Far down the road we hear a shouted jest, a peal of laughter, a burst of song.
In what mood, with what spirit does the soldier, the man in the ranks, go forth into the night to his supremely great adventure? We do more than guess. We know. We chaplains are officers, but we are something more than officers. We are, or ought to be, the friends of men and officers alike. We have the chance of learning from the men’s own lips what their feelings are. Hardly ever do we get the least suggestion of heroic resolve or hint of the consciousness of great purpose. Very often we hear a hope expressed—a hope which is really a prayer for God’s blessing. But this is almost always for those left at home, for wife and children, parents, brothers, friends. It is as if they and not the men who fight had dangers to face and trials to endure.
From his intimate talk we may guess that the soldier thinks very little about himself and very much about those he has left behind. He says little of what his life has been, less still about that to which he looks forward. His mind is altogether occupied with the little affairs of his home life, with the marriage of this friend, the wages earned by son or daughter, the thousand details of life in some English village or some great city. Sometimes we hear an expression of pleasure at the thought of joining again comrades by whose side the writer has fought. Sometimes an anticipation from a young soldier of seeing in the fighting-line some friend who has gone there before him.
It is not thus that an imaginative writer would represent the talk of soldiers who say farewell. I suppose that those who speak as these men do are lovers of peace and quiet ways, have no great taste for adventuring, find war not a joy but a hard necessity. Yet as we know, as all Europe knows now, there are no better fighters in the world than these citizen soldiers whose blood the bugle stirs but sluggishly, whose hearts are all the time with those whom they have left at English firesides.
CHAPTER VIII
WOODBINE HUT
I knew many recreation huts, Y.M.C.A. huts, Church Army huts, E.F. canteens, while I was in France. I was in and out of them at all sorts of hours. I lectured in them, preached in them, told stories, played games, and spent in the aggregate many hours listening to other people singing, reciting, lecturing. It was always a pleasure to be in these huts and I liked every one of them. But I cherish specially tender recollections of Woodbine Hut. It was the first I knew, the first I ever entered, my earliest love among huts. Also its name was singularly attractive. It is not every hut which has a name. Many are known simply by the number of the camp they belong to, and even those which have names make, as a rule, little appeal to the imagination. It is nice and loyal to call a hut after a princess, for instance, or by the name of the donor, or after some province or district at home, whose inhabitants paid for the hut. One is no way moved by such names.
But Woodbine! The name had nothing whatever to do with the soldier’s favourite cigarette, though that hut, or any other, might very well be called after tobacco. I, a hardened smoker, have choked in the atmosphere of these huts worse than anywhere else, even in the cabins of small yachts anchored at night. But cigarettes were not in the mind of the ladies who built and named that hut. Afterwards when their hair and clothes reeked of a particularly offensive kind of tobacco, it may have occurred to them that they were wiser than they knew in choosing the name Woodbine.