“Do you know her?” he asked.
I shook my head. He named a very eminent novelist.
“Doing a tour of the Expeditionary Force, I expect,” he said.“I used to review her books before the war. I’d rather like to review the one she’ll write about this. Once”—he added this reminiscence after a pause—“I dined in her company in London.”
He was a journalist before he enlisted. If he survives he will no doubt write a book, a new De Profundis, and it ought to be worth reading.
I went one afternoon to a railway station to say good-bye to some friends of mine who were off to the firing-line. Troops usually left the base where I was then stationed at 10 or 11 o’clock at night and we did not go to see them off. This party—they were Canadians—started in the afternoon and from an unusual station. The scene was familiar enough. There was a long train, for the most part goods waggons. There were hundreds of laughing men, and a buffet where ladies—those ladies who somehow never fail—gave tea and cocoa to waiting crowds. Sergeants served out rations for the journey. Officers struggled to get their kit into compartments already overfull.
I made my way slowly along the platform, looking for my friends. In halting European French I answered inquiries made of me in fluent Canadian French by a soldier of Quebec. I came on a man who must have been a full-blooded Indian standing by himself, staring straight in front of him with wholly emotionless eyes. On every side of me I heard the curious Canadian intonation of English speech.
I found my friends at last. They were settling down with others whom I did not know into a waggon labelled “Chevaux, 8; Hommes, 40.” I do not know how eight horses would have liked a two-days journey in that waggon. The forty men were cheerfully determined to make the best of things. I condoled and sympathised.
From a far corner of the waggon came a voice quoting a line of Virgil. “Forsitan et illis olim meminisse juvabit.” It is a common tag, of course, but I did not expect to hear it then and there. The speaker was a boy, smooth-faced, gentle-looking. In what school of what remote province did he learn to construe and repeats bits of the Æneid? With the French-Canadians, the Indian, and all the rest of them, he, with his pathetic little scrap of Latin, was a private in the army of the empire.
It was my exceptional good fortune to be stationed for many months in a large convalescent camp. I might have been attached to a brigade, in which case I should have known perhaps Irish, or Scots, or men from some one or two parts of England; but them only. That camp in which I worked received men from every branch of the service and from every corner of the empire. A knowledge of the cap badges to be seen any day in that camp would have required long study and a good memory. From the ubiquitous gun of the artillery to the FIJI of a South Sea Island contingent we had them all at one time or another.
And the variety of speech and accent was as great as the variety of cap badges. It was difficult to believe—I should not have believed beforehand—that the English language could be spoken in so many different ways. But it was the men themselves, more than their varied speech and far-separated homes, who made me feel how widely the net of service has swept through society and how many different kinds of men are fighting in the army.