With our army in Flanders

by Valentine Williams

He is the army postman, controlling, through his Director of Postal Services, an admirable organization which keeps the men in the trenches in touch with home, even though their home be Alberta or Fiji, by means of postal deliveries as regular as those in England. He looks after requisitioning and billeting. In short, his activities are innumerable, and after months spent with the army in the field, I still come across traces of his usefulness in new directions. In an army which is always “grousing”—for grumbling has ever been the habit of the soldier—the comparative immunity from criticism of the Army Service Corps, chief handmaiden to the Q.M.G., is probably the highest compliment that can be paid to the efficiency of that hard-worked department.

The organization of our army in the field is so admirable, its departmentalization so fascinating, so simple, that the temptation lies very near me to devote this chapter to a survey in detail of the diverse services whose direction is centred at G.H.Q. Efficient organization has a strange fascination for the lay mind, as witness the transformation which a few months of soldiering effects in your young civilian. He will bombard you with technical terms; he will pepper you with alphabetical abbreviations; he will, in short, so demolish you with his salvoes of “shop” that your mind in the process is reduced to the state of a trench after the “artillery preparation” is over, and the guns are “lifting” to make way for the infantry attack.

But I want to tell you of the life, of the soul of the army in the field. Your sons and husbands and brothers and cousins will fill in the details of the vast network of services which I have sketched above. While I have been talking (and boring you doubtless) of A.G.’s and A.P.M.’s and Q.M.G.’s, there are the sentries standing at the entrances to the nameless little French town, where G.H.Q. is established, waiting to inspect the impeccable credentials with which I can furnish you, and then to pass you on, with a brisk salute, into as strange a scene as you will see in the world to-day.

For this sleepy little French town, with its inevitable Grand’ Place—a spacious cobbled square—its narrow streets mostly named after local politicians and other notabilities, its neglected-looking cathedral and churches, its garish little shops, is a kind of museum of uniforms. Never was such a variety of military caps seen together before: many variations of the “brass-hat” of the Staff Officer, from a hideous kind of Sandford-and-Merton pattern with a swollen crown, which some of the arbiters of fashions have imported from Piccadilly, to the faded red and tarnished gold of the Brigade Major from the trenches; the forage-cap of the Royal Flying Corps, the Glengarry and Kilmarnock bonnet, the képi with its khaki cover—badge of the French interpreter—the slouch hat of the Gurkha, the puggaree of the Indian Cavalry, the common or garden service-cap of Mr. Thomas Atkins.

Then the boots and leggings! What a multiple variety! Immaculate field-boots of the A.D.C., boned and blocked and polished daily by enthusiastic “batmen” until you can see yourself in their resplendent surface; “pig-dealers,” the grey, close-fitting, canvas leggings affected by the “horsy”; Stohwassers of every make and kind; puttees, brown, grey, and blue; ski boots; canvas field-boots; “ammunition boots,” clean or mud-caked and sodden according as the wearer’s duties take him near or away from the firing-line.

The bureaux of notaries, of insurance agents, of exporters and importers, have been turned into offices for the army services. Officers with such alphabetical titles as I have mentioned above stride with a preoccupied air in and out of old houses whose dilapidated fronts and faded rooms breathe an atmosphere of fatigue that contrasts strangely with the bustle within.

Here in a room that might have come out of an illustration of Du Maurier in Punch of the seventies an officers’ mess is installed. Tins of cigarettes and tobacco stand on the mantelpiece, the Sketch and the Vie Parisienne lie about the tables, maps hang on the walls, in the depressing atmosphere created by an abundance of rubbed and dusty plush, of cheap brass ornaments, of soul-searing chromo-lithographs, of dyed grasses crammed into vases as big as drainpipes. Perhaps the word mess conjures up for you a picture of regimental plate, of shaded lights, of red-and-gold uniforms. Banish it from your mind! “Cut it out!”

Meals at G.H.Q. have only one excuse—viz., that man must eat. They are short and business-like, and the fare is plain. In this stern, hard-working North of France they have none of the amenities of French life. The wine is imported, and bad and dear at that; the cooking is atrocious; and as for cleanliness, I have dined in my time at many a humble eating-house in London where the food was served in a far more appetizing manner than I have seen it in the hotels in this part of France. Soup produced from soup squares, fish (on Wednesdays and Fridays, fish-market days) or macaroni, then roast beef or mutton (ration meat, and mostly very tough), followed by tinned fruit and coffee, is the average menu of the messes at G.H.Q. Immediately after dinner everybody bolts back to his work.

During the greater part of the day everything is in movement at G.H.Q. Except for the orderlies waiting for messages outside the offices, and officers here or there talking in the street, everyone seems to be moving. Cars come chug-chugging up the narrow streets, waved in and out by military policemen posted at the dangerous corners, with little coloured flags affixed to the bonnet signifying the formation to which they are attached. There are French cars, adventurous-looking cars, some of them, heavily coated with the mud of Arras or the Argonne, or maybe even the Vosges, bearing mysterious numbers and letters on their wind-screens. They stand there in the sunshine while their drivers, begoggled and leather-coated, chat with a French interpreter or two, with a friendly town policeman, or a uniformed messenger from the Banque de France. In the group there will surely be a British A.S.C. driver or two surveying the Allied car with that silent mien of unspoken criticism which is the attitude of the chauffeur the world over towards a car other than his own.

Clean, well-set-up fellows are the sentries in the town furnished by the famous Territorial regiment incorporated in the G.H.Q. troops. The trim General with the blue arm-band you will often see walking about the town commands the G.H.Q. troops, and, as far as the British Army is concerned, represents law and order in the town. The Territorial regiment concerned has a drum-and-fife band that gives concerts twice daily on the Grand’ Place, to the huge delight of the populace. It also organises smoking-concerts of its own, at which a fine array of talent is forthcoming. The pianist at entertainments of all sorts organized by our army in the field within a wide radius of G.H.Q. is a private of this battalion, a musician of no mean order.