A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

THE DAILY ROUND

In the camp in which I was first stationed there was a story current which must, I think, have had a real foundation in fact. It was told in most messes, and each mess claimed the hero of it as belonging to its particular camp. It told of a man who believed that the place in which we were was being continuously and severely shelled by the Germans. He is reported to have said that war was not nearly so dangerous a thing as people at home believed, for our casualties were extraordinarily few. Indeed, there were no casualties at all, and the shelling to which he supposed himself to be subjected was the most futile thing imaginable.

A major, a draft-conducting officer, who happened to be with us one day when this story was told, improved on it boldly.

“As we marched in from the steamer to-day,” he said, “we passed a large field on the right of the road about a mile outside the camp—perhaps you know it?”

“Barbed wire fence across the bottom of it,” I said, “and then a ditch.”

“Exactly,” said the major. “Well, one of the N.C.O.’s in my draft, quite an intelligent man, asked me whether that was the firing line and whether the ditch was the enemy’s trench. He really thought the Germans were there, a hundred yards from the road we were marching along.”

I daresay the original story was true enough. Even the major’s improved version of it may conceivably have been true. The ordinary private, and indeed the ordinary officer, when he first lands in France, has the very vaguest idea of the geography of the country or the exact position of the place in which he finds himself. For all he knows he may be within a mile or two of Ypres. And we certainly lived in that camp with the sounds of war in our ears. We had quite near us a——Perhaps even now I had better not say what the establishment was; but there was a great deal of business done with shells, and guns of various sizes were fired all day long. In the camp we heard the explosions of the guns. By going a very little way outside the camp we could hear the whine of the shells as they flew through the air. We could see them burst near various targets on a stretch of waste marshy ground.

No one could fail to be aware that shells were being fired in his immediate neighbourhood. It was not unnatural for a man to suppose that they were being fired at him. From early morning until dusk squads of men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on two ranges. The crackling noise of rifle fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing the hill on which M. lived, we came close to the schools of the machine gunners, and could listen to the stuttering of their infernal instruments. There was another school near by where bombers practised their craft, making a great deal of noise. So far as sound was concerned, we really might have been living on some very quiet section of the front line.

We were in no peril of life or limb. There were only two ways in which the enemy worried us. His submarines occasionally raided the neighbourhood of our harbour. Then our letters were delayed and our supply of English papers was cut off. And we had Zeppelin scares now and then. I have never gone through a Zeppelin raid, and do not want to. The threat was quite uncomfortable enough for me.

My first experience of one of these scares was exciting. I had dined, well, at a hospitable mess and retired afterwards to the colonel’s room to play bridge. There were four of us—the colonel, my friend J., the camp adjutant, and myself. On one side of the room stood the colonel’s bed, a camp stretcher covered with army blankets. In a corner stood a washhand-stand, with a real earthenware basin on it. A basin of this sort was a luxury among us. I had a galvanised iron pot and was lucky. Many of us washed in folding canvas buckets. But that colonel did himself well. He had a stove in his room which did not smoke, and did give out some heat, a very rare kind of stove in the army. He had four chairs of different heights and shapes and a table with a dark-red table-cloth. Over our heads was a bright, unshaded electric light. Our game went pleasantly until—the colonel had declared two no-trumps—the light went out suddenly without warning.