The chorus dies down, and the Master of the Ceremonies, still in pyjamas and bowler hat, rises on his sound leg and standing (swaying slightly) at the head of the table, raps on it with his crutch for silence.
One officer wears a soup-bowl for a Hun helmet. Others are dressed as parodies of Turks, and have been acting in a farce entitled "The Escape." Two Irish friends of mine are singing "The Wearing of the Green," while others are patriotically drowning their voices. A submarine skipper, with a mane of yellow hair over his face, like a lion in a picture-book, watches a diplomat dancing a horn-pipe. A little bald flying man of gigantic strength and brain, is wrestling with a bearded Hercules. Some sailors are singing an old sea-chanty.
The rough deal table, littered with pipes and glasses, the tallow-dips lighting the vaulted gloom, the bearded roysterers singing songs older than Elizabeth's time, the simple fare of bread and meat, the simpler jokes and horseplay, took one back through centuries to other men who made the best of war. In Falstaff's time such scenes as these must have passed in the taverns of Merrie England. Only here, there were no wenches to serve us with sack. We had to mix our own 'araq.
"Silence, if you please," says he of the long jowl, using his crutch as a chairman's hammer. "Silence for the prisoners' band."
The band begins. It consists of penny whistles, banjos, castanets, soup-bowls, knives and forks, and anything else within reach. The motif of the piece is our release. Andante con coraggio we pass the weary months ahead. Then the dawn of our liberation breaks. We smash everything we possess, while the train to take us away steams into the station.
Sh! Shh! Shhh! Chk! Chk! Chk! Bang! Swish!! We take our seats amid a perfect pandemonium. Then the train whistles—louder and louder—and we move off—faster and faster and faster and faster, until no one can make any more noise, and the dust of our stamping has risen like incense to the roof, in a grand finale of freedom.
Strange doings in a church, you say? But what would you? We had nowhere else to go. There is a time for everything after all, and it is a poor heart that never rejoices. I feel sure Solomon himself would have sung with us, and proved most excellent company.
On Sunday mornings Divine Service was always well attended. Perhaps by contrast with my usual methods of passing the time, those Sabbath hours are set as so many jewels in the tarnished shield of idleness. The fadeless beauty of our Common Prayer brought hope and consolation to all of us who were gathered together. We repeated the grand old words; we sang "Fight the Good Fight" and "Onward, Christian Soldiers." We shared then, however humbly, in the tears and triumph of our cause. We were not of that white company that was to die for England, but we could share the sorrow of the women who mourned, and of the old who stood so sadly outside the fray.
And as through a magic door, I passed from that barren room to a country church where the litany for all prisoners and captives went up to Heaven, mingled with the fragrance of English roses.