A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

The business of keeping up a supply of lectures was not so difficult as we expected. Officers were very kind and offered us the most amazing collection of subjects. The secretary of many a literary society at home would be envious of our list. We accepted every offer we got, no matter how inappropriate the subject seemed to be.

It was impossible to tell beforehand which lectures would be popular and which would fail. Military subjects were of course common. We had “The Navy” with lantern slides. M. gave that lecture, but all his best slides were banned by the censor, for fear, I suppose, that we might have a German spy among us and that he would telegraph to Berlin a description of a light cruiser if M. exhibited one upon the screen. We had “Men who have won the V.C.” with lantern slides. That was, as was expected, a success. But we also had “Napoleon’s Campaigns” by a Cambridge professor of history, illustrated by nothing better than a few maps drawn on a blackboard. To our amazement that was immensely popular. We had “How an Army is fed,” by an A.S.C. officer, the only lecture which produced a vigorous discussion afterwards.

But we did not confine ourselves to military subjects. We had lectures on morals, which were sometimes a little confusing. One lecturer, I remember, starting from the fact that the boys had misstated their ages to the recruiting officers when they enlisted, hammered home the fact that all lies are disgraceful, and therefore our boys ought to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Another lecturer, a month later, starting from the same fact, took the line that it was possible to be splendide mendax, and that we had good reason to be extremely proud all our lives of the lie told in the recruiting office.

Manners are more or less connected with morals, and we had lectures on manners; that is to say, on saluting, which is the beginning and ending of good manners in the army. A good many civilians, especially those of the intellectual “conchie” kind, are inclined to smile at the importance soldiers attach to saluting. Our lecturer convinced me—I hope he convinced the rest of his audience—that saluting is something more than a piece of tiresome ritual, that it is the external expression of certain very great ideas.

Occasionally, but not often, we were in difficulties about our lectures. Some one at home sent us a present of a beautiful set of lantern slides, illustrating a tour in Egypt. They were such fine slides that it seemed a pity to waste them. But for a long time we could not find any one who knew enough about Egypt to attempt a verbal accompaniment of the slides.

At last we got a volunteer. He said frankly that he did not know half the places we had pictures of, but offered to do his best. He did exceedingly well with the places he did know, making the tombs of the ancient Pharaohs quite interesting to the boys. But he was a conscientious man. He refused to invent history to suit strange pictures. When anything he did not recognise was thrown on the screen he dismissed it rapidly. “This,” he would say, “is another tomb, probably of another king,” or “This is a camel standing beside a ruined archway.” Every one was thoroughly satisfied.

We had another set of slides which gave us some trouble, a series of pictures of racing yachts under sail. I had to take those on myself, and I was rather nervous. I need not have been. The boys in that club were capable of taking an interest in any subject under the sun. Before I got to the last slide the audience was ready to shout the name of every sail on a racing cutter, and could tell without hesitation whether a yacht on a run was carrying her spinnaker on the port or starboard hand. They say that all knowledge is useful. I hope that it is.

Once or twice a lecturer failed us at the last moment without giving us notice. Then J. and I had to run an entertainment of an instructive kind extempore. J. was strong on personal hygiene. He might start with saluting or the theft of Miss N.’s purse, our great club scandal, but he worked round in the end to soap and tooth brushes. My own business, if we were utterly driven against the wall, was to tell stories.

The most remarkable and interesting lecture we ever had was given on one of those emergency occasions by one of our members. He volunteered an account of his experiences in the trenches. He cannot have been much more than seventeen years old, and ought never to have been in the trenches. He was undersized and, I should say, of poor physique. If the proper use of the letter “h” in conversation is any test of education, this boy must have been very little educated. His vocabulary was limited, and many of the words he did use are not to be found in dictionaries. But he stood on the platform and for half an hour told us what he had seen, endured, and felt, with a straightforward simplicity which was far more effective than any art. He disappeared from our midst soon afterwards, and I have never seen him since. I would give a good deal now to have a verbatim report of that lecture of his.

When the lecture of the afternoon was over, the club amused itself. Attendance was no longer compulsory. Boys came and went as they chose. Order was maintained and enforced by a committee of the boys themselves. It met once a week, and of all the committees I have ever known that one was the most rigidly businesslike. I cannot imagine where the secretary gained his experience of the conduct of public business; but his appeals to the chair when any one wandered from the subject under discussion were always made with reason, and he understood the difference between an amendment and a substantive resolution.