A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

Only a few men in the army succeed in getting what is properly called a holiday, a day or two off work with a change of scene. I got one, thanks to M. It is one of the many things, perhaps the least of them, for which I have to thank his friendship.

M. had formed an exaggerated, I fear a totally erroneous, idea of my powers of entertaining men. It occurred to him that it would be a good thing if I gave lectures to the men of the cavalry brigade to which he was attached. What he said to the general who commanded the division I do not know, but somehow, between the general and M., the thing was worked. I found myself with a permit to travel on railways otherwise barred to me and three golden days before me.

No one can say that life in my three camps was dull. Life is never dull or monotonous for a man who has plenty of pleasant work to do and a party of good friends as fellow-workers. But a change is always agreeable, and I looked forward to my trip with impatient excitement.

It was like being a schoolboy again and going forth to the Crystal Palace with money in my pocket, an entire half-crown, to be dribbled away in pennyworths of sherbet and visits to curious side-shows. That party was an annual affair for us that came in June as a celebration of the Queen’s birthday. My visit to M. was in August, but the weather was still full summer.

As a lecturing tour that expedition was a flat failure. M.’s cavalry, officers and men, were frankly bored and I realised from the very start that I was not going to justify whatever M. said to the general about me.

In every other respect the holiday was a success. I enjoyed it enormously and I gained some very interesting experience. I saw French rural life, a glimpse of it. Cavalry cannot be concentrated in large camps as infantry are. When they are not wanted for fighting they are scattered in small parties over some country district where they can get water and proper accommodation for their horses. The men are billeted in farm-houses. The officers live in châteaux and mess in the dining-halls of French country gentlemen if such accommodation is available, or take over two or three houses in a village, sleep where they can and mess in the best room which the interpreter and the billeting officer can find.

M. slept in a farm-house and secured a room adjoining his for my use. I slept on the softest and most billowy feather bed I have ever come across, with another feather bed, also very soft and billowy, over me by way of covering. My room had an earthen floor, a window which would not open, a broken chair and no other furniture of any kind. I do not think that our landlady, the wife of a farmer who was with the colours, had removed her furniture from the room to keep it out of my way. That almost bare room was just her idea of what a bedroom ought to be. Her kitchen and such other rooms as I saw in her house were equally bare.

Unlike the French women whom I met in towns, this farmer’s wife was a slattern. She cared neither about her own appearance nor the look of her house. She did not wash her children. But she worked. The land was well tilled and her cattle well tended. There was no sign of neglect in the fields. Things might have been a little better, perhaps, the place more efficiently worked, if her husband had been at home, but there was not room for much improvement. Yet that woman had no one to help her except a very old man, her father-in-law, I think, who was infirm and almost imbecile.

She had four children, but they were hindrances rather than helps. The eldest of them was about eight years old. She did the whole work of the farm herself. I used to hear her getting up at 4 a.m., lighting a fire and opening doors. Peeping through the half-transparent pane of glass in my tiny window, I saw her tending her horse and cows before 5 a.m. She worked on, and worked hard, all day.

The French have not had to face the difficulty of the “one-man business” as we have, because the women of the minor bourgeoisie are willing and able to step straight into their husbands’ places and carry on. I learnt that when I lived in towns. The French can go farther in calling up the men who work the land, because their peasant women can do the work of men. The land suffers, I suppose, and the harvests are poorer than in peace time. But if farms in England were left manless as those French farms are, the result would be much more serious in spite of the gallant efforts of the girls who “go on the land.”