Men took the news according to their natures. Indurated pessimists, after proving that it was a lie, said it would be but an interlude. Others retired into themselves as though they had been shot, or went stiffly off about the meticulous execution of some trumpery detail of kit-cleaning. Some turned round and fell asleep then and there; and a few lost all holds for a while. It was the appalling new silence of things that soothed and unsettled them in turn. They did not realize till all sounds of their trade ceased, and the stillness stung in their ears as soda-water stings on the palate, how entirely these had been part of their strained bodies and souls. (“It felt like falling through into nothing, ye’ll understand. Listening for what wasn’t there, and tryin’ not to shout when you remembered for why.”) Men coming up from Details Camp, across old “unwholesome” areas, heard nothing but the roar of the lorries on which they had stolen their lift, and rejoiced with a childish mixture of fear as they topped every unscreened rise that was now mere scenery such as tourists would use later. To raise the head, without thought of precaution against what might be in front or on either flank, into free, still air was the first pleasure of that great release. To lie down that night in a big barn beside unscreened braziers, with one’s smiling companions who talked till sleep overtook them, and, when the last happy babbler had dropped off, to hear the long-forgotten sound of a horse’s feet trotting evenly on a hard road under a full moon, crowned all that had gone before. Each man had but one thought in those miraculous first hours: “I—even I myself, here—have come through the War!” To scorn the shelter of sunken roads, hedges, walls or lines of trees, and to extend in unmartial crowds across the whole width of a pavé, were exercises in freedom that he arrived at later. “We cannot realize it at all.” ... “So mad with joy we don’t feel yet what it all means.” The home letters were all in this strain.
The Battalion was relieved on the 12th November by the 2nd Grenadiers and billeted in the Faubourg de Mons. All Maubeuge was hysterical with its emotions of release, and well provided with wines which, here as elsewhere, had somehow missed the German nose. The city lived in her streets, and kissed everybody in khaki, that none should complain. But the Battalion was not in walking-out order, and so had to be inspected rigorously. Morning-drill outside billets next day was in the nature of a public demonstration—to the scandal of the grave sergeants!
On the 14th a great thanksgiving-service was held in the Cathedral for all the world, the Battalion providing the Guard of Honour at the Altar, and lining the Place d’Armes at the presentation of a flag by the Mayor of Maubeuge to the Major-General. The massed drums of the Division played in the square in the afternoon, an event to be remembered as long as the Battalion dinner of the evening. They were all route-marched next morning for an hour and a half to steady them, and on the 16th, after dinner, set off in freezing weather for the first stage of their journey to Cologne. It ran via Bettignies and then to Villers-Sire-Nicole, a matter of five and a half miles.
On the 17th they crossed the Belgian frontier at Givet and reached Binche through a countryside already crowded with returning English, French, Italian, and Belgian prisoners. One Diary notes them like migrating birds, “all hopping along the road, going due west.” Binche mobbed the drums as one man and woman when they played in the town at Retreat, but it was worse at Charleroi on the 19th, where they could hardly force their way through the welcoming crowds. The place was lit from end to end, and the whole populace shouted for joy at deliverance.
Now that they had returned as a body to civilization, it was needful they should be dressed, and they were paraded for an important inspection of great-coats, and, above all, gloves. That last, and the fact that belts, when walking out, were worn over the great-coats were sure signs that war was done, and His Majesty’s Foot Guards had come into their own. But they found time at Charleroi, among more pleasant duties, to arrest three German soldiers disguised as civilians.
On the 23rd they left for Sart-St.-Laurent, whose Mayor, beneath a vast Belgian flag, met and escorted them into the town. The country changed as they moved on from flat coal-districts to untouched hills and woods. On the 24th they picked up a dump of eighty-four guns of all calibres, handed over according to the terms of the Armistice; passed through a tract of heavily wired country, which was “evidently intended for the Meuse Line that the Germans were to have fallen back on”; and a little later crossed (being the first of the Division to do so) the steeply banked, swiftly running Meuse by a pontoon bridge. Next their road climbed into Nanine, one of the loveliest villages, they thought, they had ever seen. But their hearts were soft in those days, and all that world of peace seemed good. They dared not halt at Sorinne-la-Longue the next day, as the place was infected with influenza (“Spanish fever”), so pushed on to Lesves, and on the 26th November to Sorée, where was another wayside dump of thirty or forty Hun guns. It is noteworthy that the discarded tools of their trade frankly bored them. Where a Hun, under like circumstances, would have re-triumphed and called on his servile Gods, these islanders (of whom almost a half were now English) were afflicted with a curious restlessness and strong desire to get done with the work in hand. All their world was under the same reaction. They had to wait at Sorée for three days, as supplies were coming up badly. Indeed, on the 28th November, the Diary notes bitterly that “for the first time in the war the supplies failed to arrive. The Quartermaster managed to improvise breakfasts for the Battalion.” It was not all the fault of bad roads or the dispersion of the troops. The instant the strain was taken off, there was a perceptible slackening everywhere, most marked in the back-areas, on the clerical and forwarding sides. Every one wanted to get home at once, and worked with but half a mind; which, also, is human nature.
They were on the road again by December 5 with the rest of their brigade, and reached Méan in the afternoon over muddy roads. By the 6th they were at Villers-St.-Gertrude hill-marching through beautiful scenery, which did not amuse them, because, owing to the state of communications, supplies were delayed again. So, on the 8th December at Lierneux, fifteen miles from Villers-St.-Gertrude, another halt was called for another three days, while company officers, homesick as their men, drilled them in the winter dirt. On the 11th they crossed the German frontier line at Recht, and the drums played the Battalion over to the “Regimental March.” (“But, ye’ll understand, we was all wet the most of that time and fighting with the mud an’ our boots. ’Twas Jerry’s own weather the minute we set foot in his country, and we none of us felt like conquerors. We was just dhrippin’ Micks.”) At Vielsalm, almost the last village outside Germany, they picked up a draft of sixty men to share with them the horrors of peace ahead, and a supply-system gone to bits behind them.
Their road wound through small and inconspicuous hamlets among wooded hills, by stretches of six or seven hours’ marching a day. The people they had to deal with seemed meek and visibly oppressed with the fear of rough treatment. That removed from their minds, they stepped aside and looked wonderingly at the incomprehensible enemy that tramped through their streets, leaving neither ruin nor rape behind. By the 18th December the advance had reached Lovenich, and, after two days’ rest there, they entered Cologne on the 23rd December with an absence of display that might or might not have been understood by the natives. They had covered more than two hundred miles over bad roads in bad boots that could not be repaired nor thrown away, and but one man had fallen out. The drums played “Brian Boru” when they entered the Hohenzollern Ring; their Major-General beheld that last march, and they were duly photographed in the wet; while the world that saw such photographs in the weekly illustrated papers was honestly convinced that the Great War and all war was at an end for evermore.