FOOTNOTES
[1] He did most of his work for the Colonial Office from his sick bed, and few Secretaries of State have done more important work than he.
[2] Tennyson would say, ‘some of those stupid critics say that King Arthur is meant for Prince Albert. I never thought of him.’
DUBLIN DAYS: THE RISING.
LETTERS FROM MRS. HAMILTON NORWAY.
April 25, Tuesday.—On Saturday we were going to tea with friends at Bray when just as we were starting H. (my husband) got an ‘official’ from the Castle, so I went alone and he went to the Castle. News had come that a boat had been taken off the Kerry coast, landing ammunition, and a very important arrest had been made. Easter Sunday passed off in absolute calm, and yesterday (Easter Monday) morning H. said he had a lot of letters to write and he would go and write them at his Club, almost next door to the Sackville Street General Post Office. He found he wanted to answer some letters that were in his desk at the G.P.O. so he walked over to his room and was just sitting down when his ’phone went, an urgent message to go at once to the Castle.
He had only just arrived there and was in consultation with Sir M. N. when suddenly a volley of shots rang out at the Castle Gate, and it was found armed bodies of men were in possession of the City Hall and other houses that commanded the other gates to the Castle, and anyone attempting to leave the Castle was shot. All the officials in the Castle were prisoners.
When N. (my son) came in about 12.30 I said we would walk down to the Club and meet H. The streets were quiet and deserted till we crossed O’Connell Bridge, when N. remarked there was a dense crowd round Nelson’s Pillar, but we supposed it was a bank-holiday crowd waiting for trams. We were close to the General Post Office, when two or three shots were fired, followed by a volley, and the crowd began rushing down towards the bridge, the people calling out ‘Go back, go back, the Sinn Feiners are firing.’ N. said ‘You’d better go back, mother; there’s going to be a row; I’ll go on to the Club and find Dad.’ So I turned and fled with the crowd and got back safely to the hotel.
About 1.30 N. returned, having failed to find H., and we had an anxious lunch. During lunch a telephone message came through saying H. was at the Castle but could not leave.
At 3 P.M. N. told me all was quiet in Sackville Street and begged me to go out and see the G.P.O.
I quaked rather, but we set off and reached Sackville Street safely.
Over the fine building of the G.P.O. floated a great green flag with ‘Irish Republic’ on it. Every window on the ground floor was smashed and barricaded with furniture, and a big placard announced ‘The Headquarters of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.’ At every window were two men with rifles, and on the roof the parapet was lined with men. H.’s room appeared not to have been touched and there were no men at his windows.
We stood opposite and were gazing when suddenly two shots were fired, and, seeing there was likely to be an ugly rush, I fled again.
At 11.30 P.M. H. walked in, to my immense relief. The troops had arrived, 2000 of them from the Curragh, at about 5 P.M., and had promptly stormed the City Hall, which commanded the main gate of the Castle, and had taken it after fierce fighting.
Tuesday.—This morning we hear the military are pouring into the city.
All our valuables were stored in H.’s safe and cupboards when we gave up our house, and all our dear F.’s books, sword, and all his possessions, which we value more than anything else in the world; we would not trust them with the stored furniture.
Yesterday afternoon the mob broke all the windows in various streets, and looted all the shops. The streets were strewn with clothes, boots, furniture, tram cushions, and everything you can imagine.
While I am writing now there is incessant firing in St. Stephen’s Green, and we fear there may be street fighting in this street.
Tuesday Evening.—H. and N. have just come in, having seen Dr. (now Major) W., Surgeon to the Forces in Ireland. He told them that so far we had had about 500 casualties, two-thirds of them being civilians shot in the streets.
The first thing Dr. W. heard of the outbreak was a ’phone message telling him to go at once to the Shelbourne, as a man had been shot. He supposed it was a case of suicide, so jumped into his car and went off, fortunately in mufti. In Nassau Street his car was stopped and he was ordered by rebels to get out; he attempted to argue, and was told if he did not obey instantly he would be shot. Had he been in uniform he would have been shot at sight; as a civilian doctor they allowed him to go, and he took his bag and ran. He found three men shot in the Shelbourne, and a boy was shot as he reached the door.
After we got into bed a ’phone came that H. was to go at once to the Viceregal Lodge in the Phœnix Park, so he dressed and tried every way to get a motor; but of course no motor would go out. After some delay he got the Field Ambulance of the Fire Brigade, at Dr. W.’s suggestion, but when it came the men told H. they had been carrying wounded all day, and that they had been constantly stopped by pickets, and the car searched, and if they went, and the car was stopped and found to contain H., they would undoubtedly all be shot. So H. considered it too risky and it had to be abandoned, and eventually his Excellency gave his instructions over the ’phone, first in French, but that particular ’phone did not speak French! So eventually he took the risk of the ’phone being tapped and gave them in English.
While we were dressing a terrific bombardment with field guns began, the first we had heard, and gave me cold shivers. It went on for a quarter of an hour—awful! big guns and machine guns—and then ceased, but we hear they were bombarding Liberty Hall, the headquarters of Larkin and the strikers two years ago. The guns were on H.M.S. Hecla, that came up the river and smashed it from within about fifty yards. It made one feel quite sick.
H. has just been summoned to the Castle, and there is no knowing when he will be back. All who go out carry their lives in their hands.
N. did a fine thing yesterday. After the Green had been raked by our machine guns’ fire, he strolled up, in his casual way, to see the result. In front of one of the side gates in the railings, which are seven feet high and spiked three ways, he saw a small group of men peering into the Green; he went to see what they were looking at. The rebels had barricaded the gate, which opened inwards, by putting one of the heavy garden seats against it upside down and on the top of it another right side up, and lying full length on the seat, face downwards, was a man, a civilian, with all his lower jaw blown away, and bleeding profusely! N. immediately climbed the railings and dropped down on the Sinn Fein side, and found that the man was still alive; he then turned and fairly cursed the men who were looking on, and asked if there was not one man enough to come over the railings and help him. Whereupon three men climbed over and together they lifted down the seat with the poor creature on it, and dragged away the other seat, when they were able to open the gate, and they brought out the seat and the man on it, and carried him to the nearest hospital, where he died in about five minutes.
N.’s theory is that he was probably one of the civilians taken prisoner by the Sinn Fein the previous day, and was trying to escape from the awful machine-gun fire when he was shot down and fell back on to the seat. It was a terrible case.
Friday, 10 A.M.—N. is of course safer attached to the Red Cross than roaming the streets making rescues on his own, and if he was killed one should at least hear of it; but the risks are many and great, as in street fighting the ambulances are constantly under fire.
Among other things they enter houses where there are known to be wounded Sinn Feiners, and bring them out and take them to the hospitals.
This N. was doing yesterday. One of the most awful things in this terrible time is that there must be scores of dead and dying Sinn Feiners, many of them mere lads, that no one can get at in the houses, where they will remain till after the rebellion; and in some cases the houses take fire and they are burnt. However, whatever is possible is being done.
All the afternoon an awful battle raged in the neighbourhood of the river and quays, and the din of the great guns and machine guns was tremendous. We now have 30,000 troops and plenty of artillery and machine guns, so the result cannot be uncertain, though there is desperate work to be done before the end is in sight.
I cannot give you any idea of what it was like when I went to bed; I sent for Mrs. B., the manager’s wife, and together we watched it from my window.
It was the most awe-inspiring sight I have ever seen. It seemed as if the whole city was on fire, the glow extending right across the heavens and the red glare hundreds of feet high, while above the roar of the fires the whole air seemed vibrating with the noise of the great guns and machine guns. It was an inferno! We remained spellbound.
Yesterday Lord S. had a narrow escape from a sniper who has been worrying this street for two days and could not be located. He was picking off soldiers during the fighting in Grafton Street, but later turned his attention to the cross streets between this and Grafton Street and there as nearly as possible got Lord S., who was coming back to us from the Castle.
The military thought the man was on our roof, which made us all whistle with indignation—the mere idea of the wretch being on our hotel; but a thorough search proved he was not here, though he evidently had access to some roof.
Yesterday afternoon, when the firing in Grafton Street was over, the mob appeared and looted the shops, clearing the great provision shops and others.
From the windows we watched the proceedings, and I never saw anything so brazen! The mob were chiefly women and children, with a sprinkling of men; they swarmed in and out of the side door, bearing huge consignments of bananas, the great bunches on the stalk, to which the children attached a cord and ran away dragging it along; other boys had big orange boxes, which they filled with tinned and bottled fruits. Women with their skirts held up received showers of apples and oranges and all kinds of fruit which were thrown from the upper windows by their pals; and ankle deep on the ground was all the pink and white and silver paper and paper shavings used for packing choice fruits. It was an amazing sight! And nothing daunted these people. Higher up, at another shop, we were told a woman was hanging out of a window dropping down loot to a friend, when she was shot through the head by a sniper, probably our man. The body dropped into the street and the mob cleared. In a few minutes a cart appeared and gathered up the body, and instantly all the mob swarmed back to continue the joyful proceedings!
H. and Lord S. were sitting at the window for a few minutes yesterday when the fruit shop was being looted and saw one of the funniest sights they had ever seen. A very fat, very blowsy old woman emerged from the side street and staggered on to the pavement, laden with far more loot than she could carry; in her arms she had an orange box full of fruit, and under her shawl she had a great bundle tied up, which kept slipping down; having reached the pavement, she put her box down and sat on it! And from her bundle rolled forth many tins of fruit; these she surveyed ruefully, calling on the Almighty and all the Saints to help her! From these she solemnly made her selection, which she bound up in her bundle and hoisted, with many groans and lamentations, on her back and made off with, casting back many longing looks at the pile of things left on the pavement, which were speedily disposed of by small boys!
Humour and tragedy are so intermixed in this catastrophe! A very delicate elderly lady who is staying here said to me this morning, in answer to my inquiry as to how she had slept:
‘I could not sleep at all; when the guns ceased the awful silence made me so nervous!’
I know exactly what she meant; when the roar of the guns ceases you can feel the silence.
5 p.m.—Colonel C. has just come in, having been in the thick of it for 48 hours. He tells us the Post Office has been set on fire by the Sinn Feiners who have left it. If this is true, and it probably is, I fear we have lost all our valuable possessions, including my diamond pendant which was in my jewel-case in H.’s safe.
To-day, about lunch-time, a horrid machine gun gave voice very near us, also the sniper reappeared on the roofs and this afternoon was opposite my bedroom window, judging from the sound. A man might be for weeks on the roofs of these houses among the chimney-stacks and never be found as long as he had access to some house for food. When we were working in my room this afternoon he fired some shots which could not have been more than twenty yards away.
I was almost forgetting to tell you how splendidly one of H.’s men behaved when the G.P.O. was taken. When the rebels took possession they demanded the keys from the man who had them in charge. He quietly handed over the keys, having first abstracted the keys of H.’s room! Imagine such self-possession at such a terrible moment.
6.30 p.m.—A party of soldiers and a young officer have just arrived to search the roof for the sniper. They say he is on the roof of the annexe, which is connected with the main building by covered-in bridges. They are now on the roof and shots are being fired, so I expect they have spotted him.
When N. was out last night another ambulance had a bad experience. They had fetched three wounded Sinn Feiners out of a house and were taking them to hospital, when they came under heavy fire; the driver was killed, so the man beside him took the wheel and was promptly wounded in both legs; the car then ran away and wrecked itself on a lamp-post. Another ambulance had to run the gauntlet and go to the rescue! On the whole, as far as possible the rebels have respected the Red Cross, but not the white flag.
Guinness’s brewery have made three splendid armoured cars by putting great long boilers, six feet in diameter, on to their great motor lorries. Holes are bored down the sides to let in air, and they are painted grey; the driver sits inside too; they each carry twenty-two men or a ton of food in absolute security. N. saw them at the Castle being packed with men; nineteen got in, packed like herrings, and three remained outside; up came the sergeant.
‘Now then, gentlemen, move up, move up; the car held twenty-two yesterday, it must hold twenty-two to-day,’ and in the unfortunate three were stuffed. It must have been suffocating, but they were taken to their positions in absolute safety!
29th, Saturday, 4 p.m.—Sir M. N. has just rung up to say the rebels have surrendered unconditionally. We have no details, and the firing continues in various parts of the town; but if the leaders have surrendered it can only be a question of a few hours before peace is restored and we can go forth and look on the wreck and desolation of this great city. So ends, we hope, this appalling chapter in the history of Ireland, days of horror and slaughter comparable only to the Indian Mutiny.
April 30, Sunday, 10 a.m.—This morning we hear the reports of the burning of the whole of Sackville Street were exaggerated. The Imperial Hotel, Clery’s great shop, and one or two others were burnt, but the street as a whole escaped, and the Accountant’s Office and the Sackville Street Club were not touched.
Here I must tell you how absolutely heroic the telephone girls have been at the Exchange. It is in a building a considerable distance from the G.P.O., and the Sinn Feiners have made great efforts to capture it. The girls have been surrounded by firing; shots have several times come into the switch-room, where the men took down the boards from the back of the switch-boards and arranged them as shelters over the girls’ heads to protect them from bullets and broken glass. Eight snipers have been shot on buildings commanding the Exchange, and one of the guard was killed yesterday, and these girls have never failed. They have been on duty since yesterday, sleeping when possible in a cellar, and with indifferent food, and have cheerfully and devotedly stuck to their post, doing the work of forty. Only those on duty at the outbreak of the rebellion could remain, those in their homes could never get back, so with the few men who take the night duty these girls have kept the whole service going; all telegrams have had to be sent by ‘’phone,’ and they have simply saved the situation. It has been magnificent!
The shooting is by no means over, as many of the Sinn Fein strongholds refuse to surrender. Jacob’s biscuit factory is very strongly held, and when the rebels were called on to surrender they refused unless they were allowed to march out carrying their arms!
It is said that when Jacob was told that the military might have to blow up the factory he replied:
‘They may blow it to blazes for all I care; I shall never make another biscuit in Ireland.’
I don’t know if this is true, but it very well may be, for he has been one of the model employers in Dublin. He almost gave up the factory at the time of the Larkin strike, and only continued it for the sake of his people, and so it will be with the few great industries in the city. Dublin is ruined!
Yesterday I made a joyful discovery. When we came back from Italy in March, H. brought back from the office my large despatch-case, in which I keep all F.’s letters. I did not remember what else was in it, so I investigated and found my necklace with jewelled cross and the pink topaz set—both of these, being in large cases, would not go into the jewel-case,—also the large old paste buckle, so I am not absolutely destitute of jewelry. But, best of all, there were the three little handkerchiefs F. sent me from Armentières with my initial worked on them; for these I was grieving more than for anything, and when I found them the relief was so great I sat with them in my hand and cried!
This week has been a wonderful week for N. Never before has a boy of just seventeen had such an experience. Yesterday morning he was at the Automobile Club filling cans of petrol from casks for the Red Cross ambulances; he came in to lunch reeking of petrol! In the afternoon he went round with the Lord Mayor in an ambulance collecting food for forty starving refugees from the burnt-out district, housed in the Mansion House, and after tea went out for wounded and brought in an old man of seventy-eight shot through the body. He was quite cheery over it and asked N. if he thought he would recover. ‘Good Lord! Yes; why not?’ said N., and bucked the old man up!
There is intermittent firing in all directions. I doubt if it will quite cease for some days, as their strongholds will not surrender.
May 1, 11 a.m.—I had no time to continue this yesterday, but during the afternoon three of the rebel strongholds surrendered, Jacob’s, Boland’s, and the College of Surgeons on St. Stephen’s Green. From this last building 160 men surrendered and were marched down Grafton Street. It is said that among them was Countess Marcovitz, dressed in a man’s uniform; it is also said that the military made her take down the green Republican flag flying over the building herself and replace it by a white one. When she surrendered she took off her bandolier and kissed it and her revolver before handing them to the officer. She has been one of the most dangerous of the leaders. People who saw them marched down Grafton Street said they held themselves erect, and looked absolutely defiant!
Yesterday H. revisited the Telephone Exchange and a point was cleared up that had mystified everyone; and that is why, when the rebels on Easter Monday took every building of importance and every strategic position, did they overlook the Telephone Exchange? Had they taken it we should have been absolutely powerless, unable to send messages or telegrams for troops. The Exchange is situated in Crown Alley, off Dame Street, and the Superintendent told H. an extraordinary story. It seems when they had taken the G.P.O. they marched a detachment to take the Exchange, when just as they were turning into Crown Alley an old woman rushed towards them with arms held up calling out ‘Go back, go back; the place is crammed with military.’ And, supposing it to be in the hands of our troops, they turned back! This was at noon; at 5 P.M. our troops arrived and took it over.
This saved the whole situation! Whether the woman was on our side, or if she thought she had seen soldiers, will never be known....
I have just returned from walking round the G.P.O. and Sackville Street with H. and some of the officials. It passes all my powers of description; only one word describes it: ‘desolation.’ If you look at pictures of Ypres or Louvain after the bombardment, it will give you some idea of the scene.
We looked up through the windows of the G.P.O. and saw the safe that was in H.’s room still in the wall, and the door does not appear to have been opened or the safe touched; but the whole place has been such an inferno, one would think that door must have been red-hot. Among all the débris the fire was still smouldering, and we could not penetrate inside. Do you realise that out of all H.’s library he does not possess a single book, except one volume of his Dante, and I not even a silver teaspoon!
Everything belonging to F. has gone; as he gave his life in the war, so an act of war has robbed us of everything belonging to him, our most precious possession!
May 2, 10 a.m.—Last evening I walked all round the ruined district. The streets were thronged with people, and threading their way among the crowd were all sorts of vehicles—carts carrying the bodies of dead horses, that had been shot the first day and lain in the streets ever since; Fire Brigade ambulances followed by Irish cars bringing priests and driven by Fire Brigade men. The motors with Red Cross emblems, carrying white-jacketed doctors, would dart along, followed by a trail of Red Cross nurses on bicycles, in their print dresses and white overalls, their white cap ends floating behind them, all speeding on their errand of mercy to the stricken city.
From time to time we came across on the unwashed pavement the large dark stain telling its own grim story, and in some places the blood had flowed along the pavement for some yards and down into the gutters; but enough of horrors. We came sadly back, and on the steps we met Mr. O’B. returning from a similar walk. He could hardly speak of it, and said he stood in Sackville Street and cried, and many other men did the same.
Out of all the novel experiences of the last eight days, two things struck me very forcibly. The first is that under circumstances that might well have tried the nerves of the strongest, there has been no trace of fear or panic among the people in the hotel, either among the guests or staff. Anxiety for absent friends of whom no tidings could be heard, though living only in the next square, one both felt and heard, but of fear for their own personal safety I have seen not one trace, and the noise of battle after the first two days seemed to produce nothing but boredom. The other fact is a total absence of thankfulness at our own escape.
It may come, I don’t know; others may feel it, I don’t. I don’t pretend to understand it, but so it is. Life as it has been lived for the last two years in the midst of death seems to have blunted one’s desire for it, and completely changed one’s feelings towards the Hereafter.
AN AMERICAN AMBULANCE IN THE VERDUN ATTACK.
BY FRANK HOYT GAILOR
‘Our artillery and automobiles have saved Verdun,’ French officers and soldiers were continually telling me. And as I look back on two months of ambulance-driving in the attack, it seems to me that automobiles played a larger part than even the famous ‘seventy-fives,’ for without motor transport there would have been no ammunition and no food. One shell, accurately placed, will put a railway communication out of the running, but automobiles must be picked off one by one as they come within range.
The picture of the attack that will stay with me always is that of the Grande Route north from Bar-le-Duc, covered with the snow and ice of the last days of February. The road was always filled with two columns of trucks, one going north and the other coming south. The trucks, loaded with troops, shells, and bread, rolled and bobbled back and forth with the graceless, uncertain strength of baby elephants. It was almost impossible to steer them on the icy roads. Many of them fell by the wayside, overturned, burned up, or were left apparently unnoticed in the ceaseless tide of traffic that never seemed to hurry or to stop.
All night and all day it continued. Soon the roads began to wear out. Trucks brought stones from the ruins of the Battle of the Marne and sprinkled them in the ruts and holes; soldiers, dodging in and out of the moving cars, broke and packed the stones or sprinkled sand on the ice-covered hillsides. But the traffic was never stopped for any of these things. The continuous supply had its effect on the demand. There were more troops than were needed for the trenches, so they camped along the road or in the fields. Lines of camions ran off the road and unloaded the reserve of bread; the same thing was done with the meat, which kept well enough in the snow; and the shells, which a simple camouflage of white tarpaulins effectually hid from the enemy airmen.
At night, on the main road, I have watched for hours the dimmed lights of the camions, winding away north and south like the coils of some giant and luminous snake which never stopped and never ended. It was impressive evidence of a great organisation that depended and was founded on the initiative of its members. Behind each light was a unit, the driver, whose momentary negligence might throw the whole line into confusion. Yet there were no fixed rules to save him from using his brain quickly and surely as each crisis presented itself. He must be continually awake to avoid any one of a thousand possible mischances. The holes and ice on the road, his skidding car, the cars passing in the same and opposite directions, the cars in front and behind, the cars broken down on the sides of the road—all these and many other things he had to consider before using brake or throttle in making his way along. Often snow and sleet storms were added to make driving more difficult. Objects six feet away were completely invisible, and it was only by watching the trees along the side of the road that one could attempt to steer.
I was connected with the Service des Autos as a driver in Section No. 2 of the Field Service of the American Ambulance of Neuilly. We had the usual French section of twenty ambulances and one staff car, but, unlike the other sections, we had only one man to a car. There were two officers, one the Chief of Section, Walter Lovell, a graduate of Harvard University and formerly a member of the Boston Stock Exchange; and George Roder, Mechanical Officer, in charge of the supply of parts and the repair of cars. Before the war, he was a promising bacteriologist in the Rockefeller Institute. Our section was one of five which compose the field service of the American Ambulance, and are located at various points along the front from Dunkirk to the Vosges. The general direction of the Field Service is in the hands of A. Piatt Andrew, formerly professor at Harvard and Assistant Secretary of the United States Treasury. He has organised the system by which volunteers and funds are obtained in America, and is the responsible link between the work of the service and the will of the French authorities.
In each of the five sections there are twenty drivers, all Americans and volunteers. Most of them are college men who have come over from the United States to ‘do their bit’ for France and see the war at the same time. Certainly our section was gathered from the four corners of the ‘States.’ One, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, had worked for two years on the Panama Canal as an engineer; another, an Alaskan, had brought 200 dogs over for the French Government, to be used for transportation in the Vosges; a third was a well-known American novelist who had left his home at Florence to be a chauffeur for France. There were also two architects, a New York undertaker, several soi-disant students, and a man who owned a Mexican ranch that was not sufficiently flourishing to keep him at home.
The term of service required by the French authorities is now six months, though, of course, some of the men have been in the section since the Battle of the Marne. We all got five sous a day and rations as privates in the French army, which was represented in our midst by a lieutenant, a maréchal de logis, a mechanic, and a cook.
On February 22 our French lieutenant gave us our ‘order to move,’ but all he could tell us about our destination was that we were going north. We started from Bar-le-Duc about noon, and it took us six hours to make forty miles through roads covered with snow, swarming with troops, and all but blocked by convoys of food carts and sections of trucks. Of course, we knew that there was an attack in the neighbourhood of Verdun, but we did not know who was making it or how it was going. Then about four o’clock in the short winter twilight we passed two or three regiments of French colonial troops on the march with all their field equipment. I knew who and what they were by the curious Eastern smell that I had always before associated with camels and circuses. They were lined up on each side of the road around their soup kitchens, which were smoking busily, and I had a good look at them as we drove along.
It was the first time I had seen an African army in the field, and though they had had a long march they were cheerful and in high spirits at the prospect of battle. They were all young, active men, and of all colours and complexions, from blue-eyed blonds to shiny blacks. They all wore khaki and brown shrapnel casques bearing the trumpet insignia of the French sharpshooter. We were greeted with laughter and chaff, for the most part, in an unknown chatter, but now and again some one would say, ‘Hee, hee, Ambulance Americaine,’ or ‘Yes, Ingliish, Good-bye.’
I was fortunate enough to pick up one of their non-commissioned officers with a bad foot who was going our way. He was born in Africa, which accounted for his serving in the colonials, though his mother was American and his father French. From him I learned that the Germans were attacking at Verdun, and that, to everyone’s surprise, they were trying to drive the point of the salient south instead of cutting it off from east to west. As we were passing along, one of his men shouted something to him about riding in an ambulance, and I remarked that they all seemed in a very good humour. ‘Oh yes,’ he answered; ‘we’re glad to be on the move, as we’ve been en repos since autumn in a small quiet place south of Paris.’ ‘But it means trouble,’ he added proudly, ‘their sending us up, for we are never used except in attacks, and were being saved for the summer. Six hundred have been killed in my company since the beginning, so I have seen something of this war. Now my regiment is mixed up with two others, and altogether we make about 4000 men.’
As we talked, I realised that his was a different philosophy from that of the ordinary poilu that I had been carrying. Certainly he loved France and was at war for her; but soldiering was his business and fighting was his life. Nothing else counted. He had long since given up any thought of coming out alive, so the ordinary limitations of life and death did not affect him. He wanted to fight and last as long as possible to leave a famous name in his regiment, and to add as many citations as possible to the three medals he had already gained. He was the only man I ever met who was really eager to get back to the trenches, and he said to me with a smile when I stopped to let him off, ‘Thanks for the lift, my old, but I hope you don’t have to carry me back.’
After that we rode north along the Meuse, through a beautiful country where the snow-covered hills, with their sky-lines of carefully pruned French trees, made me think of masterpieces of Japanese art. In the many little villages there was much excitement and activity with troops, artillery, and munitions being rushed through to the front, and the consequent wild rumours of great attacks and victories. Curiously enough, there were few who thought of defeat. They were all sure, even when a retreat was reported, that the French were winning, and that spirit of confidence had much to do with stopping the Germans.
At about six in the evening we reached our destination some forty miles north-east of Bar-le-Duc. The little village where we stopped had been a railroad centre until the day before, when the Germans started bombarding it. Now the town was evacuated, and the smoking station deserted. The place had ceased to exist, except for a hospital which was established on the southern edge of the town in a lovely old chateau, overlooking the Meuse. We were called up to the hospital as soon as we arrived to take such wounded as could be moved to the nearest available railhead, which was ten miles away, on the main road, and four miles south of Verdun. We started out in convoy, but with the then conditions of traffic, it was impossible to stick together, and it took some of us till five o’clock the next morning to make the trip. That was the beginning of the attack for us, and the work of ‘evacuating’ the wounded to the railway stations went steadily on until March 15. It was left to the driver to decide how many trips it was physically possible for him to make in each twenty-four hours. There were more wounded than could be carried, and no one could be certain of keeping any kind of schedule with the roads as they then were.
Sometimes we spent five or six hours waiting at a cross-road, while columns of troops and their equipment filed steadily by. Sometimes at night we could make a trip in two hours that had taken us ten in daylight. Sometimes, too, we crawled slowly to a station only to find it deserted, shells falling, and the hospital moved to some still more distant point of the line. Situations and conditions changed from day to day—almost from hour to hour. One day it was sunshine and spring, with roads six inches deep in mud, no traffic, and nothing to remind one of war, except the wounded in the car and the distant roar of the guns, which sounded like a giant beating a carpet. The next day it was winter again, with mud turned to ice, the roads blocked with troops, and the Germans turning hell loose with their heavy guns.
In such a crisis as those first days around Verdun, ammunition and fresh men are the all-essential things. The wounded are the déchets, the ‘has-beens’, and so must take second place. But the French are too gallant and tender-hearted not to make sacrifices. I remember one morning I was slapped off the road into a ditch with a broken axle, while passing a solitary camion. The driver got down, came over, and apologised for the accident, which was easily half my fault. Then we unloaded four cases of ‘seventy-five’ shells that he was carrying, and put my three wounded in on the floor of his car. He set out slowly and carefully up the ice-covered road, saying to me with a smile as he left, ‘Don’t let the Boches get my marmites while I’m gone.’ For some time I sat there alone on the road, watching the shells break on a hill some miles away to the north, and wondering when I could get word back to the ‘base’ of my mishap. Then a staff car appeared down the road making its way along slowly and with difficulty, because, being without chains, it skidded humorously with engine racing and the chauffeur trying vainly to steer. There was a captain of the Service des Autos sitting on the front seat, and he was so immaculately clean and well groomed that he seemed far away from work of any kind. But when the car stopped completely about half-way up the little hill on which I was broken down, he jumped out, took off his fur coat, and using it to give the rear wheels a grip on the ice, he swung it under the car. As the wheels passed over it, he picked it up and swung it under again. So the car climbed the hill and slid down the other slope round the curve and out of sight. It was just another incident that made me realise the spirit and energy of the French Automobile Service. But the captain had not solved any of my difficulties. He had been too busy to notice me or wonder why an American ambulance was sprawled in a ditch with four cases of shells alongside.
I had been waiting there in the road about two hours when another American came by and took back word of my accident and of the parts necessary to set it right. Then about noon my friend came back in his camion to take up his cases of shells and report my wounded safe at the railway station. We lunched together on the front seat of the camion on bread, tinned ‘monkey meat,’ and red wine, while he told me stories about his life as a driver. He had been on his car then for more than twenty days without leaving it for food or sleep. That morning his ‘partner’ had been wounded by a shell, so he had to drive all that day alone. Usually the two men drive two hours, turn and turn about; while one is driving, the other can eat, sleep, or read the day before yesterday’s newspaper. The French camions are organised in sections of twenty. Usually each section works in convoy, and has its name and mark painted on its cars. I saw some with elephants or ships, some with hearts or diamonds, clubs or spades, some with dice—in fact every imaginable symbol has been used to distinguish the thousands of sections in the service. The driver told me there were more than ten thousand trucks working between Verdun and Bar-le-Duc. There is great rivalry between the men of the several sections in matters of speed and load—especially between the sections of French and those of American or Italian cars. The American product has the record for speed, which is, however, offset by its frequent need of repair.
My friend told me about trips he had made up as far as the third line trenches, and how they were using ‘seventy-fives’ like machine-guns in dug-outs, where the shells were fired at ‘zero’ so that they exploded immediately after leaving the mouth of the gun. The French, he said, would rather lose guns than men, and according to him, there were so many guns placed in the ‘live’ parts of the sector that the wheels touched, and so formed a continuous line.
As soon as we had finished lunch he left me, and I waited for another two hours until the American staff car (in other surroundings I should call it an ordinary Ford touring car with a red cross or so added), came along loaded with an extra ‘rear construction,’ and driven by the chief himself. It took us another four hours to remove my battered rear axle and put in the new parts, but my car was back in service by midnight.
That was a typical instance of the kind of accident that was happening, and there were about three ‘Ford casualties’ every day. Thanks to the simplicity of the mechanism of the Ford, and to the fact that, with the necessary spare parts, the most serious indisposition can be remedied in a few hours, our section has been at the front for a year—ten months in the Bois-le-Prêtre, and two months at Verdun—without being sent back out of service for general repairs. In the Bois-le-Prêtre we had carried the wounded from the dressing stations to the first hospital, while at Verdun we were on service from the hospital to the railheads. In this latter work of évacuation the trips were much longer, thirty to ninety miles, so the strain on the cars was correspondingly greater. As our cars, being small and fast, carried only three wounded on stretchers or five seated, our relative efficiency was low in comparison with the wear and tear of the ‘running gear’ and the amount of oil and petrol used. But in the period from February 22 to March 13, twenty days, with an average of eighteen cars working, we carried 2046 wounded 18,915 miles. This would be no record on good open roads, but with the conditions I have already described I think it justified the existence of our volunteer organisation—if it needed justification. Certainly the French thought so, but they are too generous to be good judges.
Except for our experiences on the road, there was little romance in the daily routine. True, we were under shell fire, and had to sleep in our cars or in a much-inhabited hayloft, and eat in a little inn, half farmhouse and half stable, where the food was none too good and the cooking none too clean; but we all realised that the men in the trenches would have made of such conditions a luxurious paradise, so that kept us from thinking of it as anything more than a rather strenuous ‘camping out.’
During the first days of the attack, the roads were filled with refugees from the town of Verdun and the country north of it. As soon as the bombardment started, civilians were given five hours to leave, and we saw them—old men, women, and children—struggling along through the snow on their way south. It was but another of those sad migrations that occur so often in the ‘Zone des Armées.’ The journey was made difficult and often dangerous for them by the columns of skidding trucks, so the more timid took to the fields or the ditches at the roadside. They were for the most part the petits bourgeois who had kept their shops open until the last minute, to make the town gay for the troops, who filed through the Promenade de la Digue in an endless queue on their way to and from the trenches. Most of them had saved nothing but the clothes on their backs, though I saw one old woman courageously trundling a barrow overflowing with laces, post cards, bonbons (doubtless the famous Dragées Verdunoises), and other similar things which had been part of her stock-in-trade, and with which she would establish a Verdun souvenir shop when she found her new home. There were many peasant carts loaded with every imaginable article of household goods from stoves to bird cages, but no matter what else a cart might contain, there was always a mattress with the members of the family, old and young, bouncing along on top. So ubiquitous was this mattress that I asked about it, and was told that the French peasant considers it the most important of his Lares, for it is there his babies are born and his old people die—there too, is the family bank, the hiding-place for the bas de laine.
All the people, no matter what their class or station, were excited. Some were resigned, some weeping, some quarrelling, but every face reflected terror and suffering, for these derelicts had been suddenly torn from the ruins of their old homes and their old lives after passing through two days of the heaviest bombardment the world has ever seen.
I did not wonder at their grief or terror when I had seen the town from which they fled. Sometimes it is quiet, with no shells and no excitement; at others it is a raging hell, a modern Pompeii in the ruining. Often I passed through the town, hearing and seeing nothing to suggest that any enemy artillery was within range. But one morning I went up to take a doctor to a near-by hospital, and had just passed under one of the lovely old twelfth-century gates, with its moat and towers, when the Germans commenced their morning hate. I counted 150 shells, ‘arrivés,’ in the first quarter of an hour.
After making my way up on the old fortifications in the north-eastern quarter, I had an excellent view of the whole city—a typical garrison town of Northern France spreading over its canals and river up to the Citadel and Cathedral on the heights. Five and six shells were shrieking overhead at the same time, and a corresponding number of houses in the centre of the town going up in dust and débris, one after another, almost as fast as I could count.
During this bedlam a military gendarme strolled up as unconcerned as if he had been looking out for a stranger in the Champs Elysées. He told me about a dug-out that was somewhere ‘around the corner.’ But we both got so interested watching the shells and their effect that we stayed where we were. The gendarme had been in the town long enough to become an authority on bombardments, and he could tell me the different shells and what they were hitting, from the coloured smoke which rose after each explosion and hung like a pall over the town in the windless spring air. When the shells fell on the Cathedral—often there were three breaking on and around it at the same time—there sprang up a white cloud, while on the red tiles and zinc roofs they exploded in brilliant pink and yellow puffs. The air was filled with the smell of the burning celluloid and coal-tar products used in the manufacture of the high explosive and incendiary shells. It was very impressive, and even my friend the gendarme said, ‘C’est chic, n’est-ce pas? It’s the heaviest rain we have had for several days.’ Then he pointed to the left where a column of flame and smoke, heavier than that from the shells, was rising, and said, ‘Watch them now, and you’ll understand their system, the cochons. That’s a house set afire with their incendiary shells, and now they will throw shrapnel around it to keep our firemen from putting it out.’ And so they did, for I could see the white puffs of the six-inch shrapnel shells breaking in and around the column of black smoke, which grew denser all the time. Then two German Taubes, taking advantage of the smoke, came over and dropped bombs, for no other reason than to add terror to the confusion. But the eighty firemen, a brave little band brought up from Paris with their hose-carts and engine, refused to be confused or terrified. Under the shells and smoke we could see the streams of water playing on the burning house. ‘They are working from the cellars,’ said the gendarme. It was fortunate there was no wind, for that house was doomed, and but for the fact that all the buildings were stone, the fire would have spread over all that quarter of the town despite the gallantry of the firemen.
The bombardment continued steadily for about two hours and a half, until several houses were well alight and many others completely destroyed. Then about noon it stopped as suddenly as it had started. I wanted to go down and watch the firemen work, but the gendarme, who had produced an excellent bottle of no ordinary ‘pinard,’ said, ‘Wait awhile, my old, that is part of the system. They have only stopped to let the people come out. In a few minutes it will start again, when they will have more chance of killing somebody.’
But for once he was wrong, and after waiting with him for half an hour, I went down to the first house I had seen catch fire. The firemen were still there, working with hose and axe to prevent the fire from spreading. The four walls of the house were still standing, but inside there was nothing but a furnace which glowed and leapt into flame with every draught of air, so that the sparks flew over the neighbouring houses, and started other fires which the firemen were busy controlling. These pompiers are no longer civilians. The black uniform and gay brass and leather helmet of Paris fashion have been replaced with the blue-grey of the poilu, with the regulation steel shrapnel casque or bourguignotte. The French press has had many accounts of their heroism since the beginning of the attack. Certainly if any of the town is left, it will be due to their efforts among the ruins. There are only eighty of them in the town. Half of them are men too old for ‘active service,’ yet they have stayed there for two months working night and day under the shells, with the strain of the bombardment added to the usual dangers from falling walls and fire. They are still as gay and eager as ever. Their spirit and motto is the same as that of every soldier and civilian who is doing hard work in these hard times. They all say, ‘It is war,’ or more often, ‘It is for France.’
I left them saving what they could of the house, and walked on over the river through the town. It is truly the Abomination of Desolation. The air was heavy and hot with the smell of explosives and the smoke from the smouldering ruins. Not a sound broke the absolute quiet and not a soul was in sight. I saw two dogs and a cat all slinking about on the search for food, and evidently so crazed with terror that they could not leave their old homes. Finally, crossing over the canal, where the theatre, now a heap of broken beams and stones, used to stand, I met an old bearded Territorial leaning over the bridge with a net in his hand to dip out fish killed by the explosion of the shells in the water. He did not worry about the danger of his position on the bridge, and, like all true fishermen, when they have had good luck, he was happy and philosophical. ‘One must live,’ said he, ‘and it’s very amiable of the Boches to keep us in fish with their marmites, n’est-ce pas, mon vieux?’ We chatted for a while of bombardments, falling walls, and whether the Germans would reach Verdun. He, of course, like every soldier in that region, was volubly sure they would not. Then I went on up the hill towards the Cathedral, by the old library, which was standing with doors and windows wide open, and with the well-ordered books still on the tables and in the shelves. As yet it is untouched by fire or shell, but too near the bridge to escape for long.
I continued my way through streets filled with fallen wires, broken glass, and bits of shell. Here and there were dead horses and broken waggons caught in passing to or from the lines. There is nothing but ruins left of the lovely residential quarter below the Cathedral. The remaining walls of the houses, gutted by flame and shell, stand in a wavering line along a street, blocked with débris, and with furniture and household articles that the firemen have saved. The furniture is as safe in the middle of the street as anywhere else in the town. As I passed along I could hear from time to time the crash and roar of falling walls, and see the rising clouds of white stone dust that has settled thickly everywhere.
The Cathedral, with its Bishop’s Palace and cloisters—all fine old structures of which the foundations were laid in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—must from its commanding position overlooking the town, be singled out for destruction. I watched ten shells strike the Cathedral that one morning, and some of them were the terrible ‘380’s,’ the shells of the 16-inch mortars, which make no noise as they approach and tear through to the ground before their explosion.
The interior of the Cathedral, blurred with a half-inch layer of stone dust, is in most ‘unchurchly’ disorder. Four or five shells have torn large holes through the roof of the nave, and twice as many more have played havoc with the chapels and aisles at the side. One has fallen through the gilded canopy over the high altar and broken one of the four supporting columns, which before were monoliths like those of St. Peter’s at Rome. Of course, most of the stained glass windows are scattered in fragments over the floor, and through the openings on the southern side I could see the ruins of the cloisters, with some chairs and a bed literally falling into them from a room of the Bishop’s Palace above.
This destruction of the Cathedral is typical of the purposeless barbarity of the whole proceeding. The wiping out of the town can serve no military purpose. There are no stores of munitions or railway communications to be demolished. Naturally there are no troops quartered in the town, and now all extensive movements of convoys are conducted by other roads than those leading through the town. Yet the bombardment continues day after day, and week after week. The Germans are sending in about £5,000,000 worth of shells a month. ‘It’s spite,’ a poilu said to me; ‘they have made up their minds to destroy the town since they can’t capture it; but it will be very valuable as an iron mine after the war.’
THE SPINE OF AN EMPIRE.
BY MAJOR-GEN. G. F. MACMUNN, C.B., D.S.O.
In Agypt’s land on banks of Noile
King Pharaoh’s royal daughter went to bath in shtoile;
She had her dip and hied into the land,
To dry her royal pelt she ran along the sand.
A Bulrush thripped her and at her foot she saw
The little Moases, in a wad of sthraw.
Fragment, The Finding of Moses, Anon.
Never in the cinema of all time have there been such films to record as on the stage of Egypt. Certain localities are preordained to attract the come and go of the world, and before all others the Nile delta has this property. Its strategical location in the world’s assembling has compelled the holders of power and might and majesty and dominion to crowd therein. No decay of empires can affect the significance of geographical siting. Mena and Cheops and Khefren give place to Amenemhats and Thotmes and a host of Rameses, who yield in turn to such modernities as the Ptolemies, but the Nile remains the Nile, and the Red Sea the waterway from East to West.
As Darius and Xerxes and Alexander were compelled by the call of strategical law, so came Salah-ud-Din and Napoleon and Ferdinand de Lesseps and Sir Garnet Wolseley. And here, too, would come William of Hohenzollern, boasting to break the spine of the British Empire, in the vertebræ that Chesney planned and De Lesseps made.
Between Alexander the Great and William of Hohenzollern the host of moderns has been legion, but it was for Napoleon and his dreams of Eastern Empire to bring the British into the scene to short circuit their sea routes. Since the Corsican brought his legions, his savants, and his artists to the Pyramids, the English have entered into the joint control of the Levant, and to help them have brought the armies of India. With Abercromby came David Baird and his sepoys. Sir Garnet Wolseley, in Egypt and in the Soudan, had Indian troops to help him, and now, lest William of Hohenzollern and his Ottoman allies should ‘break the British spine,’ and disturb the peace and plenty of Egypt, not only has India sent troops, but all elements of the Empire far and near. Never, even in the days of Alexander’s armies, had so many varied contingents garrisoned Egypt, as came when the Hun threatened the Canal in force.
In the late autumn of 1915, what time Serbia was broken on the wheel, the Hun determined to overrun Egypt and Sinai and Goshen, breaking thereby the British spine. But the Mistress of the Sea said No. The army of Gallipoli was conjured back from the Hellespont and the outer Empire sent its levies, and the great plans of the All-Highest were ‘postponed.’
The force gathered in Egypt was the most wonderful combination of the Empire that can be imagined. To the gathering came first and most famous a division of the old army, the army that has held the line from the Yser to the Aisne, and lies in a grave and lives in a memory for its guerdon, the world round. With them were Territorial divisions, and divisions of the new army, brigades of yeomen, divisions from Australia and New Zealand, the Maoris cheek by jowl with the white, a model in this respect to the rest of the Empire. Not only was the Indian army proper there—Gurkha, Sikh, and Pathan in due and ancient form—but the armies of the protected states, those imperial service contingents, the wisdom of their conception yearly more apparent. But the tally of Empire ended not with Gwalior, Mysore, and Bikaneer. Hospitals from Canada, Sambo from the West Indies cleaning his rifle to Moody and Sankey hymns, and the Afrikander corps of Dutch and English added to that pageant of Empire, standing four-square with the troops of the Sultan himself.
Strategically to the world’s power and commerce, the situation of Egypt is as favourable now as in the days of Alexander, and troops are as well placed there against emergency as anywhere, and as the danger to Egypt lessened were ready to be sent by those who rule the sea North, South, East, or West. Troops can come and go and be switched back quicker than foes can assemble.
The defending of the canal, a waterless tract, void of roads in its immediate vicinity, is no easy matter and a subject of much controversy, the manner of its defence depending, like that of most other localities, on the troops available and the strength of the enemy threat. The difficulties have been overcome by a herculean effort. Atkins bathes happily in its water, and watches the ships of allies and of neutrals—those lesser breeds who wait—pass us safely.
To most of the English the canal has seemed a desert track dotted with lonely gares, akin in their solitude to a Red Sea lighthouse. A further acquaintance with them has dispelled many imaginings. The gares, the friendly chefs de gare, and their brimming quivers have assumed a different aspect from their ancient one of milestones on the road to India.
British patrols thread the ancient course of the Nile now dry, the Pelusiac and Tanaitic channels that found the sea east of the canal and explain the delta-like lagoons that still remain. The ruins of Pelusium and the ancient channel explain how Cleopatra, defeated on the high seas, escaped by water inland to Damietta, and how the Holy Family found the road to Egypt far easier than it is now. Across Lake Menzalah from Port Said lie the ruins of Tanais, the capital of the Pharaohs in the time of Moses. El Qantara, a British post, closes the road from Palestine to Egypt that has run since time was, and that has seen in our own time the legions of Napoleon march by the bridge over the arm of the marsh for Syria. ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ with a vengeance, many, poor souls, to die miserably.
And no doubt over the El Qantara rode also the savants in their high hats and veils, their long directoire coats and their striped pantaloons—like any member of the various royal societies of to-day, but with the chill off—while the escorting chasseurs chaffed them and their umbrellas.
So to-day Port Said and Suez and Ismailia and Cairo are full of the soldiery, and a wide camp is spread under the Pyramid of Ghizr, and young officers walk along the groyne at Port Said, asking ‘what is the history of that funny old green statue’ which stands a wonder of the world, like the Phare in ancient Alexandria. Shades of Ferdinand de Lesseps and Rawdon Chesney! What, indeed, is the history of that ‘funny old green statue,’ and the ‘spine of the British Empire’ as the Hun has immortalised it? It is a phrase for which we may thank William of Hohenzollern.
The mass of the force in Egypt transferred from Gallipoli, rage the ‘unterseebote’ never so fiercely, is resting and retraining. If you’ve been six months on Gallipoli you’ll run a mile to see a nursing sister, and both Atkins and his officers are soft of heart. Graceful Cairenes in French cut skirts of black crépe de chine with ever the topmost button undone, with black head-shawls of the same material, and evanescent veils that faintly cloud to distraction the face below the eyes, are strong wine for young soldiers. So attractive is the dress that the old hand will tell you that many another than Cairenes will don the dress when out for a spree—a disguise that also enhances attraction is a good find, mesdames!
Atkins himself and Hotspur the yeoman are nothing if not gallant. Here is a true story from Port Said. Time about 8 P.M. Attractive English lady hears two soldiers walking fast behind who come up one on either side.
First Soldier. Beg pardon, miss, do you speak English?
Attractive Lady. Yes.
Both Soldiers. Oh, you are English!
First Soldier. I think we saw you waving out of the window.
Attractive Lady. I think you are mistaking me for Mrs. Brown’s nursemaid!
Second Soldier (severely). You must be an ass to take this young lady for a nursemaid!
Both Soldiers. Perhaps we ought not to have spoken, but we are very lonely—may we walk with you?
Attractive Lady. I am going this way.
First Soldier. Would you tell us who you are, miss?
Attractive Lady. I am the chaplain’s sister. (Sensation and silence.)
First Soldier (plucking up courage). We never saw a chaplain’s sister like you before.
Second Soldier. No, indeed, only one I knew was enough to give you the ’orrors.
Attractive Lady (somewhat flattered, stopping at door of a house under a street lamp). I must say good-night now. I live here.
Both Soldiers. Now we see you we are sorry we spoke to you, for we can see you are more one for the officers than for us.
(Exit.)
And so it runs from Putney to Port Said, and from Cambridge to Cairo. Soldiers are very susceptible gents, as the late Francis Bacon knew and so stated.
And while one big army has delved and dug and built on the canal and taken toll of Sinai, another force has chased the Senussi up and down the Western desert, and yeomen from the shires have watered their horses at the garden steps of the week-end villa at Matrush, where Antony entertained Cleopatra. This is no doubt foretold by one of the minor prophets whom Voltaire considered capable de tout. It is certainly a dramatic event for those who moralise on empires’ rise and wane.
Hardly less striking is the prolonged pursuit and charge of the Senussi by His Grace of Westminster at the head of the motor bandits—as the army will call the armoured motor-car—in that same Western desert. The hyacinth and the iris grew for a wonder on surface free from shifting sands, and the armoured car trick was brought off in a fashion and with a dash that its promoters could hardly have hoped for in their most enthusiastic moments.
War has brought many surprises and troubles to the desert and its denizens. In Sinai, where the Bedouin lives by the date palm, there has come starvation, and why? Because the female date must be fertilised by hand, and the male dates are few and far between. The date fertiliser is a skilled professional and lives in Egypt, and Turks in Sinai have meant that date trees go unwed. The which is a parable. There is no remedy save perhaps one similar to that suggested by the American mayor to the man who complained that the ‘wather had come into me back cellar and drowned all me hins.’ ‘Young man, I should advise you to keep ducks,’ and the Bedouin might grow the hermaphrodite date. In the country of the scarabæus it might well be found as Alexander’s soldiers left it on the Indus. If war has brought harm to some, it has in Egypt brought profit to the many, and the Greek is ever ready to trade, and merchants one and all have risen to the occasion and waxed fat. In Alexandria the Greek influence is very great and sympathy with the Allies considerable. The Greek will tell you they come of a northern stock, and will quote the body worship of the bel âge to illustrate affinity with the English, and that Greeks alone of all Levantine races or Latin races either have pronounced ‘th’ since time was like the English—which, be it true or false, all makes for good trade. The soldiery all the year are better than the Americans in the winter, and Young Australia has money to spend.
Another wonder of the ages is that Egypt from the Pyramids to Tel el Kebir should be the Aldershot of the Australians and New Zealanders, where Tommy Cornstalk learns to obey for a common cause and to let off steam in the process.
And over it all grin in the morning sun the Ethiopian lips of the Sphinx—noting one more trivial mark of chalk on granite, one more grain of sand in the hour-glass, one more struggle of the captains and the kings, one more grim grin at peoples rending themselves—perhaps the thousand-year-long grin sprang from the knowledge that it had only to endure long enough to see William of Hohenzollern show the world the way of peace, while the very sand mocked back again.
‘SWEET LAVENDER.’
BY GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM.
Was ever a name less appropriately given? I have heard of a Paradise Court in a grimy city slum and a dilapidated whitewashed house on the edge of a Connaught bog which had somehow got itself called Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names moved me only to mirth mingled with a certain sadness. Sweet Lavender is a sheer astonishment. I hear the words and think of the edgings of old garden borders, straggling spiky little bushes with palely, unobtrusive flowers. I think of linen cupboards, of sheets and pillow-cases redolent with very delicate perfume. I think of the women who wander through such gardens, who find a pride in their store of scented house-linen, delicately nurtured ladies, very gentle, a little tinged with melancholy, innocent, sweet. My thoughts wander through memories and guesses about their ways of life. Nothing in the whole long train of thought prepares me for, or tends in any way to suggest this Sweet Lavender.
It is a building. In the language of the Army—the official language—it is a hut; but hardly more like the hut of civil life than it is like the flower from which it takes its name. The walls are of thin wood. The roof is corrugated iron. It contains two long low halls. Glaring electric lights hang from the rafters. They must glare if they are to shine at all, for the air is thick with tobacco smoke. Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of soldiers. In one, that which we enter first, the men are sitting, packed close together at small tables. They turn over the pages of illustrated papers. They drink tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns and slices of bread and butter. They write those letters home which express so little and, to those who understand, mean so much. Of the letters written home from camp, half at least are on paper which bear the stamp of the Y.M.C.A.—paper given to all who ask in this hut and a score of others. Reading, eating, drinking, writing, chatting, or playing draughts, everybody smokes. Everybody, such is the climate, reeks with damp. Everybody is hot. The last thing that the air suggests to the nose of one who enters is the smell of Sweet Lavender.
In the other, the inner hall, there are more men, still more closely packed together, smoking more persistently, and the air is even denser. Here no one is eating, no one reading. Few attempt to write. The evening’s entertainment is about to begin. On a narrow platform at one end of the hall is a piano. A pianist has taken possession of it. He has been selected by no one in authority, elected by no committee. He has occurred, emerged from the mass of men; by virtue of some energy within him has made good his position in front of the instrument. He flogs the keys and above the babel of talk sounds some rag-time melody, once popular, now forgotten or despised at home. Here or there a voice takes up the tune and sings or chants it. The audience begin to catch the spirit of the entertainment. Some one calls the name of Corporal Smith. A man struggles from his seat and leaps on to the platform. He is greeted with applauding cheers. There is a short consultation between him and the pianist. A tentative chord is struck. Corporal Smith nods approval and turns to the audience. His song begins. If it is the kind of song which has a chorus the audience shouts it, and Corporal Smith conducts the singing with wavings of his arm.
Corporal Smith is a popular favourite. We know his worth as a singer, demand and applaud him. But there are other candidates for favour. Before the applause has died away, while still acknowledgments are being bowed, another man takes his place on the platform. He is a stranger, and no one knows what he will sing. But the pianist is a man of genius. Whisper to him the name of a song, give even a hint of its nature, let him guess at the kind of voice, bass, baritone, tenor, and he will vamp an accompaniment. He has his difficulties. A singer will start at the wrong time, will for a whole verse perhaps make noises in a different key; the pianist never fails. Somehow, before very long, instrument and singer get together—more or less. There is no dearth of singers, no bashful hanging back, no waiting for polite pressure. Everyone who can sing, or thinks he can, is eager to display his talent. There is no monotony. A boisterous comic song is succeeded by one about summer roses, autumn leaves, and the kisses of a maiden at a stile. The vagaries of a drunkard are a matter for roars of laughter. A song about the beauty of the rising moon pleases us all equally well. An original genius sings a song of his own composition, rough-hewn verses set to a familiar tune, about the difficulty of obtaining leave and the longing that is in all our hearts for a return to ‘Blighty; dear old Blighty.’ Did ever men before fix such a name on the standard for which they fight? Now and again some one comes forward with a long narrative song, a kind of ballad chanted to a tune very difficult to catch. It is about as hard to keep track with the story as to pick up the tune. Words—better singers fail in the same way—are not easily distinguished, though the man does his best, clears his throat carefully between each verse and spits over the edge of the platform to improve his enunciation. No one objects to that. About manners and dress the audience is very little critical. But about the merits of the songs and the singers the men express their opinions with the utmost frankness. The applause is genuine, and the singer who wins it is under no doubt about its reality. The song which makes no appeal is simply drowned by loud talk, and the unfortunate singer will crack his voice in vain in an endeavour to regain the attention he has lost.
Encores are rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one, unmistakably, with an imitation of a drunkard singing ‘Alice, where art Thou?’ The pianist fails to keep in touch with the hiccoughing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight and continues to yell till the singer comes forward again. This time he gives us a song about leaving home, a thing of heart-rending pathos, and we wail the chorus:
‘It’s sad to be giving the last hand-shake,
It’s sad the last long kiss to take,
It’s sad to say farewell.’
The entertainment draws to its close about 8 o’clock. Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the réveillé at 5.30 in the morning. The end is always the same, but always comes strangely, always as a surprise. We sing a hymn, for choice a very sentimental hymn. We say a short prayer, often as rugged and unconventional as the entertainment itself. Then ‘The King.’ In these two words we announce the national anthem, and the men stand stiffly to attention while they sing. At half-past eight, by order of the supreme authorities, Sweet Lavender hut must close its doors. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a last glass of Horlick’s Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud to our tents. This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served. Dripping cups and sticky buns are passed to them with inconceivable rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for, something whose value to them is above all measuring with pennies—the friendly smile, the kindly word, of a woman. We can partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this work—servile, sticky, dull work—for men who are neither kith nor kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do; without praise, pay, or hope of honours, often without thanks. If ‘the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom,’ surely these deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance of surpassing sweetness. Perhaps, after all, the hut is well-named Sweet Lavender. The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies. It is not every Y.M.C.A. which is honoured with a name. Sweet Lavender stands alone here among huts distinguished only by numbers. But surely they should all be called after flowers, for in them grow the sweetest blooms of all.
BILFRED.
BY JEFFERY E. JEFFERY.
... Fellow creature I am, fellow-servant
Of God: can man fathom God’s dealings with us?...
Oh! man! we, at least, we enjoy, with thanksgiving,
God’s gifts on this earth, though we look not beyond.
You sin and you suffer, and we, too, find sorrow
Perchance through your sin—yet it soon will be o’er;
We labour to-day and we slumber to-morrow,
Strong horse and bold rider! and who knoweth more?
A. Lindsay Gordon.