“September 26th.—Signs of pressure. They may now be off any hour. The ammunition has all arrived, and there wants but one battery of artillery to complete the division. General Capper won’t wait much longer and will be off without it if it delays and make up a battery en route somehow. It is sad to see so many mere boys arriving at the hotel fresh from Sandhurst. They are given companies to command, captains being killed, wounded or missing in such numbers. As to Patrick’s regiment, the old Royal Irish seem to have been so shattered that they are all hors de combat for the present.
“September 27th.—What a precious Sunday this has been! First, Patrick accompanied me to Mass, said by Father Bernard Vaughan, in a secluded part of the camp, where the heather had not been ploughed up by men, horses and guns, as elsewhere, and where the altar was erected in a wooded glen. The Grenadier and Scots Guards were all on their knees as we arrived, and the bright green and gold vestments of the priest were relieved very vividly in the sunshine against the darker green background of the forest beyond. Quite a little crowd of stalwart guardsmen received Holy Communion, and two of them were sheltering with their careful hands the candles from the soft warm breeze, one at each end of the altar. We sit out in the leafy garden of the hotel and have tea there, we parents and relatives, with our boys by us at all spare moments. To-day, being Sunday, there have been extra crowds of relatives and friends who have motored over from afar. There is pathos here, very real pathos. How many of these husbands and sons and brothers I see sitting close to their dear ones, for the last time, perhaps! Who knows? The voices are low and quiet—very quiet. Patrick and I were photographed together by M. E. These little snapshots will be precious. We were nearly all day together to-day as there was a rest. All this quiet time here our brave soldiers are being shattered on the banks of the Aisne. Just now must be a tremendously important period of the fighting. We may get great news to-morrow. Many names I know beginning to appear in the casualty lists.
“September 28th, 1914.—Had a good motor run with the R.’s right through the field of ‘battle’ in the midst of the great forest—a rolling height covered with heather and bracken. Our soldiers certainly have learnt, at last, how to take cover. One can easily realise how it is that the proportion of officers killed is so high. Kneeling or standing up to give directions they are very conspicuous, whereas of the men one catches only a glimpse of their presence now and then through a tell-tale knapsack or the round top of a cap in the bracken; yet the ground is packed with men—quite uncanny. The Gordons were a beautiful sight as they sprang up to reach a fresh position. I noticed how the breeze, as they ran, blew the khaki aprons aside and the revealed tartan kilts gave a welcome bit of colour and touched up the drab most effectively. One ‘gay Gordon’ sergeant told us, ‘We are a grand diveesion, all old warriors, and when we get out ‘twill make a deeference.’”
The most impressive episode to me of that well-remembered day was when Patrick took me up to the high ground at sunset and we looked down on the camp. The mellow, very red sun was setting and the white moon was already well up over the camp, which looked mysterious, lightly veiled by the thin grey wood-smoke of the fires. Thousands of troops were massed or moving, shadowy, far away; others in the middle distance received the blood-red glow on the men’s faces with an extraordinary effect. They showed as ruddy, vaporous lines of colour over the scarcely perceptible tones of the dusky uniforms. Horses stood up dark on the sky-line. The bugles sounded the “Retreat”; these doomed legions, shadow-like, moved to and fro. It was the prologue to a great tragedy.
“September 30th.—There was a field day of the whole of one brigade. The regiments in it are ‘The Queen’s,’ the Welsh Fusiliers, Staffords, and Warwicks, with the monstrous 4·7 guns drawn by my well-loved mighty mammoths. The guns are made impossible to the artist of modern war by being daubed in blue and red blotches which make them absolutely formless and, of course, no glint of light on the hidden metal is seen. Still, there is much that is very striking, though the colour, the sparkle, the gallant plumage, the glinting of gold and silver, have given way to universal grimness. After all, why dress up grim war in all that splendour? My idea of war subjects has always been anti-sparkle.
“As I sat in the motor in the centre of the far-flung ‘battle,’ in a hollow road, lo! the Headquarter Staff came along, a gallant group, à la Meissonier, Patrick, on his skittish brown mare ‘Dawn,’ riding behind the General, who rode a big black (very effective), with the chief of the Staff nearly alongside. The escort consisted of a strong detachment of the fine Northumberland Hussars, mounted on their own hunters. They are to be the bodyguard of the General at the Front. Several drivers of the artillery are men who were wounded at Mons and elsewhere, and, being well again, are returning with this division to the Front. All the horses here are superb. Poor beasts, poor beasts! One daily, hourly, reminds oneself that the very dittoes of these men and animals are suffering, fighting, dying over there in France. Kitchener tells our General that the 7th Division will ‘probably arrive after the first phase is over,’ which looks as though he fully expects the favourable and early end of the present one.
“October 2nd.—The whole division was out to-day. I was motored into the very thick of the operations on the high lands, and watched the men entrenching themselves, a thing I had never yet seen. Most picturesque and telling. And the murderous guns were being embedded in the yellow earth and covered with heather against aeroplanes, especially, and their wheels masked with horse blankets. There they lay, black, hump-backed objects, with just their mouths protruding, and as each gun section finished their work with the pick and shovel, they lay flat down to hide themselves. How war is waged now! Great news allowed to be published to-day in the papers. The Indian Army has arrived, and is now at the Front! It landed long ago at Marseilles, but how well the secret has been kept! How mighty are the events daily occurring. Late in the afternoon I saw the Northumberland Hussars, on a high ridge, practising the sword exercise! With the idea that the sword was obsolete (engendered by the Boer War experience), no yeomanry has, of late, been armed with sabres, but, seeing what use our Scots Greys, Lancers, Dragoon Guards and Hussars have lately been making of the steel, General Capper has insisted on these, his own yeomen, being thus armed. I felt stirred with the pathos of this sight—men learning how to use a new arm on the eve of battle. They were mounted and drawn up in a long, two-deep line on that brown heath, with a heavy bank of dark clouds like mine in ‘Scotland for Ever!’ behind their heads—a fine subject.
“Who will look at my ‘Waterloos’ now? I have but one more of that series to do. Then I shall stop and turn all my attention and energy to this stupendous war. I shall call up my Indian sowars again, but not at play this time.