A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

I agree with the “tough.” I totally disagree with the “bad.” Even if, after eight months, I had been bidden farewell in the same phrase with which I was greeted, I should still refuse to say “bad lot” about those men. I hope that in such a case I should have the grace to recognise the failure as my fault, not theirs, and to take the “bad lot” as a description of myself.

The Emergency Stretcher-bearers when I first knew them were no man’s children. The Red Cross flag flew over the entrance of their camp, but the Red Cross people accepted no responsibility for them. Their recreation room, which was not a room at all, but one end of their gaunt dining-room, was ill supplied with books and games, and had no papers. There were no lady workers in or near the camp, and only those who have seen the work which our ladies do in canteens in France can realise how great the loss was. There was no kind of unity in the camp.

It was a small place. There were not more than three hundred men altogether. But they were men from all sorts of regiments. I think that when I knew the camp first, nearly every one in it belonged to the old army. They were gathered there, the salvage of the Mons retreat, of the Marne, of the glorious first battle of Ypres, broken men every one of them, debris tossed by the swirling currents of war into this backwater.

Their work was heavy, thankless, and uninspiring. They were camped on a hill. Day after day they marched down through the streets of the town to the railway station or the quay. They carried the wounded on stretchers from the hospital trains to the Red Cross ambulances; or afterwards from the ambulance cars up steep gangways to the decks and cabins of hospital ships. They were summoned by telephone at all hours. They toiled in the grey light of early dawn. They sweated at noonday. Soaked and dripping they bent their backs to their burdens in storm and rain. They went long hours without food. They lived under conditions of great discomfort. It was everybody’s business to curse and “strafe” them. I do not remember that any one ever gave them a word of praise.

It was the camp, of all that I was ever in, which seemed to offer the richest yield to the gleaner of war stories. I have always wanted to know what that retreat from Mons felt like to the men who went through it. We are assured, and I do not doubt it, that our men never thought of themselves as beaten. What did they think when day after day they retreated at top speed? Of what they suffered we know something. How they took their suffering we only guess. I hoped when I made friends with those men to hear all this and many strange tales of personal adventures.

But the British soldier, even of the new army, is strangely inarticulate. The men of the old army, so far as concerns their fighting, are almost dumb. They would talk about anything rather than their battles. There was a man in the Life Guards who had received three wounds in one of the early cavalry skirmishes. He wanted to talk about cricket, and told me stories about a church choir in which he sang when he was a boy.

There was a Coldstream Guardsman. I never succeeded in finding out whether he was in the famous Landrecies fight or not. The most he would do in the way of military talk was to complain, privately, to me of the lax discipline in the camp, and to compare the going of his comrades from the camp to the quay with the marching of the Coldstreamers on their way to relieve guard at Buckingham Palace. There was an old sergeant from County Down who was more interested in growing vegetables—we had a garden—than anything else, and a Munster Fusilier who came from Derry, of all places, and exulted in the fact that his sons had taken his place in the regiment.

At first this curious reticence was a disappointment to me. It is still a wonder. I am sure that if I had been one of the “Old Contemptibles” I should talk of nothing else all my life. But I came to see afterwards that if I had heard battle stories I should never have known the men. The centre of interest of their lives was at home. They, even those professional soldiers, were men of peace rather than war. The soldiers’ trade was no delight to them.

I dare say the Germans, who took pains to learn so much about us beforehand, knew this, and drew, as Germans so often do, a wrong inference from facts patiently gathered. They thought that men who do not like fighting fight badly. It may be so sometimes. It was certainly not so with our old army. We know now that it is not so with the men of our new army either.

After a while the stretcher-bearers and I began to know each other. The first sign of friendliness was a request that I should umpire at a cricket match on a Sunday afternoon. I am not sure that the invitation was not also a test. Some parsons, the “——” kind, who are not wanted, object to cricket on Sundays. My own conscience is more accommodating. I would gladly have umpired at Monte Carlo on Good Friday, Easter, Advent Sunday, and Christmas, all rolled into one, if those men had asked me.