Encores are rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one unmistakably with an inimitable burlesque of “Alice, where art thou?” The pianist fails to keep in touch with the astonishing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight, and continues to yell till the singer comes forward again. This time he gives us a song about leaving home, a thing of heart-rending pathos, and we wail the chorus:
“It’s sad to give the last hand-shake,
It’s sad the last long kiss to take,
It’s sad to say farewell.”
The entertainment draws to its close about 8 o’clock. Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the reveille at 5.30 in the morning. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a glass of Horlick’s Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud to our tents.
This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served. Dripping cups and sticky buns are passed to them with inconceivable rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for, something the value of which to them is above all measuring with pennies—the friendly smile, the kindly word of a woman. We can partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this work—servile, sticky, dull work—for men who are neither kith nor kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do; without praise, pay, or hope of honour, often without thanks. If “the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom,” surely these deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance of surpassing sweetness.
Perhaps, after all, the hut is well named “Woodbine,” and others might be called “Rose,” “Violet,” “Lily.” The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies.
The British part of the war area in France is dotted over with huts more or less like the “Woodbine.” They are owned, I suppose, certainly run, by half a dozen different organisations. I understand that the Church Army is now very energetic in building huts, but when I first went to France by far the greater part of the work was done by the Y.M.C.A.
The idea—the red triangle is supposed to be symbolical—is to minister to the needs of the three parts of man—body, mind, and soul. At the bar which stands at one end of the hut men buy food, drink (strictly non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body of the room men play draughts, chess, anything except cards, read papers and write letters. Often there are concerts and lectures. Sometimes there are classes which very few men attend. So the mind is cared for.
The atmosphere is supposed to be religious, and the men recognise the fact by refraining from the use of their favourite words even when no lady worker is within earshot. The talk in a Y.M.C.A. hut is sometimes loud. The laughter is frequent. But a young girl might walk about invisible among the men without hearing an expression which would shock her, so long as she remained inside the four walls.
There are also supposed to be prayers every night and there is a voluntary service, of a very free and easy kind, on Sunday evenings. Those evening prayers, theoretically a beautiful and moving ending to the day’s labour, were practically a very difficult business. I have been in huts when the first hint of prayers, the production of a bundle of hymn-books, was the signal for a stampede of men. By the time the pianist was ready to play the hut was empty, save for two or three unwilling victims who had been cornered by an energetic lady.
In the early days the “leader” of the hut was generally a young man of the kind who would join a Christian Association in the days before the war, and the lady workers, sometimes, but not always, were of the same way of thinking. They were desperately in earnest about prayers and determined, though I think unfair ways were adopted, to secure congregations. A concert drew a crowded audience, and it seemed desirable to attach prayers to the last item of the performance so closely that there was no time to escape.