A Padre in France

by George A. Birmingham

M. and I tramped about that country a great deal while I was with him. We saw the same things everywhere, cattle well cared for and land well worked by a few old men and women who looked old long before their time.

Our landlady cannot have been an old woman. Her youngest child was a baby in a cradle, but she looked fifty or more. Loss of youth and beauty is a heavy price for a woman to pay for anything. I wonder if she resented having to pay it. At least she has the satisfaction of knowing that she bought something worth while though she paid dearly. She kept her home. She fed her children. As surely as her husband in the trenches she helped to save her country.

I have been assured that the French women have not been so successful as English women in the conduct of war charities. They have not rushed into the hospitals to nurse the wounded with anything like the enthusiasm and devotion of our V.A.D.’s. In the organisation of War Work Depots and the dispatching of parcels to prisoners of war the French women have proved themselves on the whole less efficient than English women. They have not shone in the management of public business, where Englishwomen have been unexpectedly able and devoted.

On the other hand French women seem to have done better than English women in the conduct of their private affairs. This, I think, is true both of the bourgeois and peasant classes. In England the earning power on which the house depends is the man’s. When he is taken away he is very badly missed and the home suffers or even collapses. In France the women are more independent economically. They can carry on the business or the farm sufficiently well without the man.

But I did not get permission to visit M.’s cavalry division that I might observe the French peasantry. I went to give lectures to the men. I did that, faithfully exerting myself to the uttermost, but I did it very badly. I suppose I am not adaptable. Certainly the conditions under which I lectured destroyed any faint chance of my succeeding, before I began.

It has been my lot to lecture under various circumstances to widely different kinds of audiences. I have been set up at the end of a drawing-room in a house of culture in the middle west of the U.S.A. I have stood beside a chairman on a platform in an English hall. Never before had I been called upon to lecture in a large open field, standing in the sunlight, while my audience reclined peacefully on the grass under a grove of trees. Never before had I watched my audience marched up to me by squadrons, halted in front of me by the stern voices of sergeants, and sitting down, or lying down, only after I had invited them to do so. It was a very hot afternoon. I do not wonder that half the men went to sleep. I should have liked to sleep too.

I lectured that same day in another field to a different body of men. There I was even more uncomfortable. Two thoughtful sergeants borrowed a table from a neighbouring house and I stood on it. That audience stayed awake, perhaps in hope of seeing me fall off the table, but made no pretence of enjoying the lecture.

Yet it was not altogether the strange conditions of the performance which worried me. I should, I think, have come to grief just as badly with those audiences if they had been collected into rooms or halls. I was out of touch with the men I was talking to. I did not understand them or how to address them. I had some experience, experience of six months or so, of soldiers; but that was no help to me. These were soldiers of a kind quite new to me. They belonged to the old army. Officers and men alike were professionals, not amateurs soldiering by chance like the rest of us.

The cavalry is, with the possible exception of the Guards, the only part of our force in which the spirit of the old army survives. Every infantry battalion has been destroyed and renewed so often since the war began that the original personality of the thing, the sense of memory, the link with the past and all its traditions, no longer survives. An infantry regiment bears an old name; but it is a new thing. Its resemblance to the regiment which bore the name before the war is superficial, a thin veneer. In spirit, outlook, tone, interest, tradition, in all but courage and patriotism, it is different. In the cavalry this great change has not taken place.