The signs of this feeling for and sympathy with the French civils, among our soldiers, are many. Here is one story, slight but illuminating, told me by an eye-witness. She is one of a band of women under a noble chief, who, since very early in the war, have been running a canteen for soldiers, night and day, at the large railway-station of the very base I have been describing, where trains are perpetually arriving from and departing to the front. In the early days of the war, a refugee train arrived one afternoon full of helpless French folk, mainly of course women and children, and old people, turned out of their homes by the German advance. In general, the refugees were looked after by the French Red Cross, "who did it admirably, going along the trains with hot drinks and food and clothing." But on this occasion there were a number of small children, and some of them got overlooked in the hubbub. "I found a raw young Scotchman, little more than a boy, from one of the Highland regiments," with six youngsters clinging to him, for whom he peremptorily demanded tea. "He had tears in his eyes, and his voice was all husky as he explained in homely Scotch how the bairns had been turned out of their homes—how he couldn't bear it—and he would give them tea." A table was found. "I provided the milk, and he paid for bread and butter and chocolate, and waited on and talked to the six little French people himself. Strange to say, they seemed to understand each other quite well."
III
It was with this railway-station canteen that my latest memories of the great base are concerned. All the afternoon of our second day at —— was spent in seeing a fine Red Cross hospital, and then in walking or driving round the endless reinforcement and hospital camps in the open country. Everywhere the same vigourous expanding organisation, the same ceaselessly growing numbers, the same humanity and care in detail. "How many years have we been at war?" one tends to ask oneself in bewilderment, as the spectacle unrolls itself. "Is it possible that all this is the work of eighteen months?" And I am reminded of the Scotch sergeant's reply to his German captive, who asked his opinion about the duration of the war. "I'll tell you what—it's the furrst five years that'll be the worst!" We seem—in the bases—to have slipped through them already, measuring by any of the ordinary ratios of work to time. On my return home, a diplomat representing one of the neutral nations, told me that the Military Secretary of his staff had been round the English bases in France, and had come back with his "eyes starting out of his head." Having seen them myself, the phrase seemed to me quite natural.
Then, last of all, as the winter evening fell, we turned toward the canteen at the railway-station. We found it going on in an old goods' shed, simply fitted up with a long tea and coffee bar, tables and chairs; and in some small adjacent rooms. It was filled from end to end with a crowd of soldiers, who after many hours of waiting, were just departing for the front. The old shabby room, with its points of bright light, and its shadowy sides and corners, made a Rembrandtesque setting for the moving throng of figures. Some men were crowding round the bar; some were writing letters in haste to post before the train went off; the piano was going, and a few, gathered round it, were singing the songs of the day, of which the choruses were sometimes taken up in the room. The men—drafts going up to different regiments on the line—appeared to me to come from many parts. The broad Yorkshire and Cumbrian speech, Scotch, the cockney of the Home Counties, the Northumberland burr, the tongues of Devon and Somerset—one seemed to hear them all in turn. The demands at the counter had slackened a little, and I was presently listening to some of the talk of the indefatigable helpers who work this thing night and day. One of them drew a picture of the Canadians, the indomitable fighters of Ypres and Loos, of their breathless energy, and impatience of anything but the quickest pace of life, their appetites!—half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, at 3d each, swallowed down in a moment of time; then of the French-Canadians, their Old World French, their old-world Catholicism, simple and passionate. One of these last asked if there was any chance of his being sent to Egypt. "Why are you so anxious to go to Egypt?" "Because it was there the Holy Family rested," said the lad shyly. The lady to whom he spoke described to him the tree and the Holy Well in St. Georgius, and he listened entranced.
Sometimes a rough lot fill the canteen, drawn from the poorest class, perhaps, of an English seaport. They hustle for their food, shout at the helpers, and seem to have no notion that such words as "please" and "thank you" exist. After three or four hours of battling with such an apparently mannerless crew one of the helpers saw them depart to the platform where their train was waiting for them, with very natural relief. But they were no sooner gone, when a guardsman, with the manners, the stature, and the smartness of his kind, came back to the counter, and asked to speak to the lady in charge of it. "Those chaps, Miss, what have just gone out," he said apologetically, "have never been used to ladies, and they don't know what to say to them. So they asked me just to come in and say for them they were very much obliged for all the ladies' kindness, but they couldn't say it themselves." The tired helper was suddenly too choky to answer. The message, the choice of the messenger, as one sure to do "the right thing," were both so touching.
But there was a sudden movement in the crowd. The train was up. We all surged out upon the platform, and I watched the embarkation—the endless train engulfing its hundreds of men. Just as I had seen the food and equipment trains going up from the first base laden with everything necessary to replace the daily waste of the army, so here was the train of human material, going up to replace the daily waste of men. After many hours of travelling, and perhaps some of rest, these young soldiers—how young most of them were!—would find themselves face to face with the sharpest realities of war. I thought of what I had seen in the Red Cross hospital that afternoon—"what man has made of man"—the wreck of youth and strength, the hideous pain, the helpless disablement.
But the station rang with laughter and talk. Some one in the canteen began to play "Keep the Home Fires Burning"—and the men in the train joined in, though not very heartily, for as one or two took care to tell me, laughingly—"That and 'Tipperary' are awfully stale now!" A bright-faced lad discussed with D—— how long the war would last. "And shan't we miss it when it's done!" he said, with a jesting farewell to us, as he jumped into the train which had begun to move. Slowly, slowly it passed out of sight, amid waves of singing and the shouting of good-byes....
It was late that evening, when after much talk with various officers, I went up to my room to try and write, bewildered by a multitude of impressions—impressions of human energy, human intelligence, human suffering. What England is doing in this country will leave, it seems to me, indelible marks upon the national character. I feel a natural pride, as I sit thinking over the day, in all this British efficiency and power, and a quick joy in the consciousness of our fellowship with France, and hers with us. But the struggle at Verdun is still in its first intensity, and when I have read all that the evening newspapers contain about it, there stirs in me a fresh realisation of the meaning of what I have been seeing. In these great bases, in the marvellous railway organisation, in the handling of the vast motor transport in all its forms, in the feeding and equipment of the British Army, we have the scaffolding and preparation of war, which, both in the French and English Armies, have now reached a perfection undreamt of when the contest began. But the war itself—the deadly struggle of that distant line to which it all tends? It is in the flash and roar of the guns, in the courage and endurance of the fighting man, that all this travail of brain and muscle speaks at last. At that courage and endurance, women, after all, can only guess—through whatever rending of their own hearts.
But I was to come somewhat nearer to it than I thought then. The morrow brought surprise.