II
Mons And Paris
Back from Belgium to England; then across the Channel again to Boulogne, where I saw the last of the French garrison march away, their red trousers a throbbing target along the road. From Boulogne the British had advanced into Belgium. Now their base was moved on to Havre. Boulogne, which two weeks before had been cheering the advent of "Tommee Atkeens" singing "Why should we be downhearted?" was ominously lifeless. It was a town without soldiers; a town of brick and mortar and pavements whose very defencelessness was its best security should the Germans come.
The only British there were a few stray wounded officers and men who had found their way back from Mons. They had no idea where the British army was. All they realized were sleepless nights, the shock of combat, overpowering artillery fire, and resisting the onslaught of outnumbering masses.
An officer of Lancers, who had ridden through the German cavalry with his squadron, dwelt on the glory of that moment. What did his wound matter? It had come with the burst of a shell in a village street which killed his horse after the charge. He had hobbled away, reached a railroad train, and got on board. That was all he knew.
A Scotch private had been lying with his battalion in a trench when a German aeroplane was sighted. It had hardly passed by when showers of shrapnel descended, and the Germans, in that grey- green so hard to see, were coming on as thick as locusts. Then the orders came to fall back, and he was hit as his battalion made another stand. He had crawled a mile across the fields in the night with a bullet in his arm. A medical corps officer told him to find any transportation he could; and he, too, was able to get aboard a train. That was all he knew.
These wounded had been tossed aside into eddies by the maelstrom of action. They were interesting because they were the first British wounded that I had seen; because the war was young.
Back to London again to catch the steamer with an article. One was to take a season ticket to the war from London as home. It was a base whence one sallied forth to get peeps through the curtain of military secrecy at the mighty spectacle. You soaked in England at intervals and the war at intervals. Whenever you stepped on the pier at Folkestone it was with a breath of relief, born of a sense of freedom long associated with fields and hedges on the other side of the chalk cliffs which seemed to make the sequestering barrier of the sea complete.
Those days of late August and early September, 10.14, were gripping days to the memory. Eager armies were pressing forward to a cataclysm no longer of dread imagination but of reality. That ever- deepening and spreading stain from Switzerland to the North Sea was as yet only a splash of fresh blood. You still wondered if you might not wake up in the morning and find the war a nightmare. Pictures that grow clearer with time, which the personal memory chooses for its own, dissociate themselves from a background of detail.
They were very quiet, this pair that sat at the next table in the dining- room of a London hotel. I never spoke to them, but only stole discreet glances, as we all will in irresistible temptation at any newly-wedded couple. Neither was of the worldly type. One knew that to this young girl London was strange; one knew the type of country home which had given her that simple charm which cities cannot breed; one knew, too, that this young officer, her husband, waited for word to go to the front.
Unconsciously she would play with her wedding-ring. She stole covert glances at it and at him, of the kind that bring a catch in the throat, when he was not looking at her—which he was most of the time, for reasons which were good and sufficient to others besides himself. Apprehended in "wool-gathering," she mustered a smile which was so exclusively for him that the neighbour felt that he ought to be forgiven his peeps from the tail of his eye at it because it was so precious.