Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front

by E. W. Hornung

And yet, as I began by saying, not a man of them showed shaken nerves, or what mattered more to those of us who had seen less, a shaken faith. Therein they were not only worthy of the men they had served so devotedly to the end, but of the sublime tradition it was theirs to uphold. It was a great matter that there should not have been one heart among us so faint as to affect another, that we should have carried ourselves at least outwardly as I think we did. But to some of us it seemed a yet greater matter, in the days of anti-climax and reaction now in store, that those to whom we were entitled to look for spiritual support did not fail us in a single instance.

THE REST CAMP—AND AFTER

Y.M.C.A. work was over for the time being in the fighting areas. Hundreds of huts and mountains of stores had been abandoned or destroyed. What was to be done with the six or seven dozen of us, now thoroughly superfluous men (and as many more in other centres), was the immediate problem. It was solved by the High Command putting at our disposal an Army rest-camp on the coast.

Thither we all started by rail on the evening of Tuesday, March 26th. Ten minutes after our train left, the station was heavily bombed; half-an-hour later we were lying low in a cutting, under a mercilessly full moon, but perhaps in deeper shadow than we supposed, while a German aeroplane scoured the sky for mischief. There was an Anti-Aircraft Battery also concealed about the district; thanks to its activities, we were at length able to proceed with less fear of molestation. But only fitfully; the full moon saw to that. It was as light as noonday through smoked glasses, and very soon our train was hiding in the next wood that happened to intersect the line.

Did we waste time talking about it, discussing our chances, or mildly anathematising our last-straw luck? Not for many minutes; at least, not in the bare truck round which some fifty of us squatted on our baggage. We had begun the last stage of our exodus in a certain fashion; and in that fashion we went on—and on. Before we were five minutes out, one of them had struck up a hymn, and we had sung it with all our lungs and hearts. Another and another followed; and in the stoppages, after a human peep at the sky, and a silence broken by the beat of the destroyer's engine, there was always some exalted voice to lead us yet again, and a stentorian following every time. Though the tunes were often strange to me, and to my mind no improvement on the ones I wanted, the hymns themselves were the old hymns that take a man back to his old home and his old school. Each was like a bottle charged with the essence of some ancient scene. One savoured the scents of vanished rooms, heard the sound of voices long past singing or long ago stilled; forgotten influences, childish promptings, looks and thoughts and sayings, came leaping out of the dead past into that dark truck hiding for dear life in a wood. And of all the unreal situations I was ever in—or invented, for that matter—this at last struck me as about the most unconvincing and far-fetched. Yet at the same time, like all else that really matters, it seemed the most natural thing in the world: as though the whole history of mankind had not led up to the horrors and splendours of this stupendous war more inevitably than our fifty life-lines converged in that truck-load of brave, faithful, hymn-singing men.

Then a hymn would end, and there would be sometimes as much as a minute of natural talk and normal thinking. But it was like the lorries full of fighting-men in the moonlit dust; always a new leader filled the breach; and the officers of the Rest Hut had long been stolid listeners when we stopped once more, not to hide, but at some station, and that weary pair sneaked out into another truck. Here there were but other two before them: a sardonic Anglican, and a young man enviably asleep under less covering than would have soothed our thinner blood. Side by side we cowered upon a packing-case, a Rest Hut blanket about our legs, and discussed the secular situation over a pipe. Almost the last thing we two had heard in the town was a whisper about the German cavalry; a rumour so sensational that we were keeping it to ourselves; but it only confirmed the mate in his prophetic conviction that the fools were just cutting their own throats deeper with every mile they advanced. That was his hymn; not a stage of our flight had he failed to beguile with the grim refrain; but in the truck I seem to recall a wilder dream of getting into some dead man's uniform, if the other folly went much further, and risking a firing-party for one blow at a Boche by fair or foul. It was perhaps as well that we were going beyond the reach of any such desperate temptations.

The Rest Camp was on a chilly plateau at the mouth of the Somme: it might have been the Murrambidgee for all the warfare within reach. A few faint flashes claimed our wistful attention on a clear night, but I have heard the guns better here in Sussex. On the other hand, it was a military camp, laid out on scientific principles that appealed to the camp-following spirit, and military discipline kept us on our acquired mettle. I had not slept under canvas for thirty years, and rather dreaded it, especially as the weather had turned cold and unsettled. A tent in the rain had perhaps more terrors for many of us than a snug hut under occasional shell-fire; but few if any were the worse for the experience. Indeed, the chief drawback was an appetite out of all proportion to available rations; but, though tempers were at times on edge, and fists clenched in the bacon queue, on one of our few bacon mornings, no grumbling disgraced the board. We reminded ourselves and each other of the lads we had left to bear the brunt, and we started our humdrum days with vociferous jocosity in the wash-house.

Easter was upon us before we were fairly settled, or a tent pitched large enough to hold us all; and it was 'in sundry places,' indeed, that we mobilised as a congregation. One was the open shed in which we shivered over meals, and one the camp shower-baths. But on Easter Day, which was fine and bright, all adjourned to a neighbouring wood, then breaking into bud and song; and sitting or leaning in a circle against the trees, at the intersection of two green rides, we held our service in Nature's sanctuary. In that ring of unmilitary men in khaki there were few who had not been nearer violent death than ever in their lives before, very few but were prepared to face it afresh at the first chance, one at least who was soon to be killed behind his counter; and presently a young man standing in our midst, an Anglican with a Nonconformist gift of speech, brought the spring morning home to our hearts, filled them with thankfulness for our lot and trust in the issue, and pride of sacrifice, and love of Him Who showed the way, in a sermon one would not have missed for the best they were getting in London at that hour. It was not the only fine sermon we had in the Rest Camp; and wonderful it was to hear the same simple note struck so often, albeit from different angles of the Christian faith, and so seldom forced. We must have had representatives of all the English-spoken Churches, save and except the parent of them all; constantly an Anglican and a Dissenter would officiate together, with many a piquant compromise between their respective usages; but when it came to preaching, they were like searchlights trained from divers quarters upon the same central fact of Christianity. The separate beams might taper off into the night, but high overhead they met and mingled in a single splendour.

But there was one minister who took no part; he lay too sick in our tent; and yet his mere record is the sermon I remember best. He was that other Baptist already mentioned, a shy bachelor of fifty, the most diffident and (one might have thought) least resolute of men. A lad he loved had come out and been killed; the impulse took him to follow and throw himself into the war in the only capacity open to his years. The Y.M.C.A. is the refuge of those consciously or unconsciously in quest of this anodyne. We had met at my first hut, where he had slaved many days as an extra hand. Never was one of us so deferential towards the men; never were they served with a more intense solicitude, or addressed across the counter with so many marks of respect. 'Sir,' he never failed to call them to their faces, or 'this gentleman' when invoking expert intervention. That gentleman, being one, never smiled; but we did, sometimes, in our room. Then one Sunday I persuaded him to preach. It was a revelation. The hut had heard nothing simpler, manlier, straighter from the shoulder; and the war, not just then the safest subject, was finely and bravely treated, both in the sermon and the final prayer. A fighting sermon and a fighting prayer, for all the gentle piety that formed the greater part, and all the sensitive mannerism which would never make us smile again.