With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

I have seen many striking contrasts in these châteaux of France. One day I turned into the courtyard of as dainty a little château as ever the fifteenth Louis of gallant memory built for a lady. It was one of the country places of a French officer then at the front, and very rarely visited by him. Its grounds were neglected, the iron gates were rusted and broken, and the stonework running round the flat and shallow fish-pond was hoary and cracked with age. Against a superb background of green foliage, a mighty screen of poplars bordering a drive that ran out to the blue horizon, a horseman sat on his horse, turbaned, a lance at his stirrup, immobile, a sublime equestrian statue. It was an Indian sowar, a Pathan trooper of the native cavalry. He sat perfectly still in the sunshine, in the silence that was Pompadour France....

Again, I remember calling at a château to get a pass to visit a certain part of our line. It was a hybrid kind of place. The old part of the château had been caught up and surrounded, as it were, in an imposing pile of new red brick. On the lawn in front ran a lean fragment of old grey wall, along which the scarlet rambler climbed recklessly, profusely, in and out of the castellated coping and athwart a broken arch. Two motor-cyclist despatch-riders sat on the lawn beneath a giant walnut-tree and tinkered with their cycles. In the distance the guns drummed gently, continuously. A young man came strolling across the lawn. He was an officer. His khaki tunic and breeches and puttees had seen hard service, his cap was thrust back from his forehead. In his hand he carried a sheaf of papers, with which he returned, rather punctiliously, the salute of the two motorcyclists. As he passed me I saw it was the Prince of Wales.

He passed into my vision briefly that day and passed out again, very slim, still a little diffident, in the pink of condition, as he passes to and fro in the midst of our army in the field, restless when he is held back too long from the front, happy only when he feels that he is sharing the dangers and hardships of the army. The Prince of Wales with the army in France! What a fine suggestion there is about the phrase! It kindles my imagination every time I see him there with the troops. Possibly the grey old tower of that modernized château which watched him strolling nonchalantly across the grass that morning had also looked down upon his most famous ancestor, him whose sable armour, once famed in France, you may see to this day in the Cathedral at Canterbury.

This region is rich in association with our fighting past. I spent a morning once with a Headquarters Staff in a château where Marlborough (who has left the impress of his magnetic personality so deeply stamped on the French imagination) had stayed when he was conducting his operations against Marshal Villar’s famous Ne Plus Ultra lines. A quiet, reposeful spot was that château, with a rococo atmosphere, with panelled rooms and old furniture, and gold-framed portraits of military men of a past age. In a little study on the ground-floor, where “Corporal John” may have worked himself, a General explained to me over a table spread with maps his hopes and ambitions for the coming summer. Outside a Staff Officer was explaining the working of a trench mortar, the invention of one of the officers quartered in the château; others were talking of the fishing they had managed to get in the neighbourhood. Mortars and fishing! As subjects of conversation they were as topical in the times of “the army in Flanders” as to-day.

One day I picked up a thread which conducted me straight back to Waterloo. It was in an old château I found it, an exquisitely preserved gem of the early seventeenth century, with a pigeon-coop, emblematic of seigneurial rights, and a dainty little flower-garden, a perfect corner of old France which, as a contemporaneous print hung in one of the rooms of the château attested, had not changed its appearance since it was laid out when the château was built. In this château Grant’s Brigade of cavalry, which fought at Waterloo, was quartered for two years after the battle. The place was still redolent of the memories of the British cavalry which, as part of the army of occupation of the Allies after the overthrow of Napoleon, had been quartered in the château and in the little township which surrounds it. In the outer wall of the stables they showed me a row of rings affixed there for the horses, a hundred years ago, by the men of the 15th Hussars who were in Grant’s Brigade. In and about the little town surrounding the château, on the occasion of my visit, I met again men of the 15th Hussars quartered there—the 15th Hussars of to-day, gallantly carrying on the great traditions which their forbears at Waterloo helped to establish.

These ancient châteaux in our zone of operations often change their occupants. A Staff moves on and disappears, and before the old house has had time to relapse into its secular sleep there is another irruption of “brass-hats” in motor-cars and mess orderlies in motor-lorries.

The General Staff room is generally established in the largest room of the château. I have seen some curious contrasts in these rooms. I have in mind a long and lofty apartment with a broad alcove made by a story of one of the corner turrets of the château. On the walls old-fashioned oil-paintings hung side by side with innumerable maps, army orders, and various indications, serious and facetious. A Staff Officer was sitting at a big old oak table spread with an extraordinary collection of mud-stained papers. This was the Intelligence Officer going through correspondence found on German prisoners and dead. In the alcove another Staff Officer was talking on the telephone to a Brigade Headquarters; sandbags was the theme, and its discussion developed a certain amount of acerbity as it proceeded. A young man in very muddy riding-boots stood by the handsome carved-stone mantelpiece, his cap on the back of his head, a riding-crop in his hand. He was waiting with some impatience for the sandbag debate to finish.

In its outward appearance the room was a blend of suggestions of peace and war. There were touches of the boudoir, the bureau, and the barrack-room in the furniture. One or two dainty bergère chairs, a work-stand, a pretty cabinet or two, spoke of some feminine influence that had once reigned here; the typewriters, the telephone, suggested the city office; while the barrack-room touch was provided by the Sam Browne belts, the revolvers, the riding-crops and swagger canes which were scattered about in the corners and on the tables and chairs.

Life in these châteaux is not always so peaceful as their appearance would indicate. Not so very long ago I was having tea in a château with a Headquarters Staff, and the very tea-things on the table rattled with the continual air-percussion of shells screeching to and fro about the place. It was an ill-omened place, that dining-room, for all the windows on one side had been smashed, and in front of them a solid barricade of sandbags had been erected to diminish the effect of shells bursting on the gravel without. As we drank our tea placidly, half a dozen heavy shells went wailing over the house, and exploded noisily in the immediate vicinity.

There are châteaux, like the château of Hooge of which I spoke in a previous chapter, which have been totally destroyed by shell-fire. Yet you may find troops living in the grounds, in dug-outs furnished from the château, or sometimes even in a single room or cellar of the château which has escaped destruction. I have been to châteaux where almost every day shells plumped square into the crumbling brickwork, ploughing their way through ancient rafters and bursting with reverberating explosions amid Buhl tables and Empire chairs and Louis XIV. clocks and old French prints. I have seen gardens still blooming amid a horrid welter of destruction, with standard roses rearing their slender stems on high, and London pride and stocks and syringa straggling over little graves dotted here and there between gaping shell-holes, and tree-trunks blasted lying across shattered cucumber-frames.