Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front

by E. W. Hornung

That afternoon there came to my hut, for no particular reason that he ever told me, a man I had not met before. He was the Senior Chaplain of the boy's Division. We made friends, by what steps I cannot remember, but I must have told him where I was going next day. He was interested. I told him the whole thing. He said: 'But surely there must be somebody in the Battalion that you could take with you, to identify the place?' I told him there was such a man, a bandsman, but the Battalion was away resting and I was not sure but that the man himself was on leave. Said the Chaplain: 'I can find out. I know where they are. I can get them on the telephone. If you don't hear from me again, go round their way in the morning when you get the car. It's ten kilometres in the wrong direction, but it may be worth your while.'

Worth my while! I did not hear from him again; not a word all that anxious evening to spoil the prospect he had opened up; and in the morning came the car, a powerful limousine, mine for the next two days! My pass from the A.P.M. was for Ypres only, but I did not think of that. In less than an hour we had found those rest-billets among ploughed fields at peace in the spring sunshine; and at the right regimental headquarters, a young Corporal ready waiting in his field overcoat. It was the bandsman: he who had been nearest to the boy at the very last, to whose special care his dear body had been committed. The living man who had most to tell me!

And the first thing he told me showed what a mercy it was to have him with me; but at the moment it came as a shock. I had shown him the watch; he had shaken his head. No watch had been buried with the boy; of that the Corporal was unshakably certain; and he was the man to know, the man whose duty it had been to make sure at the time. Away went our strongest piece of evidence! Then I told him about the boot-strap, always a doubtful item in my own mind; and the Corporal swept it aside at once. The boy had not worn boots with straps; he had worn ordinary laced boots and puttees; exactly as I had been thinking at the back of my mind. He had not been out many weeks, and I knew every noble inch of him that went away. So, after all, it was not his grave that had been found! That would have been a grievous blow but for the transcending thought—it was not his grave that had been disturbed! And we might never have known but for this young soldier at my side who was saying quite confidently that he could show me where the grave really was! One of—at most—three living men who could!

Who had brought him to my side—at the last moment—the very man I wanted—the one man needful?

To be sure, the Senior Chaplain of their Division; but why should the Senior Chaplain, a man I never saw before, have come to my hut in the nick of time to do me this service, so definitely desired? Why should I myself have come to the very place in France where the Division was waiting for me—the one place where I had also an old friend with a car to lend me when the time came? Why had I not gone to Belgium (to be near the boy) as I at first intended? And why, at that very time, should a complete stranger have been making entirely independent efforts to find the grave in Belgium that I yearned to see?

'Chance' is no answer, unless the word be held to cover an organic tissue of chances, each in turn closely related to some other chance, all component parts of a chance whole! And what sensation novelist would build a plot on such foundations and hope to make his tale convincing? Not I, at my worst; and there were more of these chances still to come, albeit none that mattered as did those already recounted.

Nor is there very much left to tell that bears telling here. In Ypres I did not find my great unknown friend; he had warned me, when it was too late to alter plans, that he might be called home on a private matter; and this had happened. But he had told me I should find his 'trusty Sergeant,' who had taken part in the investigations, ready to help me in every way; and so, indeed, I did. The man was, among other things, an enthusiastic amateur gardener; he had known exactly what to do with the bulbs and plants, which he had unpacked on their arrival and was keeping nice and moist for next morning. But this was not the first thing we had to talk about. The first thing was to impress upon the Sergeant the importance of not letting my witness know that a new cross had been put up, and so to ensure absolutely independent identification of the spot. He gave me his promise, and I know he kept it.

Next morning, under a leaden February sky, the three of us drove north in the car, accompanied by a second Sergeant with digging tools, in case the bandsman located the grave elsewhere and I was bent upon some proof. At the time I did not know why he was with us; later, the quiet little fact above spoke volumes for the good faith of the party. It was completed by a young Catholic Padre from Ypres, so that the only office which the boy had lacked at the hands of his dear men might now be fulfilled.

I am following the course we took upon a military map given to the boy's father by one of the many officers who had befriended him in his trouble; and I had been prepared for the thickening cluster of shell-holes further on by more than one aeroplane photograph sent from Army Headquarters. O that all whom this war has robbed of their hearts' delight could know, as this father knows, how the huge heart of the Army is with them in their sorrow! There was the Army Commander, who had done what he could for a man he met but once by chance; it was not much that even he could do, but how more than readily it had been done! And now here in the car, itself a tangible sign of infinite compassion, were these N.C.O.'s and this young priest, with their grave faces and their kind eyes! One's heart went out to them. It seemed all wrong to be taking men, who any day might be in theirs, to see a soldier's grave in cold blood. So we fell to discussing the sky, the mud, and such landmarks as remained, quite simply and naturally, as the boy himself would have wished.

'Plains that the moonlight turns to sea,' the boy had quoted in describing the plain we were crossing now; but it had become a broken plain since his time; covered with elephant huts and pill-boxes, scored by light railways; the roads on which no man might live in those days, themselves alive with traffic in these, with lorries and men and all the abundant activities of a host behind a host. The car stopped one or two hundred yards from our destination, towards which we threaded our way over duck-boards, through and past these mushroom habitations, till we came to the green open space which was all that remained of the farm. Not a stone or a brick to be seen; not even a heap of bricks, or a charred beam, or the empty socket of pillar or post; only the two gate-posts themselves, looking like the stumps of trees. But what better than a gateway to give a man his bearings? It led the bandsman straight to a regular file of such stumps, which really had been trees: and in his path stood a white cross, new and sturdy, at which I had been looking all the time: at which he stopped without looking twice, still studying the ground and the bits of landmarks that survived. It was the place.