Needless to say, we took advantage of our commandant’s arrangement for free ‘bus rides into Amiens every Saturday. Christmas Day falling on a Saturday, we all had a Christmas dinner at the Hôtel de l’Univers. This, needless to say, was a “good show.” It was a pity, though, that turkey had been insisted on, as turkey with salad, minus sausages, bread-sauce, and brussels sprouts did not seem somehow the real thing; the chef had jibbed at sausages especially! Better at Rome to have done completely as Rome does. After all we cannot give the French much advice in cooking or in war. Otherwise the dinner was good, and unlike our folk at home we had a merry Christmas.
Of course I went to see the Cathedral that Ruskin has claimed to be the most perfect building in the world; indeed, each Saturday found me there; for like all true beauty the edifice does not attract merely by novelty but satisfies the far truer test of familiarity. Yet I confess to a thrill on first entering that dream in stone, which could not come a second time. For down in the mud I had forgotten, in the obsession of the present, man’s dreams and aspirations for the future. Now, here again I was in touch with eternal things that wars do not affect. I remember once at Malvern we had been groping and choking in a thick fog all day; then someone suggested a walk, and three of us ventured out and climbed the Beacon. Half-way up the fog began to thin, and soon we emerged into a clear sunshine. Below lay all the plain wrapped in a great level blanket of white fog; here and there the top of a tall tree or a small hill protruded its head out of the mist and seemed to be laughing at its poor hidden companions; and in a cloudless blue the sun was smiling at mankind below who had forgotten his very existence. So in Amiens Cathedral I used to get my head out of the thick fog of war for a time, and in that stately silence recover my vision of the sun.
The cathedral is a building full of all the freshness of spring. I was at vespers there on Christmas afternoon, and was then impressed by the wonderful lightness of the building: so often there is gloom in a cathedral, that gives a heavy feeling. But Amiens Cathedral is perfectly lighted, and in the east window glows a blue that reminded me of viper’s bugloss in a Swiss meadow. My imagination flew back to the building of the cathedral, and to the brain that conceived it, and beyond that again to the tradition that through long years moulded the conception; and behind all to the idea, the ultimate birth of this perfect creation. And one seemed to be straining almost beyond humanity, to see the first spring flowers looking up in wonder at the sky. The stately pillars were man’s aspiration towards his Creator, the floating music his attempt at praise.
Yet it was only as I left the building that I found the key to the full understanding of this perfect expression of an idea. Round the chancel is a set of bas-reliefs depicting a saint labouring among his people. But what people! They live, they speak! The relief is so deep, that some of the figures are almost in the round, and several come outside the slabs altogether. They are the people of mediæval Amiens; they are the very people who were living in the town while their great cathedral rose stone by stone to be the wonder of their city, the pride of all Picardy. Almost grotesque in their vivid humanity, they are the same people who walk outside the cathedral to-day. The master-artist, greater in his dreams than his fellow men, was yet blessed with that divine sense of humour that made him love them for their quaint smallnesses! So in Amiens I felt a double inspiration: there was man’s offering of his noblest and most beautiful to his Creator, and there was also the reminder, in the saint among the Amiens populace, that God’s answer was not a proud bend of the head as He deigned to accept the offering of poor little man, but a coming down among them, a claiming of equality with them, even though they refuse still to realise their divinity, and choose to live in a self-made suffering and to degrade themselves in a fog of war.
All too quickly the month went by. The enthusiasm and interest of everybody grew in a steady crescendo, and no one, I am sure, will ever forget the impression left by the Major-General who was deputed to come and “tell us one or two things” from the General Staff. In a quiet voice, with a quiet smile, he compared our position with that of a year ago; told us facts about our numbers compared with the enemy’s; our guns compared with his; the real position in the air, the temporary superiority of the Fokker that would vanish completely and finally in a month or so; in everything we were now superior except heavy trench-mortars, and in a month or so we should have a big supply of them too, and a d—d sight heavier! And we could afford to wait. One got the impression that all our grousings and doubtings were completely out of date, that up at the top now was a unity of command that had thought everything out and could afford to wait. Later on I forgot this impression, but I remember it so well now. Even through Verdun we could afford to wait. We had all the cards now. There was a sort of breathless silence throughout this quiet speech. And when it ended with a “Good luck to you, gentlemen,” there was applause; but one’s chief desire was to go outside and shout. It was a bonfire mood: best of all would have been a bonfire of Daily Mails!
We returned to our units on Sunday, 9th January, 1916, by motor-bus, which conveyed us some sixty or seventy miles, when we were dropped, Sergeant Roberts, myself, and Lewis, my servant. Leaving Lewis with my valise, we walked in the moonlight up to Montagne, where I got the transport officer to send a limber for my valise. “O’Brien on leave” was the first thing I grasped, as I tried to acclimatise myself to my surroundings. Leave! My three months was up, so I ought to get leave myself in a week or so; in a few days in fact. My first leave! The next week was rosy from the prospect. My second impression was like that of a poet full of a great sunset and trying to adjust himself to the dry unimaginative remarks of the rest of the community who have relegated sunsets to perdition during dinner. For every one was so dull! They groused, they maligned the Staff, they were pessimistic, they were ignorant, oh! profoundly ignorant; they were in fact in a state of not having seen a vision! I could not believe then that the time would come when I, too, should forget the vision, and fix my eyes on the mud! Still, for the moment, I was immensely surprised, though I was not such a fool as to start at once on a general reform of everyone, starting with the Brigadier. For under the Commandant’s influence one felt ready to tell off the Brigadier, if he didn’t get motor-’buses to take your men to a divisional concert instead of saying the men must march three miles to it. But, as I say, I restrained myself.
A week of field days, of advance guards and attacks in open order, of battalion drill, company drill, arm-drill, gas-helmet drill; lectures in the school in the evening, and running drill before breakfast. Yet all the time I felt chafing to get back into the firing-line. I felt so much better equipped to command my men. I wanted to practise all my new ideas. Then my leave came through.
Leave “comes through” in the following manner. The lucky man receives an envelope from the orderly room, in the corner of which is written “Leave.” Inside is an “A” Form (Army Form C 2121) with this magic inscription: “Please note you will take charge of —— other ranks proceeding on leave to-morrow morning, 17th inst. They will parade outside orderly room at 7.0 a.m. sharp.” Then follow instructions as to where to meet the ’bus. “Take charge!” If you blind-folded those fellows they would find their way somehow by the quickest route to Blighty! The officer is then an impossible person to live with. He is continually jumping about, upsetting everybody, getting sandwiches, and discussing England, looking at the paper to see “What’s on” in town, talking, being unnecessarily bright and cheery. He is particularly offensive in the eyes of the man just come back from leave. Still, it is his day; abide with him until he clears off! So they abode with me until the evening, and next morning Oliver and I started off in the darkness with our four followers. As we left the village it was just beginning to lighten a little, and we met the drums just turning out, cold and sleepy. As we sprang down the hill, leaving Montagne behind us, faintly through the dawn we heard réveillé rousing our unfortunate comrades to another Monday morning!
Then came the long, long journey that nobody minds really, though every one grumbles at it. At B—— an hour’s halt for omelettes and coffee and bread and jam, while the Y.M.C.A. stall supplied tea and buns innumerable. B—— will be a station known for all time to thousands. “Do you remember B——?” we shall ask each other. “Oh! yes. Good omelettes one got there.” Then the port, and fussy R.T.O’s again. Why make a fuss, when everyone is magnetised towards the boat? Under the light of a blazing gas-jet squirting from a pendant ball, we crossed the gangway.