GREATHEART AND CHRISTIANA
There were hospitals up the road preparing and being prepared for the Indian wounded. In one of these lay a man of, say, a Biluch regiment, sorely hit. Word had come from his colonel in France to the colonel’s wife in England that she should seek till she found that very man and got news from his very mouth—news to send to his family and village. She found him at last, and he was very bewildered to see her there, because he had left her and her child on the verandah of the bungalow, long and long ago, when he and his colonel and the regiment went down to take ship for the war. How had she come? Who had guarded her during her train-journey of so many days? And, above all, how had the baba endured that sea which caused strong men to collapse? Not till all these matters had been cleared up in fullest detail did Greatheart on his cot permit his colonel’s wife to waste one word on his own insignificant concerns. And that she should have wept filled him with real trouble. Truly, this is the war of ‘Our Raj!’
VI
TERRITORIAL BATTALIONS
To excuse oneself to oneself is human: but to excuse oneself to one’s children is Hell.—Arabic Proverb.
Billeted troops are difficult to get at. There are thousands of them in a little old town by the side of an even older park up the London Road, but to find a particular battalion is like ferreting unstopped burrows.
‘The Umpty-Umpth, were you looking for?’ said a private in charge of a side-car. ‘We’re the Eenty-Eenth. ‘Only came in last week. I’ve never seen this place before. It’s pretty. Hold on! There’s a postman. He’ll know.’
He, too, was in khaki, bowed between mailbags, and his accent was of a far and coaly county.
‘I’m none too sure,’ said he, ‘but I think I saw——’
Here a third man cut in.
‘Yon’s t’ battalion, marchin’ into t’ park now. Roon! Happen tha’ll catch ‘em.’
They turned out to be Territorials with a history behind them; but that I didn’t know till later; and their band and cyclists. Very polite were those rear-rank cyclists—who pushed their loaded machines with one vast hand apiece.
They were strangers, they said. They had only come here a few days ago. But they knew the South well. They had been in Gloucestershire, which was a very nice southern place.
Then their battalion, I hazarded, was of northern extraction?
They admitted that I might go as far as that; their speech betraying their native town at every rich word.
‘Huddersfield, of course?’ I said, to make them out with it.
‘Bolton,’ said one at last. Being in uniform the pitman could not destroy the impertinent civilian.
‘Ah, Bolton!’ I returned. ‘All cotton, aren’t you?’
‘Some coal,’ he answered gravely. There is notorious rivalry ‘twixt coal and cotton in Bolton, but I wanted to see him practise the self-control that the Army is always teaching.
As I have said, he and his companion were most polite, but the total of their information, boiled and peeled, was that they had just come from Bolton way; might at any moment be sent somewhere else, and they liked Gloucestershire in the south. A spy could not have learned much less.
The battalion halted, and moved off by companies for further evolutions. One could see they were more than used to drill and arms; a hardened, thick-necked, thin-flanked, deep-chested lot, dealt with quite faithfully by their sergeants, and altogether abreast of their work. Why, then, this reticence? What had they to be ashamed of, these big Bolton folk without an address? Where was their orderly-room?
There were many orderly-rooms in the little old town, most of them in bye-lanes less than one car wide. I found what I wanted, and—this was north-country all over—a private who volunteered to steer me to headquarters through the tricky southern streets. He was communicative, and told me a good deal about typhoid-inoculation and musketry practice, which accounted for only six companies being on parade. But surely they could not have been ashamed of that.