I spent a most fascinating half hour one morning with a handful of Glasgow newsboys serving in a famous Scottish regiment that wears the trews. Their speech was unmistakably the speech of the Glasgow streets, and their wits were as sharp as their bayonets. I told them they were newsboys and newsboys they were, or of the same class, vanboys and the like.
I visited the Cameron Highlanders—what was left of their Territorial battalion—after the second battle of Ypres and heard, in the speech of Inverness-shire, their story of the battle. Many of them speak Gaelic. One of their officers confided to me that during the battle, requiring two men to go down to the rear, the wires being cut, to ascertain the whereabouts of the brigade headquarters, he selected two notorious deer poachers as likely to have their wits about them.
It is a gratifying task, this identification of dialects. I have heard two sappers "fra' Wigan" engaged in a lively argument with two privates (from Cork) of the Leinster Regiment, in whose trench the two gentlemen "fra' Wigan" were operating. A London cockney, say, from one of the innumerable battalions of the Royal Fusiliers, would have understood less of that conversation if it had been carried on in German, but only a little less.
During the Battle of Ypres two privates of the Monmouthshire Regiment, who were talking Welsh, were pounced upon by two prowling Southerners from one of the home counties and carried off to brigade headquarters as German spies. What with Welsh miners talking Welsh and Cameron Highlanders Gaelic, the broad speech of the Yorkshire Geordines, the homely burr of the Third Hussars and other regiments recruited in the West Country, the familiar twang of the cockneys, the rich brogue of the Irish regiments, the strong American intonation of the Canadians, a man out here begins to realize of what composite layers our race is formed.
II—OLD FRIENDS AT THE FRONT
Everybody who is anything is at the front. Never was there such a place for meeting as at Flanders. The Strand is not in it. My own experience is that of everybody else. One finds at the front men one has lost sight of for years, old friends who have dropped away in the hurry of existence, chance acquaintances of a Riviera train de luxe, men one has met in business, men who have measured one for clothes.
Often I have heard my name sung out from the center of a column of marching troops, and a figure has stepped out to the roadside who, after my mind has shredded it of the unfamiliar uniform, the deep brown sunburn, the set expression, has revealed itself as old Tubby Somebody whom one had known at school, or Brown with whom one had played golf on those little links behind the Casino at Monte Carlo, or the manager of Messrs. Blank in the city.
I wanted to find a relation of mine, a sergeant in a famous London regiment, and wrote to his people to get the number of his battalion and his company. When the reply came I discovered that the man I wanted was billetted not a hundred yards from me in the village, in which the War Correspondents' Headquarters were situated, where he had come with the shattered remnant of his battalion to rest, after the terrible "gruelling" they sustained in the second battle of Ypres.
At the front one constantly witnesses joyous reunions, brother meeting brother in the happy, hazardous encounter of two battalions on the road or in the trenches. The very first man I met on coming out to the front was a motor-car driver, whose father had particularly asked me to look out for his boy. I discovered that he was the man appointed to drive me!