Chapter XIV
In Camp
I have often remarked that English writers use the word “depression” much more frequently than do writers on this side of the water, and I have often wondered what could be the reason for this. I had not passed one week in England before I knew. A few days in an English military camp will give one an idea of what depression is.
The military camp to which we were sent was Bramshott—a great collection of long, low, one-story huts, built row on row, with a door at each end, opening into muddy lanes that ran the whole length of the camp. It was raining mildly the evening we arrived and we marched in the darkness for three miles along soft muddy roads, and now and again we splashed through a puddle, though we tried to avoid them.
There seems to be an especially slippery quality about the mud of England,—to say nothing of that of France—that makes it very difficult to retain one’s balance. My cane, which according to military regulations I always carried, for the first time now proved useful. Day after day as the soldiers of the camp drilled in the soft, muddy squares, their movements resembled sliding more than orderly marching. Sometimes thick pads of the soft, yellow mud clung heavily to their feet; very often a gentle drizzle of rain fell, and nearly always the sky was dark grey and sombre, so that one wondered no longer why the word “depression” should be so frequently used in English literature.
But notwithstanding the mud and the dark skies, many of us grew to like England. There were many quaint, winding roads hedged in places with hawthorne bushes or spruce or boxwood. These led us into delightful little country villages with their old free-stone churches, sometimes covered with ivy that often ran for a long distance up the old Norman tower.
Chapter XV
The Cenacle
Not more than three miles from the camp was situated the convent of the Sisters of the Cenacle, a beautiful three-story building of red brick and stucco hidden away among great hemlock, spruce and cypress trees. It is a kind of rest house, where at certain seasons of the year retreats are given for ladies, who come from different parts of England and pass a week at the convent.
All during the war there was an open invitation to the Catholic soldiers of Bramshott Camp to visit the convent on Sunday afternoon and assist at Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament.
There were three or four different ways of going to Grayshott, near which the Convent of the Cenacle was situated. One of these was a foot-path which led first through a moor, covered in summer with purple heather, then through bracken, almost as high as an average man, and bunches of green gorse bushes that blazed light yellow at certain seasons with flowers resembling in shape the sweet-peas. It was a quaint little path, passing on its way “Wagner’s Wells” a chain of what we on this side of the Atlantic would call ponds, in a low, wooded valley. In summer these were very pretty when the full-leafed branches of the trees hung low over the Wells, and the water was almost wholly hidden by tiny white flowers that rested on the surface. All during the war, on Sunday afternoons, a long, irregular line of khaki-clad figures went leisurely along the foot-path to Grayshott, passed scenery strange though pleasing, mounted quaint rustic stiles till they came to the convent of the Sisters of the Cenacle.
The first Sunday I visited the Convent there were so many soldiers present that the little chapel could not contain all. I learned afterwards that this had happened so frequently that, in order that all might be present at Benediction, the good Sisters had asked for and obtained a general permission to have the services on the lawn just in the rear of the chapel.