I have been in a room, the last room habitable in a pretty little country-house where the flooring was of parquet, once highly polished, no doubt, but now stained with mud and scratched by hobnailed boots. A splendid Empire clock ticked away on the white marble mantelpiece; the table, spread with tin plates and cups, some bully-beef in a saucer, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of whisky, was Buhl; the chairs were of mahogany in the Empire style. A common wash-hand-stand, retrieved, I should think, from the stables, stood in a corner; in another corner an Empire couch had been spread with a flea-bag and blankets, and served as a bed for the doctor, who had his quarters there. Two walls of the apartment were curtained off with sacking, for beyond was the open air—roofless rooms, piled-up with débris, and shattered walls.
But what of the proprietors of these châteaux in our lines? you may ask. The British Army pays for everything it uses, pays rent for the châteaux it occupies, as for the horses or cattle it may (very rarely) requisition. The châtelains have very often gone away until the war is over; sometimes they have been called up to the French or Belgian armies, as the case may be. I have met with cases in which the châtelain has lived in his château during our occupation, and the officers quartered there have dined daily at his table.
The position is a little delicate. Our army is an army of gentlemen, and both officers and men have shown in this war that they know how to respect the feelings and property of the civilian population in our zone of operations. But, obviously, considerable tact is required to reconcile some elderly Countess, accustomed all her life to preside over a well-conducted, placid, and scrupulously clean household, with the irruption of a horde of healthy, active men, shod with hobnails (“Mon Dieu, le parquet!”), very often muddy (“O Ciel, mes tapis!”), and inclined to smoke pipes all over the place.
In one case I heard of, a Headquarters Staff, on arriving at a château where they were to establish themselves, found that the owner and his wife, an elderly couple, had not been on the best of terms with their predecessors, a Headquarters Staff that had just moved on. A tactful Staff Captain went out to reconnoitre the ground. He found that their hosts had been a trifle froissé by a lack of understanding on the part of the other British officers who had been quartered there. He laid himself out to make friends with the old couple with some success.
One day they mentioned en passant that it was a pity there was only one swan on the lake, and that a female. The Staff Captain took counsel. Presently, with great secrecy, the youngest member of the Staff, who was thought to require a change of air, was despatched to Paris with strict orders only to return with a male swan. The British officer is a resourceful person. In three days the subaltern was back with a gentleman swan in a basket. This graceful present broke the ice between the British officers and their hosts, and when I visited that château, not only did the old couple preside daily at the officers’ mess, but they had also given them the usage of certain rooms which they had resentfully closed to their predecessors.
Occasionally, on the other hand, the châtelain—in the case I have in mind it was a châtelaine—is irreconcilably disagreeable. The lady in this case was married, and her husband, having been mobilized, was serving somewhere in the French firing-line. This circumstance had fired her indignation. With woman’s sweet unreasonableness, she laid it down that soldiers who were not in the firing-line were a good-for-nothing pack of ne’er-do-wells, and if they expected to have a nice comfortable time in her château, she would show them that they were vastly mistaken. So this preposterous person would visit the house several times a day—she lived herself in another house close by—ferret about for any damage done, and generally make herself an unmitigated nuisance. The gardener actually had instructions, which he carefully observed, to lop off the heads of every flower in the grounds to prevent the British officers from plucking them for their rooms. The General quartered there might have had the woman promptly packed off about her business by saying a word to the French Military Mission at General Headquarters. He was, however, much too polite to do that, so the lady was suffered in silence, and only scolded behind her back.
This case, which I have only mentioned because it is amusing, and not because it is typical, is quite exceptional. In the main, the relations between our army and its French hosts have been admirable. There has been a maximum of consideration on the one hand, a maximum of grateful hospitality on the other. In years to come the memories that will linger about these old châteaux of those who gratefully accepted their hospitality will be of brave, unostentatious, clean-living gentlemen, like Bayard, premier knight of France, sans peur et sans reproche.
CHAPTER VII
G.H.Q.
In an army in which abbreviation by capital letter is carried to the pitch of mania, the hieroglyphics standing at the head of this chapter may be recognized, without undue difficulty, as signifying General Headquarters. This is a comparatively simple combination. It is not always thus. One requires a certain amount of practice to discern the different offices of the army in the field in a row of letters flashed out at one in conversation with soldier-men.
“Can you direct me to the D.A.D.O.S.?” a dusty motor-cyclist despatch-rider, one foot trailing on the ground beside his snorting machine, asks a quartermaster-sergeant in a village. “First on the right past the D.A.D.R.T.’s, the red house next to the A.P.M.” Quite unperturbed by this fearsome array of letters, the youth whirrs cheerily off, and finds his destination without difficulty. Question and answer, as interpreted to the layman, signify: “Can you direct me to the Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Services?” “First on the right past the Deputy Assistant Director of Railway Transport, the red house next to the Assistant Provost Marshal.”