"Vive les Anglais!" cried a French girl, in answer to the whistling courtesy. Then she laughed, with her arm round the waist of a girl friend, and said, "They are all the same, these English soldiers. In their khaki one cannot tell one from the other, and now that I have seen so many thousands of them—Heaven! hundreds of thousands! —I have exhausted my first enthusiasm. It is sad: the new arrivals do not get the same welcome from us."
That was true. So many of our soldiers had been through the British base that they were no longer a novelty. The French flower-girls did not empty their stalls into the arms of the regiments, as on the first days.
It was an English voice that gave the new-comers the highest praise, because professional.
"A hefty lot! … Wish I were leading them." The praise and the wish came from a young English officer who was staying in the same hotel with me. For two days I had watched his desperate efforts to avoid death by boredom. He read every line of the Matin and Journal before luncheon, with tragic sighs, because every line repeated what had been said in the French newspapers since the early days of the war. After luncheon he made a sortie for the English newspapers, which arrived by boats. They kept him quiet until tea-time. After that he searched the cafés for any fellow officers who might be there.
"This is the most awful place in the world!" he repeated at intervals, even to the hall porter, who agreed with him. When I asked him how long he had been at the base he groaned miserably and confessed to three weeks of purgatory.
"I've been put into the wrong pigeon-hole at the War Office," he said.
"I'm lost."
There were many other men at the British base who seemed to have been put into the wrong pigeon-holes. Among them were about two hundred French interpreters who were awaiting orders to proceed with a certain division. But they were not so restless as my friend in the hotel. Was it not enough for them that they had been put into English khaki—supplied from the store-cupboard—and that every morning they had to practise the art of putting on a puttee? In order to be perfectly English they also practised the art of smoking a briar pipe—it was astoundingly difficult to keep it alight—and indulged in the habit of five o'clock tea (with boiled eggs, ye gods!), and braved all the horrors of indigestion, because they are not used to these things, with heroic fortitude. At any cost they were determined to do honour to le khaki, in spite of the arrogance of certain British officers who treated them de haut en bas.
The Base Commandant's office was the sorting-house of the Expeditionary Force. The relays of officers who had just come off the boats came here to report themselves. They had sailed as it were under sealed orders and did not know their destination until they were enlightened by the Commandant, who received instructions from the headquarters in the field. They waited about in groups outside his door, slapping their riding-boots or twisting neat little moustaches, which were the envy of subalterns just out of Sandhurst.
Through another door was the registry office through which all the Army's letters passed inwards and outwards. The military censors were there reading the letters of Private Atkins to his best girl, and to his second best. They shook their heads over military strategy written in the trenches, and laughed quietly at the humour of men who looked on the best side of things, even if they were German shells or French fleas. It was astonishing what a lot of humour passed through this central registry from men who were having a tragic time for England's sake; but sometimes the military Censor had to blow his nose with violence because Private Atkins lapsed into pathos, and wrote of tragedy with a too poignant truth.
The Base Commandant was here at all hours. Even two hours after midnight he sat in the inner room with tired secretaries who marvelled at the physical and mental strength of a man who at that hour could still dictate letters full of important detail without missing a point or a comma; though he came down early in the morning. But he was responsible for the guarding of the Army's store-cupboard—that great hangar, half a mile long—and for the discipline of a town full of soldiers who, without discipline, would make a merry hell of it, and for the orderly disposition of all the supplies at the base upon which the army in the field depends for its welfare. It was not what men call a soft job.