Thus I fell in with a crack Hussar regiment billeted in some farms well off the main road. Their billets were so remote that it took me a good hour to locate them. After inquiring successively from two privates in an estaminet, a farrier-sergeant playing ball with a small girl in a courtyard, and a battered-looking young subaltern riding down the road, a long, low farm-house with a red-tiled roof, built round three sides of a yard in which a duck-pond, a dung-heap, and several enormous pigs were the outstanding features, was pointed out to me as the officers’ quarters. I side-stepped the dung-heap, skirted the pond, and, dodging the pigs, banged on the door with my riding-crop. “Entrez!” shouted someone within, and I entered the mess of the 3rd Hussars.
“Mess” summed up the scene rather well. Of the four or five officers in the room, most were lying, the picture of boredom, on sleeping valises which lined the walls of the long, low-pitched room. A table on trestles in the centre was piled up with maps, field-glasses, cigarette-tins, magazines, a mass of Sam Browne belts, a Sparklet bottle, a tin of shortbread, and some flowers in a shell-case. The stone floor was thick with mud, brought in fresh that morning, as the boots of the officers present certified.
I was rapturously received. One of the chairs was cleared of its contents. On shouts of “Orderly,” a door in the corner opened, and a strong smell of frying and a greasy-looking soldier in a grey army shirt and khaki trousers emerged simultaneously. He brought glasses and a bottle of local beer; the box of cigarettes was produced, and then I was ordered summarily to tell the company what was happening at home and at the front. Was America coming in? And Italy? (This was before Italy’s intervention.) What were they going to do with that fellow, Ramsay Macdonald? They heard nothing, nothing, where they were. Were the cavalry never coming into action in this dam-fool hole-in-the-ground war? They might be at Shorncliffe for all they were seeing of the war....
Would I come round the horse-lines before lunch? The man I had come to see, a Captain, conducted me via the dung-heap, the duck-pond, and the pigs to an orchard where the horses of this squadron were picketed in a sea of mud. It was a sad, weeping morning, like a spring day in Ireland. The horses looked very fit despite the wet winter they had passed through. “Mind that little ’orse, sir,” said a grizzled old private as we passed. “Rather a character, that man,” said my friend: “re-engaged; typical old soldier; regular scamp. Talk to him.”
He was a wizened little man in the forties, with a horsy manner, and had been all through the retreat from Mons. Only one of his remarks has stuck in my head. I was asking him about the food. He was pleased to be very well satisfied with the efforts of the A.S.C. on his behalf. “No one ain’t got no cause to grumble,” he said, “and that’s the truth. You gets yer grub reg’lar, and that’s more than a lot of them in this army did before. Of course”—with fine sarcasm—“there is some as wants stewed apples and custard ev’ry day for dinner, and there’s no pleasing the likes of those. No, sir, the food’s all right.”
By the time we returned to the farm-house the table had been cleared and set with a number of tin plates, a loaf of ration bread, and some tin cups. It was a rough meal, there is no denying the fact. There were sardines as hors-d’œuvre, some very tough roast beef, and potatoes, and some tinned apricots and boiled rice. We washed it down with very strong tea and condensed milk out of the aforesaid tin cups. “D’you mind tea?” asked my host apologetically. “We mostly have it for lunch.” I did not mind a bit. But I wondered idly to myself what the 3rd Hussars would have said if, a few months previously, you had suggested tea for lunch in their elegant mess at home!
Puck, in his most mischievous mood, never conceived anything more glaringly inappropriate than the British soldier in billets in France. Probably no greater contrast could be found than, on the one hand, the French peasant, working from daybreak to nightfall, scraping and stinting and saving to realize a profit where he can, to add a franc or two to his bas de laine, and, on the other, the British soldier—who receives about the same wage as a farm-hand in this part of France, unless he is in the Mechanical Transport, when with 6s. a day he is far better paid than the curé or the village schoolmaster—wasteful, liberal-handed, as thriftless about money as he is about food. Without warning the two are flung together. Suddenly they are called upon to live together on a footing of the utmost intimacy.
To know a man you must live with him. That is how the North of France has got to know the British soldier. After making due allowance for English madness—spleen, the French call it—the peasant has discovered the British soldier to be the most easy-going of lodgers, whose liberal allowances in the matter of rations and broad ideas about money enable all manner of small transactions to be arranged of advantage to the host and his cronies in the village, who is always ready to do odd jobs about the house, who is a kind of nurse to the children, who is, in short, the best of fellows imaginable. This is all to the credit side. On the debit side there is the British soldier’s unaccountable and inexplicable mania for washing himself, requiring quantities of clean cold water that appear positively incredible in comparison with the small jugful which suffices for the ablutions of the host and his entire family.
The German comic (God save the mark!) press loves to portray the “savage” British soldier “preying” on the North of France, to the despair of the unfortunate French peasant, abandoned to the clutches of the wicked English by an unscrupulous Government of Paris Chauvinists. In reality the “unfortunate” French peasant in these parts is living on British rations, and making more money than ever before in his life. In all the villages about our line the boys and girls of all ages are wearing British Army badges. I met a cowherd once who was wearing a most unmistakable pair of British khaki riding-breeches. I lunched one day at an hotel in a town in our zone where British ration bread was served at the table d’hôte. The hostess noticed the query in my eye, and hastened to explain: “C’est un officier anglais qui loge chez nous et qui demande, comme ça, que l’on lui sert de son pain à lui.” That might pass for the bread, but the soft sugar had specks of black in it, those flakes of tea which you will always find in British ration sugar. I said no more, but paid without a murmur three francs for the worst meal I have ever eaten in France.
