Our Casualty, and Other Stories / 1918

by George A. Birmingham

After awhile the enthusiasm for the new camp began to fade. The Turks did not put in an appearance, and life was as peaceful as it had been in the English camp where the battalion was trained. The situation of the camp, though roomy, was not exciting. Both officers and men began to find existence exceedingly dull. Lieutenant Dalton, who at this time wrote long letters to his mother, told her that he understood at last why the Children of Israel were so desperately anxious to get back to Egypt and were inclined to rag Moses about the want of melons and cucumbers. At the end of the month the whole battalion was bored to exasperation.

The desert which stretched in front of the camp was intolerably flat. The sun rose with pitiless regularity, shone with a steady glare for a great many hours, and then set. That was all that ever happened. The coming of a cloud into the sky would have been greeted with cheers. No cloud appeared. A sandstorm, however disagreeable, would have been welcomed as a change. The sand stayed quietly where it was. The men tried football, and gave it up because of the blistering heat. They played “House” until even the excitement of that mild gamble exhausted itself. No other form of amusement suggested itself. There was not even any work to do. Had the battalion belonged to the Brigade of Guards it would no doubt have gone on doing barrack-square drill every day and all day long until the men learned to move like parts of a machine. But this was a Territorial battalion, and the colonel held reasonable views about modern warfare. The value of drill, a mechanical business, was in his opinion easily exaggerated. Had the battalion belonged to an Irish regiment there would probably have been several interesting fights and some means of obtaining whisky would have been devised. In such ways the men would have escaped the curse of monotony, and the officers would have been kept busy in the orderly room. But this battalion came from the English Midlands. The men did not want to fight each other, and had no overpowering desire to get drunk. When the morning parades were over they lay in their tents and grumbled peacefully. Under such circumstances tempers often wear thin, and a habit of bickering takes possession of a mess. It is greatly to the credit of everyone concerned that there was no sign of bad temper among the officers of the battalion. The colonel lived a good deal by himself in his tent, but was always quietly good-humoured. Lieutenant Dalton, an incurably merry boy, kept the other subalterns cheerful. Only Captain Maitland was inclined to complain a little, and he had a special grievance, an excuse which justified a certain amount of grumbling. He slept badly at night, and liked to read a book of some sort after he went to bed. The mess had originally possessed an excellent supply of books, some hundred volumes of the most varied kind supplied by the Camps Libraries’ Association at home. Unfortunately, almost all the books were left behind when the move was made. Only three volumes were to be found in the new camp—one novel, a treatise on the culture of apple trees, and Mallory’s “Morte D’Arthur.”

Captain Maitland blamed the chaplain for the loss.

“You ought to have looked after those books, padre,” he said. “It’s a padre’s business to look after books.”

The Rev. John Haddingly, C.F., was a gentle little man, liked by the officers because he was entirely unassuming, and popular with the men because he was always ready to help them. He accepted the whole blame for the loss of the books without an attempt to defend himself.

“I’m awfully sorry, Maitland,” he said. “I ought to have seen to those books. I did look after the Prayer Books. They’re here all right; at least most of them are.”

“Prayer Books!” said Maitland. “If they were even whole Prayer Books! But those little yellow tracts of yours! They haven’t even got the Thirty-Nine Articles in them. If they were pukka Prayer Books I’d borrow one and try to read it. I expect there are lots of interesting things in the small print parts of the Prayer Book, the parts you padres never read out. But what’s the good of the books you have? Nothing in them but what we all know off by heart.”

Haddingly sighed. He was painfully conscious of the shortcomings of the Field Service Books supplied for the use of the troops. Dalton came to his defence.

“Don’t strafe the padre,” he said. “He brought along a church, an entire church. Is there another padre in the whole Army who could have got a church to a place like this?”

Dalton’s almost incredible statement was literally true. Haddingly had succeeded, contrary to all regulations, in bringing with him from England a corrugated iron church. It was quite a small one, it folded up and could be packed flat. When unpacked and erected it was undeniably a church. It had a large cross at one end of it outside. Inside it was furnished with an altar, complete with cross and candlesticks, a collapsible harmonium and a number of benches. Chaplains have certainly no right to load up troopships with churches, but Haddingly had somehow got his to Egypt. By what blandishments the transport officer had been induced to drag the thing out into the desert beyond the canal no one knew. Haddingly was one of those uncomplainingly meek men who never stand up for themselves. It is a curious fact, but it is a fact, that a really helpless person gets things done for him which the most aggressive and masterful men cannot accomplish. The success in life of women of the “clinging” kind is an illustration of this law.