Читать книгу A "Temporary Gentleman" in France - A. J. Dawson - Страница 5

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If inclined to revile me for apparent neglect of you these last few days, be charitable and revile lightly.

It's astonishing how full one's days are. And then when late evening arrives and arrangements for next morning are complete, and one's been the round of one's platoon billets and seen all in order for the night—then, instead of being free to write one's own letters, one must needs wade through scores written by the men of one's platoon, who—lucky beggars!—have three times the leisure we can ever get. Their letters must all be censored and initialed, you see. Rightly enough, I suppose, the military principle seems to be never to allow the private soldier to be burdened by any responsibility which an officer can possibly take. The giving away of military information in a letter, whether inadvertently or knowingly, is, of course, a serious offence. (German spies are everywhere.) When I have endorsed all my platoon's letters, the responsibility for their contents rests on my shoulders and the men run no risks.

If I were an imitative bird now, you would find my letter reading something after this style:

"Just a few lines to let you know how we are getting on, hoping this finds you in the pink as it leaves me at present. We are getting very near the Germans now, and you can take it from me they'll get what for when we come up with 'em. The grub here is champion, but we are always ready for more, and I shan't be sorry to get that parcel you told me of. Please put in a few fags next time. The French people have a queer way of talking so you can't always understand all they say, but they're all right, I can tell you, when you get to know 'em, and I can sling their bat like one o'clock now. It's quite easy once you get the hang of it, this bong jor and pang parley voo. Milk is lay, and not too easy to get. The boys are all in the pink, and hoping you're the same, so no more at present," etc.

One sometimes gets mad with them for trifles, but for all the things that really matter—God bless 'em all! By Jove! they are Britons. They're always "in the pink" and most things are "champion," and when the ration-wagon's late and a man drops half his whack in the mud, he grins and says, "The Army of to-day's all right"; and that, wait till he gets into the trenches, he'll smarten the Boches up for that! Oh, but they are splendid; and though one gets into the way of thinking and saying one's own men are the best in the Army, yet, when one means business one knows very well the whole of the New Army's made of the same fine stuff. Why, in my platoon, and in our Company for that matter, they are every mother's son of them what people at home call rough, ignorant fellows. And I admit it. Rough they certainly are; and ignorant, too, by school standards. But, by Jingo! their hearts are in the right place, and I'd back any one of them against any two goose-stepping Boches in the Kaiser's Prussian Guard.

And, with it all, mind you, they're so English. I mean they are kind, right through to their bones; good fellows, you know; sportsmen, every one of 'em; fellows you'd trust to look after your mother. They're as keen as mustard to get to the strafing of Boches; but that's because the Boche is the enemy, war is war, and duty is duty. You couldn't make haters of 'em, not if you paid 'em all ambassadorial salaries to cultivate a scowl and sing hymns of hate. Not them. Not all the powers of Germany and Austria could make baby-killers, women-slayers, and church-destroyers of these chaps of ours. If I know anything about it, they are fine soldiers, but the Kaiser himself—"Kayser," they call him—couldn't make brutes and bullies of 'em. Warm their blood—and, mind you, you can do it easily enough, even with a football in a muddy field, when they've been on carrying fatigues all day—and, by Jove! there's plenty of devil in 'em. God help the men in front of 'em when they've bayonets fixed! But withal they're English sportsmen all the time, and a French child can empty their pockets and their haversacks by the shedding of a few tears.

But I run on (and my candle runs down) and I give you no news. This is our last night here, and I ought to be asleep in my flea-bag, for we make an early start to-morrow for our first go in the trenches. But it's jolly yarning here to you, while the whole village is asleep, and no chits are coming in, and the Battalion Orderly Room over the way is black and silent as the grave, except for the sentry's footsteps in the mud. I'm in rather good quarters here, in the Mayor's house. When we left that first village—I'm afraid I haven't written since—we had three days of marching, sleeping in different billets each night. Here in this place, twelve miles from the firing line, we've had five days; practising with live bombs, getting issues of trench kit, and generally making last preparations. To-morrow night we sleep in tents close to the line and begin going into trenches for instruction.

But, look here, before I turn in, I must just tell you about this household and my hot bath last night. The town is a queer little place; farming centre, you know. The farm-houses are all inside the village, and mine—M. le Maire's—is one of the best. From the street you see huge great double doors, that a laden wagon can drive through, in a white wall. That is the granary wall. You enter by the big archway into a big open yard, the centre part of which is a wide-spreading dung-hill and reservoir. All round the yard are sheds and stables enclosing it, and facing you at the back the low, long white house, with steps leading up to the front door, which opens into the kitchen. This is also the living-room of M. le Maire and his aged mother. Their family lived here before the Revolution, and the three sturdy young women and one old, old man employed on the farm, all live in the house.

M. le Maire is a warm man, reputed to have a thorough mastery of the English tongue, among other things, as a result of "college" education. So I gather from the really delightful old mother, who, though bent nearly double, appears to run the whole show, including the Town Hall opposite our Battalion Headquarters. I have never succeeded in inducing the Mayor to speak a word of English, but he has a little dictionary like a prayer-book, with perfectly blinding print, and somehow carries on long and apparently enjoyable conversations with my batman (who certainly has no French), though, as I say, one never heard a word of English on his lips.

I know what the newspapers are. They pretend to give you the war news. But I'll bet they'll tell you nothing of yesterday's really great event, when the Commander of No. 1 Platoon took a hot bath, as it were under municipal auspices, attended by two Company Headquarters orderlies, his own batman, and the cordially expressed felicitations of his brother officers, not to mention the mayoral household, and the whole of No. 1 Platoon, which is billeted in the Mayor's barns and outbuildings. Early in the day the best wash-tub had been commandeered for this interesting ceremony, and I fancy it has an even longer history behind it than the Mayor's pre-Revolution home. It is not definitely known that Marie Antoinette used this tub, bathing being an infrequent luxury in her day; but if she had been cursed with our modern craze for washing, and chanced to spend more than a year or so in this mud-set village of M——, she certainly would have used this venerable vessel, which, I gather, began life as the half of a cider barrel, and still does duty of that sort on occasion, and as a receptacle for the storing of potatoes and other nutritious roots, when not required for the more intimate service of M. le Maire's mother, for the washing of M. le Maire's corduroys and underwear, or by M. le Maire himself, at the season of Michaelmas, I believe, in connection with the solemn rite of his own annual bath, which festival was omitted this year out of deference to popular opinion, because of the war.

The household of the Mayor, headed by this respected functionary himself, received me at the portals of his ancestral home and ushered me most kindly and graciously, if with a dash of grave, half-pitying commiseration, to what I thought at first was the family vault, though, as I presently discovered, it was in reality the mayoral salon or best parlour—as seen in war time—draped in sacking and year-old cobwebs. Here, after some rather embarrassing conversation, chiefly gesticulatory on my side—my conversational long suit is "Pas du tout! Merci beaucoup," and "Mais oui, Madame," with an occasional "Parfaitement," stirred in now and again, not with any meaning, but as a kind of guarantee of good faith, because I think it sounds amiable, if not indeed like my lambs in their billets, "Bien gentil," and "Très convenable, Monsieur." It is thus they are invariably described to me when I go inspecting. As I was saying, here I was presently left alone with the household cat, two sick rabbits in a sort of cage which must once have housed a cockatoo or parrot, my own little towel (a torn half, you know, designed to reduce valise weight), my sponge (but, alack! not my dear old worn-out nail-brush, now lying in trenches on Salisbury Plain), and the prehistoric wash-tub, now one quarter filled by what the Mayor regarded, I gathered, as perhaps the largest quantity of hot water ever accumulated in one place—two kettles and one oil-can full, carried by the orderlies.

The cat and the rabbits watched my subsequent proceedings with the absorbed interest of an intelligent mid-Victorian infant at its first pantomime. The cat, I blush to say, was female, and old enough to know better, but I trust the rabbits were of my own sex. Anyhow, they were sick, so perhaps it doesn't matter. The entire mayoral household, with my batman and others, were assembled in the big kitchen, separated from the chamber of my ablutions only by a door having no kind of fastening and but one hinge. Their silence was broken only by an occasional profound sigh from the Mayor's aged mother, and three sounds of reflective expectoration at considerable intervals from the Mayor himself. So I judged my bathing to be an episode of rare and anxious interest to the mayoral family.

My feet I anointed copiously with a disgusting unguent of great virtue—it's invaluable for lighting braziers when one's only fuel is muddy coke and damp chits—called anti-frostbite grease, that is said to guard us from the disease known as "Trench Feet," rumoured prevalent in our sector by reason of the mellow quality and depth of its mud, which, whilst apparently almost liquid, yet possesses enough body and bouquet—remember how you used to laugh at our auction catalogue superlatives in cellar lots?—to rob a man of his boots at times. For my hands—chipped about a bit now—I used carbolated vaseline. (Do you remember the preternaturally slow and wall-eyed salesman, with the wart, in the Salisbury shop where we bought it?) And then, clothed most sumptuously in virginal underwear, I crawled into my flea-bag, there to revel from 10.40 P.M. to 6 A.M., as I am about to do now, less one hour in the morning. How I wish one could consciously enjoy the luxury of sleep while sleeping! Good night and God bless you! God bless all the sweet, brave waiting women of England, and France, and Russia; and I wish I could send a bit of my clean comfort to-night to as many as may be of our good chaps, and France's bon camarades, out here.

When next I write we shall have seen a bit of the trenches, I hope, and so then you should have something more like real news from your

"Temporary Gentleman."