source_," says Madeleine. She points
to it oozing from the hill-side. They have diverted it and irrigated a
dozen canals each thirty yards long and two wide. There is more cress
there than the whole village could make into salads, you say. But three
housewives come with their bags, buying, and each takes such a generous
load of the _cresson_ that you know the old man has not misjudged his
cultivation.

"_Voulez-vous une botte de cresson, messieurs?_"--"_Oui, s'il vous
plait, m'sieur: merci bien!_" The old fellow places his little bridge
across the canal, cuts a bundle, and binds it from the sheaf of dried
grass at his waist. "_Voilà, messieurs!_"

The purchasers stop far longer than is necessary to talk about the War
and the price of sugar and the scarcity of _charbon_. Conversation is
the provincial hobby, as it is the national hobby. Yet I have never
seen the French mutually bored by conversation--never. Nor are there,
in French conversation, those stodgy gaps which are to be expected in
the conversation of the English, and, still more, of the Australians.
French conversation flows on; _ebbs and flows_ expresses better not
only the knack of apt rejoinder which gives it perfect naturalness, but
also the rhythmic rise and fall of it which makes it pleasant to hear,
even when you don't understand a word. That, and its perfect harmony of
gesture, make it a living thing, with all the interest of a thing that
lives.

We (unnecessarily, again) wander about the garden with Madeleine. She
gives the history of each plot. What interests us is to her a matter
of course: the extraordinary neatness of the garden, the uniformity
of plot, the assiduous exclusion of weeds, the careful demarcation of
paths, the neatness of the all-surrounding hedge. The French genius for
detail and for industry shows itself nowhere so clearly as in a garden.
They are gardeners born.

On returning to the house, madame insists that we stay to dinner. We
accept without hesitation. _Le père_ comes in and brings the dogs.
Soon we know their history from puppyhood. _Finu_ is morose and
jealous; she has a litter of pups that make her unfriendly. _Koko_ is
a happy chap--always a friend to soldiers, as the old man puts it.
He is a _souvenir_ left by a Captain of artillery. All this is, in
itself, rather uninteresting, but in the way in which it is put it is
absorbing. That, in fact, is the secret of the charm of most French
conversation. In the mouth of an Englishman--such is its trifling
detail--it would be deadly-boring. The French aptness and vividness of
description dresses into beauty the most uninteresting detail.

It soon appears that the whole family are refugees from Arras; have
lived here two years. I told them I had recently visited Arras. This
flooded me with questions. I wish I had known the detailed geography of
Arras better. The narrative of a recent Arras bombardment moved them to
tears. They love their town: they love more than their home. This is
the spirit of the Republic. The Frenchman's affection for his town is
as strong as the Scotchman's for his native heath.

They had brought from Arras all their worldly goods. They took us
to the sitting-room and to the bedroom. Much of the furniture was
heirlooms. Each piece had its age and history. The carved oak wardrobe
was extremely fine; it had belonged to madame's great-grandmother.
Chairs, table-covers, pictures--all were treasured. Here was more
evidence to expose the fallacy that French family life is decaying.
Gentle reader, never believe it. Family history is as sacred in the
provinces as natural affection is strong: which is to say much.

But the typical French family heirloom is antique plate. This takes the
form of china and porcelain embellished with biological and botanical
design. Some of it is very crude and ugly, but dear to the possessor.
Every French _salle à manger_ has a wall-full; they are in the place of
pictures.

The dinner was elaborate and delicious. No French _famille_ is so poor
that it does not dine well: soup, fish with _salade_, veal with _pommes
de terre frites_, fried macaroni with onions, prunes with custard,
coffee and cigars. This--except for the cigars, perhaps--was presumably
a normal meal. And between each course Madeleine descended the _cave_
and brought forth a fresh bottle of _cidre_. And Madeleine's glass was
filled by her parent, with a charming absence of discrimination, as
often as ours--or as her mother's. The colour mounted in her cheeks;
but she did not talk drivel. To generous draughts of wine and _cidre_
had she been accustomed from her youth up. And the youngest French
child will always get as much as Madeleine to drink at table. So the
French are not drunkards.

After lunch came two visitors to talk. They were sisters, friends of
Madeleine. For two years and a half they had been prisoners in a French
town held by the Germans, near Albert, and had been liberated only
a month before by the German evacuation. They told pitiful tales of
German ill-usage, though not of a physiological nature. But constantly
the Boches demanded food and never paid, so that they themselves went
hungry daily. Also, they worked for Germans under compulsion, and never
were paid; and worked very hard. The German soldiers they described
as not unkind, though discourteous, but the officers were invariably
brutal. _Maintenant vous êtes chez nous_ was the German officers'
formula, with its implied threat of violation; which was never
executed, however.

We rose to go, and made to pay. This was smiled at indulgently. "_Au
revoir, messieurs! Bonne chance!_" cried _le père_. "_Quand vous
voudrez_," said Madame. "_Quand vous voudrez_," echoed Madeleine. So we
went--like Christian--on our way rejoicing.



CHAPTER II

THÉRÈSE


I was sitting on a log at the crest of the splendidly high La Bouille
ridge gloating over the Seine Valley. Here, from the grounds of _La
Maison Brûlée_ (now raucous with revellers in the late afternoon) you
have a generous sweep of the basin and of its flanking forest slopes.
A Frenchman and his wife sauntered past with their daughter and took
a seat beyond. The daughter was beautiful, with an air of breeding
that sorted well with the distinguished bearing of the old man and the
well-sustained good looks of her mother. They sat for half an hour, and
as they re-passed on the return mademoiselle said: "How do you like the
view?" in excellent English. This was justification enough for inviting
them to share my log. We talked a long time, mademoiselle and I; the
old people hadn't a word of English. She had had a two years' sojourn
in Birmingham about the age of sixteen, and had acquired good English
ineradicably. She had got caught into Joseph Chamberlain's circle; he
used to call her Sunny Jim. The name sat well upon her: the facetious
aptness of it was striking. She was of the "fire and dew" that make up
the admirable French feminine lightness of spirit-vivacity, frankness,
sunniness, whimsicality, good looks, and litheness of body.

The end of it all was that I was to come down to Sahurs (over the
river) the next Sunday and see their home and get taught some French in
an incidental fashion. There was no manner of doubt of every need of
that.

And there was no manner of hesitancy in accepting such an invitation.
She flashed a smile behind as they left, and I resumed the log, wishing
to-morrow were Sunday, as distinct from Monday. This was a damnable
interval of waiting. As I was repeating this indictment over and over,
watching them disappear into the forest, she waved. I lapsed into a
profane silence, and brooded on the flight of time, and reviewed in
turn all the false allegations of its swiftness I could call to mind.

It was obviously wise to leave the margin of this darkling wood and
get down to the boat. It would never do to miss it, and be driven to
crossing to Sahurs to tell them so. No! that wouldn't do: better catch
the thing and be done with it. So I did; and had a journey of easy
contemplation up to Rouen.

Next Sunday I got a "bike": it can be made to leave earlier than the
boat. And the river-bank is more interesting than the middle-stream.

From Rouen to Sahurs the right bank of the Seine is bulwarked by a
traversing limestone ridge, clothed with forest. But the river-side
is escarped and precipitous, thrusting out its whiteness beneath the
forest crest and, as a foil, casting up the châteaux and splendid
_maisons_ on the river level, with their embracing gardens and orchards.

This rich accumulation of colour--deep forest, gleaming cliff-side, red
roof, grey mellow wall, and blooming garden and orchard, and white
river road--is unforgettable, and perhaps unexcelled. Nothing finer
you'll see in the whole Rhône Valley; and that is a bold saying.

The especial charm of a cycle is that you can stop and look. You can
gaze as long as you like (as long as is consistent with the fact
that Sunny Jim is at the other end of the journey) at this quaint
half-timbered, gable-crowded _maison_ standing in its graceful
poplar-grove; at the sweet provincial youngsters playing on the road.
You can lay up your machine and enter the rambling Normandy café
squatting on the river-bank, with its groups of blue-clad soldiers _en
permission_ making the most of things with the bloused and pantalooned
civilians and with their cider (_cidre_ is the national drink of
Normandy, as wine is of most other provinces) and you are greeted, in
such a house, with the delicious open French friendliness which is so
entrancing (by contrast) to most Englishmen. After their own national
reticence, this is pleasant beyond description. Of some it is the
undoing. The soldiers greet you, and you are adamantine if you don't
sit at their table rather than alone. The girl who serves welcomes you
like a brother. Quite sorry you are, at rising, you never came here
before.... You push on with your wheel. On the slopes of the other bank
they are getting in the harvest on the edge of the wood--some old men
and many women and a handful of soldiers on leave who have forgotten
the trenches.

There are soldiers with their families fishing on the bank beside you
at intervals. You stop to talk to these. You can't resist sitting with
them for a spell and kissing the little girls who nestle up. The
basket that contains other things than bait and the catch is opened;
you're a villain if you don't sip from that yellow bottle and take some
bread and a handful of cherries....

Halfway to Sahurs, opposite the timbered island, you pass the German
prisoners' camp, patrolled, beneath the barbed wire topping the wall,
by those quaint, informal French sentries. They're in red-and-blue
cap, red-and-blue tunic, red-and-blue breeches. They lounge and chat
and dawdle, with their rifles slung across their backs, and their
prodigiously long bayonets poking into the upper air. They appear
casual enough, but they detest the generic German sufficiently to leave
you confident that, however casual they may seem, he will not escape.

Farther down, you'll meet a gang of Boches road-making--fine, brawny,
light-haired, blue-eyed, cheerful beggars they are. Obviously they
don't aspire above their present lot so long as wars endure.

Four kilometres above Sahurs is the Napoleonic column marking the spot
where the ashes of Bonaparte were landed between their transfer from
the boat which brought them up the river to that which bore them to
Paris. As I approached this column from above, Sunny Jim, on her wheel,
approached it from Sahurs. Her friend Yvonne was with her (wonderful,
in this land, is the celerity with which the barriers surrounding
Christian names are thrown down!), and the dog.

The ride on to Sahurs is on a road that deflects from the river. It is
over-arched with elms continuously. Thérèse (that's her name) calls it
_la Cathédrale_: and the roof of branches aloft is like the groined
roof of a cathedral.

M. Duthois and madame come out to meet you. It's a welcome and a half
they give--none of your English polite formulas and set courtesy. A
warm, human, thoroughgoing sincerity sweeps you into the hall, and
there you stand in a hubbub of greeting and interrogation (of which
less than half is intelligible: but no matter!) for ten minutes,
everyone too busy talking to move on, until Thérèse suggests we go
round the garden and the orchard.

Everyone goes.

Thérèse gives us the French for every flower and shrub to be seen,
and the old man makes valiant, clumsy attempts at English, and you
make shamelessly clumsy attempts at French. One evidence of the
thoroughgoing courtesy of the French is that they will never laugh
at your attempts at their language. We smile at them: somehow their
English is amusing. Possibly the reason they do not smile at us
attempting French is that there is nothing at all amusing in our
flounderings--more likely to irritate than amuse. The old man is
accommodating in his choice of topics that will interest you and be
intelligible--accommodating to the point of embarrassment. He talks
quite fifteen minutes about the shape and coloration of your pipe,
certain that this will interest the selfish brute. Madame doesn't say a
word--carries on a sort of conversation with smiles and other pantomime.

Somehow, in the garden (I don't know how) Yvonne got named _Mme. la
Comtesse_ by M. Duthois. This for the time being embarrassed her into
complete and blushing silence because we all took it up. All manner
of difficulties were referred to the superior wisdom of _la Comtesse_.
It was she who must decide as to the markings of the aeroplane humming
up in the blue; the month when the red currants would be ripened; the
relationship of the two crows croaking in the next field; the term of
the War's duration.

But an authority on this last subject now emerged from the wicket-gate
which opened from the neighbouring house. Madame ---- had taken Thérèse
to Alsace after her return from Birmingham, and had taught her to speak
German there. Madame had lived in Alsace three years before, and spoke
German very well indeed. She related in German her dream-message of
the night before, that fixed the duration of the War unquestionably at
three months more. This subconscious conviction was so conclusive for
her that she would take bets all round. Thérèse staked all her ready
cash. No doubt she will collect about Christmas-tide.

We all went on to tea spread in the orchard, and spread with an
unerring French sense of fitness: such a meal, that is, as would be
spread in the orchard but not in the house--French rolls and dairy
butter, and _confiture de groseille_ made from the red currants of the
last season, fruit and cream, Normandy cake, cherries, wafers, and
_cidre_ sparkling like champagne, bearing no relationship whatever to
the flat, insipid green-and-yellow fluid of the Rouennaise hotels.

There was no dulness at table. French conversation flows easily and
unintermittently. There were tussles to decide whether Thérèse should
or should not help herself first. The English custom of "ladies first"
is looked on as rather stupid, with its implied inferiority of women:
"But you will not beat me! _Mais oui!_ but you are very obstinate!" And
she would not be beaten; for she said she didn't like Normandy cake
(though she adored it), and helped herself generously when it had been
round, and proclaimed her victory over English convention with a little
ripple of triumph. _Après vous_ became a mirth-provoking password.

All the pets came round the table--the fowls (to whom I was introduced
singly; they all have their names); _Mistigri_ the cat, _Henri_
the goose, the pigeons, the pug, the terrier. All these you are
expected to make remarks to, on introduction, as to regular members
of the family--which they are, in effect: "_Bon jour, Henri! Comment
allez-vous? Parlez-vous anglais? Voulez-vous vous asseoir?_" When these
introductions are over, M. Duthois brings forth his tiny bottle of
1875--the cognac he delights in.

Thérèse proposes a walk. Shall it be down by the river or through the
village? "_Both_," you say. So we go by the river and return by the
hamlet.

Setting out, Thérèse pledges me to the French tongue alone, all the
way. If I don't undertake to speak no English, I cannot go walking,
but must sit with her in the summer-house behind the orchard and learn
French with a grammar. I at once decline so to undertake. She varies
the alternative: she will not reply if I speak in English. Well, no
matter: that's no hardship. She forgets the embargo when she squelches
a frog in the grass. English is resumed at once. She is led on to a
dissertation in English upon frogs as a table-dish. This leads to
talk of other French table abnormalities--horse as preferred to ox,
the boast of French superiority in salads and coffee, the outlandish
French practice of serving your _pommes de terre_ after meat; and such
carnal topics.

Pappa wanders ahead at an unreasonable pace with _Mme. la Comtesse_.
Thérèse and I set about gathering daisies and poppies, with which the
green is starred. The dogs come out from the neighbouring farmhouse;
and Thérèse, who fears dogs horribly, has to be adequately protected.

We come up with pappa on the river-bank. We all set off dawdling
single-file along the brush-hemmed river-path.... The Normandy twilight
has settled down; but it will last till ten. La Bouille lies on the
other shore under the cliffs that gleam through their foliage. The
river gleams beneath them. There is a long track of light leading to
the ridge at the bend where the tottering battlements of the castle
of Robert le Diable stand against the sky-line. A hospital ship, now
faintly luminous, lies under the shadow of the la Bouille ridge. The
village lights have begun to twinkle on the other shore. The soft cries
of playing children creep over the water. The cry of the ferryman ready
to leave is thrown back from the cliffs with startling clearness. The
groves that fringe the cliff are cut out branch by branch against the
ruddy sky.

We don't want to talk much after coming on the river: neither do we....

It has darkened palpably when we turn to enter the village, an
hour after. The hedged lanes are dark under the poplar-groves. The
latticed windows of the cottages are brilliant patchwork of light. The
glow-worms are in the road-side grass and in the hedges. We pluck them
to put them in our hats. Thérèse weaves all manner of wistful fancies
about them. We pass under the Henry VIII. _église_ to the house, and
enter quietly.

Thérèse sits at the piano without stupid invitation, and sings some
of the lovely French folk-songs, and (by a special dispensation) some
German, that are almost as haunting. The old man watches his daughter
with a sort of fearful adoration, as though this creature, whose spirit
gleams through the fair flesh of her, were too fine a thing for him to
be father of.

Between the songs we talk. There is cake and wine--that and the
common-sensed sallies of _Mme. la Comtesse_ to restrain the romance and
the sensuousness of the warm June Normandy night.

I left at midnight. We said an _au revoir_ under the porch; and far
down the road came floating after the dawdling wheel a faint "_Au
'voir ... à Dimanche_"--full of a sweet and friendly re-invitation to
all this. I registered an acceptance with gratitude for the blessings
of Heaven, and wandered on along the white night road for Rouen. Why
hasten through such a night? Rouen would have been pardoned for being
_twice_ ten miles distant. The silent river, the gleaming road, the
faintly rustling trees, and the warm night filled with the scents of
the Forêt de Roumare, forbade fatigue and all reckoning of hours....
And that was the blessed conclusion of most Sabbath evenings for three
months.



CHAPTER III

LEAVES FROM A VILLAGE DIARY


_Sunday, --th._--This morning a Taube came over our village, dropping
bombs. They all fell in the neighbouring wood. Our aircraft defences
made a fervent response, but ineffectual.

At 6.30 this evening I counted eighteen of our 'planes flying home.
They have a facetious trick of shutting off their engines high and far
from home and floating down on resistance. It's curious watching a
'plane suddenly dissociated from the raucous buzz of its engine.

To-night the whole eastern sky is illuminated as though by summer
lightning in which there are no intervals--an unintermittent flap-flap.
The din is tremendous and heart-shaking. This is war--"and no error."
Anzac was hard. The country was rough and untenable--a hell, in our
strip, of lice, stinks, flies, mal-nutrition and sudden death. Food
was repulsive, and even so you did not get as much as you desired. You
got clean in the Ægean at peril of your life. Here, on the other hand,
is fighting-space gentle and smiling--a world of pastures, orchards,
streams, groves, and white winding roads, with room to sanitate and
restrain plagues. There is an over-generous ration of food that tempts
you to surfeit; Expeditionary Force canteens, as well stocked as a
London grocer's, as far up as the riskiest railhead; snug farmhouse
billets, with un-infested straw; hot baths behind the lines; cinemas
for resting battalions. But Anzac never knew the relentlessness of this
offensive fighting. There we faced an enemy with whom fighting was a
hobby, taken sportingly, if earnestly. Here we wrestle at sweaty and
relentless grips with a foe to whom the spirit of sport is strange
and repulsive, and who never had a sense of humour; who fights hating
blindly and intensely. Most days you could not jab a pin between the
gun-belches. You feel the whole world is being shaken, and, if this
goes on for long, will crumble in a welter of blood and hate. It cannot
last at this rate: that's the assurance that rises day by day and hour
by hour within you. But the assurance is melancholy: how much of either
side is going to survive the intensity of it? What will be the state,
when all is over, of the hardly-victorious?

_Monday, --th._--To-day, in nine hours, three divisions were rushed
through this town for the ---- sector. They came in motor-'buses. At
twelve miles an hour they tore through the astonished streets, which
got themselves cleared quickly enough. The military police tried to
restrain the pace. They were French 'buses driven by Frenchmen who had
got a fever of excited speed in their blood. They cleared the military
police off the route with impatient gestures, as one waves aside an
impertinence.... This is mobility.

Feverish processions of this kind are altogether apart from battalions
marching, cavalry clattering, engineers lumbering. A fifteen-inch gun,
distributed over five steam tractors, goes through at midnight with
flares and clamour. One trusts that such engines offer compensation
for their unwieldiness, for that is incredible: five gigantic tractors
_with_ trailers, to move one of them at this strident snail's pace. The
nine-point-two's are accommodated each on one tractor. The field-guns,
tossed on to waggons, hurry through, toys by comparison.

_Tuesday, --th._--I was on the ---- Road this morning in the gusty
drizzle. A column of artillery was moving towards ----. It was
miserable weather for horsed-transport. All the men had wry-necks, with
the list against the wind. The flanks of the officers' horses were
overspread by the voluminous waterproof cape. At ---- there was a horse
column encamped. Nothing could appear more miserable than the dejected
horse lines in the sea of mud--manes and draggle-tails blown about in
the murk.

A party of ineligible Frenchmen were road-patching near ----. The
main roads have them at work always. They fill the holes and minute
valleys that military traffic makes continuously. Lorry-holes are
insidious things. They magnify at an astonishing rate if left for
two days. They must be treated at once. The gangs move up and down
the roads with mobile loads of earth and gravel, treating all the
depressions and maintaining a surface tolerable for Colonels' cars.
(You can judge the freight of a car by its speed; the pace of Majors
is slightly less fierce than that of Colonels. Brigadiers make it
killing.) The road-menders get in where they can between the flights.
It's a disjointed business, and a mucky one, this weather. A Colonel's
car-wheels spurt into the green fields. The gangers get mottled with
the thin brown fluid. They are a pathetically decrepit folk--men too
old or infirm for the trenches and boys who are too young. But this
work, in this weather, carries a test almost as severe as that of
trench-warfare.

The road-signs--admonitory, hortatory, prohibitive--are raised at very
frequent intervals. Military routes behind the lines are in a state of
continual flux--to such a degree that road-maps are not only useless,
but misleading, to drivers of vehicles. Their best course is to ignore
the map, watch the road-directions as they are approached, and use
their horse-sense. Signs are quite explicit: "Closed to lorries and
ambulances"; "Closed to traffic in this direction" (arrowhead). The
distance and direction of every village, however small, is put up with
a clearness that excludes the possibility of error. The location of
every ammunition-dump, supply-dump, railhead, camping-ground, billeting
area, watering-place, intelligence Headquarters, motor-tyre press (an
institution much in demand), is indicated very exactly. Most other
signs are designed to regulate speed: "Maximum speed through village
---- for lorries and ambulances, ---- for light tractors, ---- for
cars"; "Danger: cross-roads"; "Lorry-park; slow down"; "Go slow past
aerodrome to avoid injuring engines through dust." (Can you conceive
British administration in the Army giving the reason, thus, for an
order?)

Some French signs persist: _Attention aux trains._

Some signs are not official: "Level crossing ahead: keep your
blood-shot eyes open."

The village streets show signs that have no reference to speed. Most
estaminets publish "English Stout"; "Good beer 3d., best beer 4d.";
"Officers' horses, 10"; "Cellar, 50"--_i.e._, we have a cellar that
will billet fifty men. The villages are very quiet and old-time--grey
and yellow walls abutting directly on the roads (footpaths are
unknown); thatch or slate roofs; low windows from which, sitting, your
feet would touch road; tortuous streets; plentiful girl and women
denizens; a wayside Calvary on the outskirts; a church spire rising
somewhere from the roofs; a preponderance of taverns, estaminets,
cafés, and sweet-shops in the chief street.

_Wednesday, --th._--I got some notion this morning of life on the
ambulance trains. They move between railhead and the bases with the ebb
and flow of the offensive tide. After their load is discharged to a
base they garage at a siding erected in this station for the purpose,
and await orders. They may rest three days or three hours. Sisters
and M.O.'s have lived on the same train--some of them--for twelve or
fifteen months, but are too busy to be mutually bored. At the garage
you will see them dismounted from the train taking their lunch among
the hay-ricks in the harvested field beside the line. An orderly will
alight from the train and race across the field, and you'll see the
party rise, hastily pitch their utensils incontinently into a rug,
and climb aboard as the train steams out. The order has come to move
up again and "take on." ... This is one aspect of the state of flux
in which the world behind the lines stands day and night, month after
month.

At the _gare_ here is a canteen for _voyageurs_ exclusively. A blatant
and prohibitory notice says so with no uncertainty. This is English.
An English girl is in charge of it. She gets as little respite as the
_chef de gare_. Who can say when she sleeps? She is supplying tea and
cakes and cigarettes to troops every day and every night. No one is
refused at any hour, however unhallowed. French railway-stations on
the lines of communication all carry such an English girl for such a
purpose; and usually they are in the front rank of English aristocracy.
The English nobility have not spared themselves for "the Cause." Their
men have fallen thick; their women have resigned the luxury of their
homes to minister to the pain and the hunger of the force in France.
And they do it with a thoroughness apparently incompatible (though only
apparently so) with the thoroughgoing luxury and splendour of their
civilian way of life.

_Thursday, --th._--This afternoon I walked down the river that winds
through the town and goes south. It is a comfortable, easy-flowing
trout-stream. Beyond the town bridge it turns into pastures and
orchards and cultivated fields, nosing a way through stretches of brown
stubble, apple-groves, and plantations of beet. Groves of elm and
beech overspread the high grass on its brink. The hop clusters with
the wild-strawberry and the red currant: a solitary trouter stands
beyond the tangle. The fields slope gently away from the stream--very
gently--up to the tree-lined road on the ridge. The brown-and-gold
stubble rises, acre beyond acre, to the sky-line; and in the evening
light takes on a rich investiture of colour that is bold for stubble,
but not the less lovely because it is virtual only. As the evening
wears on, this settles into a softness of hue that you cannot describe.

Such is the Somme country: such is the land of war.

At nine to-night all the station lights were switched off. Advice
had come from ---- of enemy aircraft approaching this junction. They
did not come--not to our knowledge. But the _chef de gare_ waddled
over to his private house and bundled wife and children down into the
cellar--and _cave_, as they call it--and when he had seen them safely
stowed, returned to his station to await orders. The French girls and
women inhabit the cellar with alacrity at such times. Every house has
its funk-hole, for there is hardly a dwelling so small as to neglect
a vault for _cidre_ and _vin ordinaire_. "In the season" they lay up
a year's store; as a rule, the _cidre_ is home-brewed, too. At table
the jug goes round, filling the glass of the _enfant_ and the _père_
without discrimination. By the end of the meal the colour has mounted
in the cheeks of the little girls, and they are garrulous and the boys
noisy. Amongst the _cidre_ barrels there is good and secure cover from
Taubes.

When the lights got switched on again, the detraining of the ----th
Division resumed....

_Friday --th._--I was wakened at two o'clock this morning by the hum of
their collective conversation. Sergeants-major were roaring commands in
the moonlight; some of them were supplemented by remarks not polite.
Many English sergeants-major speak in dialect: most of them do. There
is something repellent about words of command issued in dialect. Why
can't England cut-out dialect? It's time it went. Dialect is a very
rank form of Conservatism. Why can't a uniform pronunciation of vowels
be taught in English schools? Active-service over a term of years will
perhaps help to bring about a standardising of English speech. One
hopes so....

I got up and looked out. As far as could be seen along any street,
and all over the square, was a faintly mobile sea of black on which
danced the glow of the cigarette (damnable, how the cigarette has put
out the pipe!). Detachments were still marching from the train to the
halting-places, and detachments were moving out momentarily on the
night march.

  "Hark, I hear the tramp of thousands,
  And of arméd men the hum."

They moved off--some to drum and fife band; some to the regimental
song; some to the regimental whistle; some to the unrhythmic
accompaniment of random conversation. The general impression they gave,
at two in the morning, was of an abnormal cheerfulness.

A French ambulance-train came in this afternoon crowded with slightly
wounded--sitting cases. They were immensely cheerful, though there was
not by any means sitting accommodation for all. These were all nice
light "Blighty" wounds; they meant respite from the dam'd trenches
without dishonour. The fellows were immensely cheered by this. They
were more like a train-load of excursionists than a body of wounded
warriors from a hell like the Somme. They had hundredweights of German
souvenirs. Most of it was being worn--helmets, tunics, arms, and the
like. I bought several pieces. They were not expensive. A French
Poilu's pay is _cinq sous_ (twopence ha'penny) per day: fifteen or
twenty francs means about three months' pay for him. He'll part with
a lot of souvenir for that. And he has such a bulk of it that a few
casques, trench daggers, rifles, and telescopic sights, more or less,
are neither here nor there.

The English girls who administer the _gare_ canteen move up and down
with jugs of coffee. They are thanked (embraced, if they'd stand it)
with embarrassing profusion.

_Saturday, --st._--Bombs were dropped in the Citadelle moat to-day. The
Citadelle is now a casualty clearing station. This is not incongruous
with its history. It was besieged in the fifteenth century. No doubt
there were casualties within it then--though, judging its defensive
properties at this distance of time, there were more without: many
more. It's tremendously strong still--an incredible depth of dry
moat, thickness of wall, and height of rampart surmounting it: outer
ramparts on three sides from which the defenders retired across the
bridges--still standing--after they had done their worst. And there
are bowels in the place from which galleries set out to neighbouring
villages whence reinforcements used to be brought up. You can walk
miles in these galleries beneath the Citadelle itself, without
journeying beneath the surrounding country; for the ground-plan of the
Citadelle is not small. A walk round the walls will lead you a mile and
a half, traversing buttresses and all: the buttresses bulge hugely into
the moat-bed.

The whole area is terraced, originally for strategic purposes. The
buildings are many and strong and roomy.

A fine hospital it happens to have made. The multiplicity of buildings
offers all a C.O. could ask in the way of distribution of wards
and facilities for segregation, and isolated buildings for stores,
messes, Sisters' quarters, officers' quarters, operating-theatres,
laboratories.

His convalescents can bask and promenade on the ramparts in the winter
sunshine, and stroll healthfully through the groves and about the paths
of the area. In the wide level, grassy, moat-basin the orderlies play
their football matches and the C.O. takes his revolver practice.

The ghastliness of the wards is all out of harmony with this. There is
a gas-ward, hideously filled--blackened faces above the ever-restless
coverlets. The surgical wards in a station so near the line hold the
grimmest cases--cases too critical for movement down to a base: head
wounds, abdominal wounds, spinal cases that can bear transport no
farther, and that have almost no hope of recovery as it is. Men plead
piteously here for the limbs that a cruelly-kind surgeon can do nothing
with but amputate. "Doctor, I've lost the arm; that won't be so bad if
you'll only leave the leg." The plea is usually put in this form, which
implies the power of choice in the M.O. between alternatives; whereas
the gangrenous limb leaves him no room for debate.

In a station so close, too, the operating-theatre cannot afford to be
either small or idle--no mere cubicle with two tables; but two large
wards with six tables each, and (when a push has been made in the line)
with every table in use late in the night: a bloody commentary on the
righteousness of war.



CHAPTER IV

THE CAFÉ DU PROGRÈS


The Café de Progrès stands in the Rue de ---- half-way down to the
river. It's the place where merchants most do congregate. The manager
of the Banque de ---- leads them. The place that the first bank manager
in the town frequents daily is thereby given a tone which no other café
in D---- can have. So it is the first among the lounging-places only.
That leads to a rough division of all the cafés in the town into two
great classes: those you lounge and drink in, and those to which you
go for a meal. In the one you will see the French relaxing (there are
some rich "retired" gentlemen who do nothing _but_ relax); in the other
you will see the English officer satisfying his hunger more or less
incontinently. Need I say which is the place of interest?

Our favourite seat used to be upon a small dais in recess overlooking
the billiard-table immediately and the whole room generally. Its only
disadvantage was that it did not overlook that other recess--separated
from it by a partition--in which Thérèse mixed the drinks and brewed
the coffee.

The billiard-table occupied one-half the room; the other half centred
round the stove. The tables were arranged in concentric circles about
it. The regular denizens of the place--the men who lived there--would,
during the snow, come early, occupy the innermost circle of tables,
and omit to move out until sundown. And sometimes they would stay far
into the night. The retired business-man is more amenable to a sense
of cosiness than any other mortal of his age. He would get Thérèse to
bring him snacks--they were not meals--at intervals during the day. And
there he would settle himself, with his boon companions, for twelve
hours on end.

Cards is the diversion: cards and dominoes. The habitual inner
circle there is made up by the proprietor, the ex-Mayor of the
town, _le directeur de la Banque de ----_, and the manager of the
_Usine de ----_. The last named used to have inscrutable spells of
absence--inscrutable until it was explained that the occasion was the
visit of M. ---- the elder, himself, from Paris--a man of iron and the
proprietor of the _Usine_. He it was who quelled with his own hand and
voice an ugly strike of his _ouvriers_ who dared ask for more money.

The ex-Mayor was never absent. He was a well preserved old dog whom
no severity of weather was allowed to keep from the post of duty by
the stove. The whole room was obsequious to him by force of habit. He
was the presiding genius over the café: he, rather than the proprietor
himself. He would come rolling in, and fairly rattle the glasses with
his "_Bonjour, messieurs!_" He usually walked over to the buffet before
seating himself, and, if so minded, greeted Thérèse with a fatherly
kiss, which she--poor girl!--thought dignified her; whereas Thérèse,
to be accurate, was worth far more than the embraces of this pompous
old aristocrat. With his intimates he shook hands noisily, and slapped
them on the back. The herd half-rose in its seat throughout the room
in traditional deference. I suspect it was the general obsequiousness,
rather than the interest of the game, or of the company, which brought
the old egoist here daily.

The _directeur_ of the bank is not worth considering. He was the
incarnation of obsequiousness. It was plain that he had habitually
sold his soul to patrons. And since it is likely that at one time the
ex-Mayor was his chief patron (and perhaps was so still), you will
believe that he was more slavish toward him than the humblest townsman
sipping his cognac. You almost looked for him to lick his master's
mighty hand.

The proprietor was a sinewy fellow who had been a soldier. It was
wounds he had had; which had not, however, incapacitated him for
vigorous action. Also, he had been a prisoner of war in Germany. These
German experiences he would recount to you with much wealth of gesture,
and a wealth of exaggeration too, if by chance--or by design--he were
drunk enough. He was in a state of perennial intoxication; at any hour
of any day or night it was only a question of degree.

In the game of cards in a French café the stake is superfluous.
Englishmen profess they require the stake to hold their interest.
Usually the French play with counters only. The interest of the game
is enough. It is a very voluble game with them. They excite themselves
seemingly beyond all reason. You might imagine them a nest of pirates,
inflamed with liquor, playing in some den of the sea with fair captives
for stakes. These French enthusiasts upset the drink by thumping down
their cards. They have rare disputes; but they are not quarrels.

Thérèse is the girl who carries drinks. She has dimples and a happy
smile. French girls are either very free or super-continent; there is
no middle course. Thérèse is of the latter class, but not puritanical.
Subalterns have been seen attempting to kiss her in the seclusion of
a recess. They have been routed. The only occasion on which Thérèse
allowed herself to be kissed was New Year's Day. Then it was general.
Everyone was doing it--in the street--the merest acquaintances. That
day Thérèse submits as a matter of course. That day, too, the ex-Mayor
gallantly embraced that old hag, her aunt, to the diversion of the
populace.

The aunt brews and dispenses behind the buffet. She objects to
Thérèse's loitering when she serves, even though loitering may be good
for trade. Thérèse describes her as a very sober-minded woman.

The billiard-table attracts a lot of attention--from onlookers as
well as from players. There the _directeur_ of the _banque_ plays his
chief accountant and drinks champagne and _grenadine_ between the
shots--a poisonous combination, that, but a popular. The French like
things sweet, and they like them definitely coloured. The _directeur_
is a handsome fellow, with a perfectly balanced head and a curiously
pleasing harmony of nose and chin in profile. His accountant is a
loose-looking youth.

The billiard-table is a favourite resort of officers' batmen. They have
nothing else to do, and they can play half a day for almost nothing
at all. I always remember an acute-looking Scotch batman in kilts
(servant to the Rents-Officer). He was proud of his calves and of his
French--and (justly) of his billiards. He could bring discomfiture
upon any Frenchman who would play with him. He is the sort of officer's
servant (and there are many of them, the voluptuous dogs!) who could
carry a commission with ease and credit. But they prefer the whole days
of idleness on which they are free to follow their own devices.

The _facteurs_ drop in for a drink on their rounds. They hobnob here
a great part of the day, seemingly. And there is poor Marcelle at the
pork-shop pining for the letter from her _garçon_ in the line which
this gossiping dog has in his _serviette_ beside the cognac. All
_facteurs_ are discharged soldiers, and should know better. There is, I
fear, but a belated delivery of letters in this easy-going old town.

On market-day the café is filled with _les paysans_, who have come in
to vend their pigs and cattle, rabbits, eggs, butter, and vegetables.
The elderly ladies from the farms, with their generous growth of
moustache, sit and drink neat cognac with a masculinity that is but
fitting. The young girls sip white wine. The old men gossip, between
draughts, with their pipes trembling in their toothless gums. There are
no young men.



CHAPTER V

L'HÔTEL DES BONS ENFANTS


It stands facing the Place de l'Église, with its back to the Route
de ----. There is something medieval in its name; so is there in its
surroundings and in its appearance. The gargoyles of the Église frown
down upon its southern door. There is an old Flemish house facing it in
the _Place_. It is Flemish and rambling in design itself. Its stables
are low and capacious, like those of a Chaucerian inn. The rooms of the
hotel are low-roofed, and each is large enough for an assembly ball.
There is an air of generosity about the place. You have the feeling, as
you enter, that these people enjoy living; they would have a love of
life which is Italian in its deliberateness. They would taste life with
a relish.

If you see madame you will be confirmed in this. She is rotund and
high-coloured. The placidity of her feature is infectious. As soon as
you see her (and it is not long before you will) you want to bask about
the place. The pleasantness of her smile will tell you that her first
concern is not lucre, but life. She must work to live. But neither work
nor the money it brings are ends in themselves for her.

In her day she must have been very well featured. She is still. But
rotundity is clouding the lines of her beauty in face and figure.
She has a daughter of eight playing in the anteroom. She will be as
handsome as her mother has been. She is pretty, with a regularity of
feature uncommon in a child so young. A placid nurse-girl has the care
of her. She is reading at one of the small round drinking-tables. In
fact, it is the domesticity of the place which charms you as much as
its quaint architecture. English officers in groups and French officers
with their lady friends are entering and taking seats. But madame talks
audibly and naturally of nursery matters with the nurse, the child
herself is engaged upon her _leçon de l'école_ beside the buffet,
and her nursemaid is at work upon a garment at the same table as two
highly-finished Subalterns are taking their aristocratic ease and their
Médoc.

But however homely the hotel may be in France, it is rarely free from
the blemish of the _upper room_. Officers may dine gaily with their
lady friends with as little obstruction from the management as is
offered to the payment of the bill.

We had our Christmas dinner at the Bons Enfants. It was not home, but
it was very jolly. Jolly is the word rather than happy. At home the
grub would not have been French. There would have been sisters (and
others) with whom to make merry afterwards. And we would (we hope) have
been served by someone less unlovely than the well-meaning middle-aged
woman whom madame detailed to wait upon our table. But we sang long and
loud in chorus; and afterwards went into the hall and took possession
of the piano and danced with each other; and those who couldn't dance
improvised some sort of rhythmic evolutions about the room. At any
rate, we were gay. We were determined that absence from home was
not going to seem to make us sad. And perhaps some of us forced the
merriment rather obviously. But madame, I believe, thought we were
completely happy. She came and shook us all by the hand at parting, and
gave us good wishes, and was happy she should have helped us so far to
Christmas jollity in "a furrin clime." Someone reproached her with the
plebeian features of our waitress when we had got out into the shelter
of the street, and someone--I forget who--kissed her (_i.e._, madame)
in the shadow of the porch; and she gave a gentle little scream of
delight, retrospective of the days of her blooming youth when she was
more prone to thoroughgoing reciprocity.

We returned some weeks later. Someone of the mess had a birthday,
and went down in the morning to madame and in the sunny courtyard
talked to her intimately of pullets, and _poisson_, and _boisson_,
and _omelettes_, and wafers, and cheeses, and fruits; returned to the
mess before lunch, furtively countermanded the standing orders amongst
the servants for the evening meal, and at lunch flung out a general
invitation to the Bons Enfants at eight. We lived again through the
Christmas festivities--with the difference that madame detailed a less
unhandsome wench to wait on table; and that we left earlier.



CHAPTER VI

PROVINCIAL SHOPS


All _magasins_ of any standing are served by pretty girls. This is a
point of policy. Proprietors of French shops in the towns of the War
area have come to know that the man to whom they sell is largely the
English officer in rest about the town or on his way through it. He
also knows enough of the psychology of the English officer to be sure
that if his shop is known to be served by pretty girls, the officer who
has been segregated from women for three months will enter, ostensibly
to purchase, actually to talk with the girls; also that every time he
wishes to see pretty girls he will make a purchase the pretext, and
will not be dismayed by the frequency of his purchases nor by their
price. To the officer from the line feminine intercourse is reckoned
cheap at the price of socks and ties.

They know the temper of the man in rest from the trenches; he will have
what he likes, and hang the price. So they ask what they like, and get
it. This is, of course, hard on the man permanently stationed in the
town; but it is not for him they cater. And even should he refuse to
buy at all, it is nothing to them. They can batten on the traveller and
the man in rest, and they do.

The best-remembered shops in D---- are the provision shop (agent for
Félix Potin), the newspaper shop opposite the Hôtel de Ville, the boot
shop in the Rue ----, the pipe shop in the Rue ----.

Félix Potin's agency is proprieted by a masterful woman, extremely
handsome and well-figured. She is consciously proud of this as she sits
at the receipt of custom and directs the policy. She is a very able
business woman. She is never baffled by the smallest detail referred
to her by an underling. She knows the price of the smallest bottle
of perfume (though there she may, of course, be improvising--and
with safety). If stock has been exhausted in any commodity she
knows when its reinforcements will arrive from Paris. She herself
does the Parisian buying. The whole town knows when she has been to
Paris, and when she will be going next. She makes a knowledge of
these buying-excursions intimate to all her considerable patrons.
Her periodical trips are parochial events. You will hear one officer
say to another in an English mess: "Oh, Madame ---- is off to Paris
on Sunday;" or, "Madame ---- will be back to-morrow." This is very
flattering, and very good for business.

But she purchases well. There is the finest array of perfumes and
soaps, champagne and liqueurs, cakes and biscuits, chocolates, Stilton
and Gruyère, eggs and butter, almonds and chestnuts. It is Félix Potin
in little, with all the richness of Félixian variety and quality. If
it's wine you are buying, she'll take you below to the cellars; that's
a rich and vivifying spectacle. The whole shop is shelved, desked, and
finished with an appearance of distinction; the windows are dressed
with a taste and an avoidance of super-crowding that would grace the
Rue de la Paix. The whole _magasin_ is in a class beyond compare with
any other shop in D----. It puts one in the dress-circle to purchase
a box of chocolates there. But in the interests of finance he had far
better make the purchase at the Expeditionary Force Canteen. At the
canteen you pay neither for the atmosphere of the place nor for the
expense of importation from Paris.

The stationer's shop opposite the Hôtel de Ville gets the English
newspaper daily. Towards evening there is an incessant stream of
privates, N.C.O's, and Staff-Officers asking for the daily sheet
from England. "_'Delly Mell,' m'sieur?--pas encore arrivée._" (The
_voyageur_ arrives late in these parts.) It's with difficulty you can
elbow your way about this shop at most hours of the afternoon. Soldiers
who call for the paper loiter, attracted by the post-cards or the range
of English novels. The post-cards are spread out in an inciting array.
They are Parisian in their frankness.

Everyone knows the boot shop. There are four boot shops in D----. But
when you speak of the boot shop there is no doubt in the mind of the
company which is the shop referred to, because the prettiest girl in
D---- is there. When an officer appears in the street with new boots
(though he guilelessly bought them at Ordnance) his friends will say:
"Ha! did she try them on for you? Was she long about it? It's a pretty
pair of shoulders, _n'est-ce pas_?" It is but fitting that the shop
with the prettiest girl in D---- should be the most expensive. So it
is. Better go bare-footed unless you have "private means" or can get
access to an Ordnance clothing store--or (better still) get an "issue."

But who can avoid the tobacconist's in the Rue ----? One must have a
well-finished pipe now and then, and the widow's daughter is handsome
and speaks a kind of English. In accordance with the French usage,
madame, as a widow, has been given this tobacco shop by the State. Had
she been daughterless, or had her daughter been unlovely, she would
have imported some _jolie demoiselle_. But she had no need. Marie
Thérèse fills the rôle. And Marie Thérèse is kept busy by a genuine
queue of purchasers. For this is the shop where small purchases are
most excusable, and in any case it is an easy matter to ask for an
impossible brand of tobacco and listen with feigned amazement to Marie
Thérèse's pretty, well-gestured regrets that she has it not. But
she has other. But you explain how you are a purist, and none other
will do. And if the shop is not busy--which is seldom indeed--such
explanations can be made elaborate and prolonged, and Marie Thérèse
can be made intelligently interested in the inscrutable whims of
thoroughgoing smokers. But the damsel is not all guileless. If it is
your ill-fortune that she has what you ask, you pay well and truly. And
Marie Thérèse knows as well as you (though neither says so) that you
have paid for the repartee.


BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND





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