It is a building. In the language of the Army—the official language—it is a hut; but hardly more like the hut of civil life than it is like the flower from which it takes its name. The walls are of thin wood. The roof is corrugated iron. It contains two long low halls. Glaring electric lights hang from the rafters. They must glare if they are to shine at all, for the air is thick with tobacco smoke. Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of soldiers. In one, that which we enter first, the men are sitting, packed close together at small tables. They turn over the pages of illustrated papers. They drink tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns and slices of bread and butter. They write those letters home which express so little and, to those who understand, mean so much. Of the letters written home from camp, half at least are on paper which bear the stamp of the Y.M.C.A.—paper given to all who ask in this hut and a score of others. Reading, eating, drinking, writing, chatting, or playing draughts, everybody smokes. Everybody, such is the climate, reeks with damp. Everybody is hot. The last thing that the air suggests to the nose of one who enters is the smell of Sweet Lavender.
In the other, the inner hall, there are more men, still more closely packed together, smoking more persistently, and the air is even denser. Here no one is eating, no one reading. Few attempt to write. The evening’s entertainment is about to begin. On a narrow platform at one end of the hall is a piano. A pianist has taken possession of it. He has been selected by no one in authority, elected by no committee. He has occurred, emerged from the mass of men; by virtue of some energy within him has made good his position in front of the instrument. He flogs the keys and above the babel of talk sounds some rag-time melody, once popular, now forgotten or despised at home. Here or there a voice takes up the tune and sings or chants it. The audience begin to catch the spirit of the entertainment. Some one calls the name of Corporal Smith. A man struggles from his seat and leaps on to the platform. He is greeted with applauding cheers. There is a short consultation between him and the pianist. A tentative chord is struck. Corporal Smith nods approval and turns to the audience. His song begins. If it is the kind of song which has a chorus the audience shouts it, and Corporal Smith conducts the singing with wavings of his arm.
Corporal Smith is a popular favourite. We know his worth as a singer, demand and applaud him. But there are other candidates for favour. Before the applause has died away, while still acknowledgments are being bowed, another man takes his place on the platform. He is a stranger, and no one knows what he will sing. But the pianist is a man of genius. Whisper to him the name of a song, give even a hint of its nature, let him guess at the kind of voice, bass, baritone, tenor, and he will vamp an accompaniment. He has his difficulties. A singer will start at the wrong time, will for a whole verse perhaps make noises in a different key; the pianist never fails. Somehow, before very long, instrument and singer get together—more or less. There is no dearth of singers, no bashful hanging back, no waiting for polite pressure. Everyone who can sing, or thinks he can, is eager to display his talent. There is no monotony. A boisterous comic song is succeeded by one about summer roses, autumn leaves, and the kisses of a maiden at a stile. The vagaries of a drunkard are a matter for roars of laughter. A song about the beauty of the rising moon pleases us all equally well. An original genius sings a song of his own composition, rough-hewn verses set to a familiar tune, about the difficulty of obtaining leave and the longing that is in all our hearts for a return to ‘Blighty; dear old Blighty.’ Did ever men before fix such a name on the standard for which they fight? Now and again some one comes forward with a long narrative song, a kind of ballad chanted to a tune very difficult to catch. It is about as hard to keep track with the story as to pick up the tune. Words—better singers fail in the same way—are not easily distinguished, though the man does his best, clears his throat carefully between each verse and spits over the edge of the platform to improve his enunciation. No one objects to that. About manners and dress the audience is very little critical. But about the merits of the songs and the singers the men express their opinions with the utmost frankness. The applause is genuine, and the singer who wins it is under no doubt about its reality. The song which makes no appeal is simply drowned by loud talk, and the unfortunate singer will crack his voice in vain in an endeavour to regain the attention he has lost.
Encores are rare, and the men are slow to take them. There is a man towards the end of the evening who wins one, unmistakably, with an imitation of a drunkard singing ‘Alice, where art Thou?’ The pianist fails to keep in touch with the hiccoughing vagaries of this performance, and the singer, unabashed, finishes without accompaniment. The audience yells with delight and continues to yell till the singer comes forward again. This time he gives us a song about leaving home, a thing of heart-rending pathos, and we wail the chorus:
‘It’s sad to be giving the last hand-shake,
It’s sad the last long kiss to take,
It’s sad to say farewell.’
The entertainment draws to its close about 8 o’clock. Men go to bed betimes who know that a bugle will sound the réveillé at 5.30 in the morning. The end is always the same, but always comes strangely, always as a surprise. We sing a hymn, for choice a very sentimental hymn. We say a short prayer, often as rugged and unconventional as the entertainment itself. Then ‘The King.’ In these two words we announce the national anthem, and the men stand stiffly to attention while they sing. At half-past eight, by order of the supreme authorities, Sweet Lavender hut must close its doors. The end of the entertainment is planned to allow time for a final cup of tea or a last glass of Horlick’s Malted Milk before we go out to flounder through the mud to our tents. This last half-hour is a busy one for the ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. Long queues of men stand waiting to be served. Dripping cups and sticky buns are passed to them with inconceivable rapidity. The work is done at high pressure, but with the tea and the food the men receive something else, something they pay no penny for, something whose value to them is above all measuring with pennies—the friendly smile, the kindly word, of a woman. We can partly guess at what these ladies have given up at home to do this work—servile, sticky, dull work—for men who are neither kith nor kin to them. No one will ever know the amount of good they do; without praise, pay, or hope of honours, often without thanks. If ‘the actions of the just smell sweet and blossom,’ surely these deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance of surpassing sweetness. Perhaps, after all, the hut is well-named Sweet Lavender. The discerning eye sees the flowers through the mist of steaming tea. We catch the perfume while we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, damp clothes, and heated bodies. It is not every Y.M.C.A. which is honoured with a name. Sweet Lavender stands alone here among huts distinguished only by numbers. But surely they should all be called after flowers, for in them grow the sweetest blooms of all.