If the spirit of the playing fields of our public schools won, as they say, our great-grandfathers’ war, the spirit of the tuck shop is showing up in this one. The lessons learned as boys in those excellent institutions have been carried into France. Tea shops and restaurants at the bases, audacious estaminets near the front, witness to the fact that we wage war with something of the spirit of schoolboys with pocket money to spend on “grub.”
Nobody will grudge our young officers their boyish taste for innocent feasts. It is a boys’ war anyway. Everything big and bright in it, the victories we have won, the cheerfulness and the enduring and the daring, go to the credit of the young. It is the older men who have done the blundering and made the muddles, whenever there have been blundering and muddles.
“Mary’s Tea” was for officers. The men were invited to “English Soldiers’ Coffee.” It, too, was a tea shop and had a good position in one of the main streets of the town. But the name was not so well devised as Mary’s Tea. It puzzled me for some time and left me wondering what special beverage was sold inside. I discovered at last that “Coffee” was a thoughtful translation of Café, a word which might have been supposed to puzzle an English soldier, though indeed very few French words puzzle him for long.
I was never inside “English Soldiers’ Coffee.” But I have no doubt it would have been just as popular if it had called itself a café or even an estaminet. The case of “Mary’s Tea” was different. Its name made it. Half its customers would have passed it by if it had announced itself unromantically as “Five o’clock” or “Afternoon Tea.”
CHAPTER XI
ANOTHER JOURNEY
“’Tis but in vain for soldiers to complain.” That jingle occurs over and over again in Wolfe Tone’s autobiography. It contains his philosophy of life. I learned to appreciate the wisdom of it before I had been a week in the army. I said it over and over to myself. If I had kept a diary I should have written it as often as Wolfe Tone did. I had need of all its consolation when the time came for me to leave H.
One evening—I was particularly busy at the moment in the Y.S.C.—an orderly summoned me to the chaplain’s office to answer a telephone call. I learned that orders had come through for my removal from H. to B. I had twenty-four hours’ notice. That is more than most men get, double as much as an officer gets who is sent up the line. Yet I felt irritated. I am getting old and I hate being hustled. Also I felt quite sure that there was no need for any kind of hurry.