A large sheet of water which had formed about some shell-holes outside the trenches of the Rifle Brigade in the winter afforded both sides a great deal of amusement. One night a patrol found a rough wooden model of a German submarine floating in the pond, flying a paper flag on which were inscribed the words: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!” The submarine was “captured,” and for the next few days several handy fellows in the battalion of the R.B.’s holding the front line spent all their spare time in constructing a model battleship. This was subsequently launched at night flying a pennant with the words: “Why don’t you come out and fight?” A night or two after our patrols found that the pennant had been removed from the battleship, and replaced by a flag bearing the words: “Germania rules the waves!” In the meantime the battle of Heligoland was fought. The model was accordingly rescued from the pond, suitably disfigured to represent a sinking ship, “Bluecher” painted in large letters on its side, and the flag replaced by one bearing these words: “Has your Government told you about this ship?” The blow told: the model disappeared, and the jest ended.
The exchange of news is very popular. I was in the front line one afternoon when a message arrived from the division announcing the surrender of German South-West Africa, and adding: “Perhaps the enemy might like to know this.”
The suggestion was immediately acted upon. The news was translated into German, “Gott strafe England!” was added to give it a proper German ring, and when I went down the men were painting the message in white on a large blackboard, which was going to be hoisted on the parapet facing the German trench. The Germans attacked this part of the line the next day, whether as the result of our message I am unable to say.
The high comradeship of our trenches is enhanced by many little touches redolent of home. The British soldier is a homing-bird, and he loves to perpetuate the memory of places that are dear to him in his surroundings in the trenches. The troops in the Ploegsteert lines—“Plug Street” of wide renown—who inaugurated the custom of giving street names to trenches with their “Strand” and “Fleet Street” and “Hyde Park Corner,” in reality hit upon a very practical solution of the great difficulty of providing suitable identification for the network of trenches which was growing up all along our lines. Now the custom is general, and the neatly inscribed sign-boards which meet your eyes in so many parts of the line evoke recollections of busy streets and squares in London and provincial towns, and of gallant commanders, some of whom have “gone west,” whose names are perpetuated in countless “houses” and “corners” and “farms” along our line.
Since I came to France I have made it my business to visit the trenches in almost every part of the line. There are those who say: “When you have seen one trench, you have seen them all.” Of a truth, outwardly there is little enough difference between them all—the same swarm of dust-coloured figures, the same sandbags, the same timber-work, the same mud, the same strip of No Man’s Land ahead, the same devastation behind, the same noises echoing hollow all about. But to me each strip of trench is another corner of the great heart of Britain, where Britons of all stamps—the fair-haired Saxon, the darker Norman, the Scot, the Celt, from many climes, of many races—are playing the part in the work of Empire which is every Briton’s birthright to-day. The bond uniting them in the steel line which the German hordes have vainly tried to break is the companionship of the Table Round of the Empire, the bulwark of the world’s civilization against the most formidable menace ever launched by the powers of darkness.
CHAPTER XI
THE PRINCE OF WALES
One evening, a few years ago, I stood on the platform of the Gare du Nord, and saw the arrival of the London train that was bringing the young Prince of Wales to Paris for a stay of a few months before going to Magdalen College, Oxford. The arrival was quite informal. There was no red carpet, no guard of honour, only a few old friends of King Edward, like the Marquis de Breteuil, with whom the Prince was going to live, and M. Louis Lépine, most Parisian of police prefects. “Comme tout ça fait penser à son grand-père!” one of those present said to me as the train steamed in. “Il aimait Paris, celui-là!”
Because of his grandfather, Paris from the first opened her heart wide to the young Prince, a fair-haired slip of a boy, as I saw him that day at the Gare du Nord, acknowledging with just a trace of embarrassment the cordial welcome of the friends of that other “Prince de Galles.” The newspapers very chivalrously acceded to his wish that his movements should be ignored, and for a few brief months the Prince of Wales enjoyed that magic experience which everyone would give the best years of his life to be able to taste again, the first acquaintanceship with Paris. From the windows of the Breteuil mansion in the Avenue du Bois he saw spring creeping into the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, while in London winter still drearily held sway. Many a time I met him swinging along the paths of the Bois with his tutor, the tall Mr. Hansell, or caught a glimpse of him driving out with one of the young Breteuils.
During his stay in Paris the young Prince went to the theatre, and visited the museums, and played tennis at the courts of the Bois de Boulogne or the Ile de Puteaux. M. Georges Cain, Curator of the Carnavalet Museum, and the greatest living authority on antiquarian Paris, led him into all the historic nooks and corners; M. Lépine took him round the Halles and the queer cabarets and lodging-houses surrounding the markets; while with Mr. Hansell he made excursions into the wider France—to Reims, and Amiens, and Tours, of cathedral fame; to the château country of the Loire; to Avignon and the Palace of the Popes; to Brest and Toulon, where M. Delcassé, another faithful friend of Edouard Sept, showed him the French Navy at work.
In the months he spent amongst the French I know the Prince learnt to love and admire France—eternal France, in President Poincaré’s noble phrase. In a conversation which I was privileged to have with the Prince in London before he went out to the front, he spoke with affectionate remembrance of his days in Paris, with indignation at the German air-raids on the city. Now, by a strange dispensation of Providence, the Prince of Wales is in France again, but the France he finds to-day is not the France he left a year or two ago.