Round about Ypres, where the country has been laid waste by shell-fire, everybody lives in dug-outs.
When up in the Ypres salient one day I ran across an old friend in the person of the C.O. of the 16th Lancers. He and his officers were living in dug-outs constructed in the grounds of a ruined country house. I reminded him that the last time I had seen him had been in the very handsome dining-room of the 16th Lancers mess at The Curragh. Then he was wearing the red and gold mess-kit of “The Scarlet Lancers.” Now he was in the worn and stained khaki, plastered with mud from top to toe, with a disreputable old cap with ear-pieces and monstrously heavy boots. “Perhaps you’d care to have a look at our mess here,” he said, and pointed at a black hole in a mud-bank a few feet away. Outside some facetious orderly had affixed a notice-board inscribed “Hotel Ritz,” with various light-hearted remarks to the effect that it was licensed for the sale of beer and wines to be consumed on the premises.
This dug-out was what it purported to be, a hole in the ground, muddy and damp and depressing. At the back several sleeping-valises lay on the ground. There was an elegant table and some chairs, white-enamelled, with turned legs. “The table’s got a marble top,” said a sad-looking Major sitting there, “like the tables at the Carlton!”
I have visited troops in their billets in every part of our line. I have been to headquarters installed in fine old châteaux, with which I deal in a subsequent chapter; I have lunched with Brigadiers quartered in hovels so mean and filthy that they would disgrace the lowliest cabin of the West of Ireland; I have sat and chatted with sappers living in holes scraped out of the sides of a bank like kingfishers’ nests; I have seen our soldiers living in wooden hutments and under canvas; I have seen them in grubby little workmen’s cottages in suburbs of the industrial towns of the North of France and in dreary, rambling old French barracks. Sometimes they were comfortable (and the British soldier is able to make himself comfortable on astonishingly little!); generally they were uncomfortable. But they never grumbled at their rough lot. They groused about their inaction and bemoaned their hard fate at not being able to “get a crack at the Germs.” By no single word, however, did they indicate that they regarded their conditions of life as anything exceptional, anything outside the great game in which they are engaged. The army does its best for them. Their food is plentiful, extraordinarily varied, seeing the difficulties of transport, and absolutely regular in every part of the line. The army gives them, amongst other things, cigarettes and tobacco and matches and newspapers. As my Hussar said, the A.S.C. does not run to “stewed apples and custard.” It cannot give them houses always; it cannot give them family life; it cannot protect them against the dark angel that stalks these Flanders flats by day and night. But it smooths things as best it can, and for the rest the cheerful philosophy of the British soldier “carries on.”
CHAPTER VI
CASTLES IN FLANDERS
With the British, as with the French and German armies in the field, you will sometimes find Headquarters Staffs housed in a château. A Staff wants plenty of elbow-room, it wants quarters away from the noise and dust of the high-road and the bustle of a town; it has to choose a fairly secluded spot, so as to escape the vigilant eyes of enemy airmen and the bombardment which inevitably follows detection. This word château is very misleading. It is what you might call a “portmanteau” word. It signifies not only the Alexander Dumas type of medieval castle; it also means practically any large house standing in its own grounds. Thus, when I have set out to find the Headquarters of the Nth Division in the Château of Blancques (B 13 c., or some similar hieroglyphic, marking the spot on the Staff maps, will be the address given to me at General Headquarters), I have never known whether I shall find the Divisional General living amid the picturesque surroundings of a real old French château, with slender grey turrets, and lichen-covered walls, and a black and shining moat, or amid the stucco and red brick, the pitch-pine and stained glass, of some preposterous mansion built by a retired merchant on the outskirts of an industrial town.
When I think of this war in years to come, however, I feel that I shall always see some of its incidents re-enacted against the idyllic background of one or other of the ancient châteaux of this part of France. There is little enough picturesqueness, Heaven knows, in this most business-like of wars, but there is an undeniable touch of romance in the scenes which take place in and about these fine old castles in our zone of occupation. I always came upon them with a feeling of surprise, these old châteaux, in a country that with its smoke-stacks and mine-shafts speaks of anything rather than of old-world romance. They are mostly tucked away behind a screen of trees, to shelter them from the icy winds which blow across these melancholy Flanders flats in winter; they are almost always surrounded by a moat, and stand in their own grounds, which remain in their natural state, with wide stretches of short grass interspersed with wild flowers between groups of fine old trees.
These grand old houses, which have witnessed so many stirring scenes of war in the past, were awakened from many years of slumber by the arrival of our army in the North of France. The little stumpy bridges across their moats, which had re-echoed under the hoofs of horsemen in the armies of le Roi Soleil; the tall, pointed turrets which had seen in succession the cocked hats of le grand Marlbrook’s infantry; the ragged bonnets of the Revolution; the beplumed busbies of Wellington’s cavalry, filing along the white roads threading the distant plain, were once again the silent witnesses of the bustle of an army in the field. A slender pennant was affixed to the lichen-covered gate-post; sentries in khaki, stolid, slow-moving, rifle with fixed bayonet at the “Order arms,” materialized apparently out of nowhere; motor-cars came whirring up, discharging lean, athletic-looking officers in caps of red and gold; while motor-lorries unloaded themselves of stacks of papers and maps and stores and sleeping-valises and kit-bags. A party of extraordinarily energetic people took possession of stables or an outhouse, or some building conveniently adjacent to the château, and decorated roof and walls with telegraph and telephone wires, and set up a pole flying a blue and white flag over against a fair fretwork sign, “R.E. Signallers.” To the Signallers’ station presently began to arrive the motor-cyclist despatch orderlies in a frantic fuss of noise and a cloud of dust.
The old châteaux hardly knew themselves again in all this activity. Northern France is so eminently industrial that one had forgotten that it had its relics of the old nobility of France as well, though many of the ancient châteaux had passed into other hands, and some were seldom if ever inhabited at all save by the caretakers and a few old servants.
So the old places awoke. The Times and the Daily Mail appeared where formerly the Figaro and La Croix (pillars of the old French nobility) were seen; the Winning Post found itself side by side with The Lives of the Saints (in thirty-eight volumes in calf); and pictures of charming young ladies cut out of the Sketch or La Vie Parisienne, particularly Rudolphe Kirchner’s delightful sketches from the latter, were pinned up on the walls next to family portraits of dead-and-gone châtelains and châtelaines. The green tree-frogs, sprawling lazily in the sunshine among the sedge on the surface of the moat, leapt away in high indignation at the invasion of their realm by noisy young men with bath-towels. The rooks in the plantation cawed in raucous protest against the thin blue curls of smoke arising from the camp-fires of the troops bivouacked among the oaks and beeches, singing, hammering, rattling tins, and jesting from dawn to dark. The birds watched in amazement men-folk doing work they had been wont to believe was the prerogative of rabbits and moles, scraping deep holes in the ground, roofing them with timber, and thatching them with leaves, and vanishing therein when blasts on a whistle heralded the approach of the curious new birds recently noticed in the sky, birds that glittered whitely far up among the clouds and droned angrily like a giant bumble-bee.