Читать книгу A Padre in France - George A. Birmingham - Страница 6

Table of Contents

I made my start from Victoria Station on a January morning. I had worn His Majesty’s uniform for no more than two days, and was still uneasily conscious of my strange clothes. I was uncertain about the proper adjustment of straps and buttons. I came for the first time in my life into touch with the army. I, a man of over fifty, went back with a leap to the emotions of forty years before. I was a new boy in a big school.

Others—some who have had the experience and more who have not—have described that start from Victoria or Waterloo. They have said something about the pangs of farewell, though I cannot imagine how any one who has been through it wants to talk about that. They have said a good deal about the thrill of excitement which comes with the beginning of adventure. They have described a certain awe of the unknown. They have tingled with intense curiosity.

I confess chiefly to bewilderment, the discomfort of strangeness and an annoying sense of my own extreme insignificance. I was a new boy. I wanted to behave properly, to do the right thing, and I had no way of knowing what the right thing was. I was absurdly anxious not to “cheek” anybody, and thereby incur the kind of snubbing, I scarcely expected the kicks, which I had endured long ago when I found myself a lonely mite in a corner of the cloisters of my first school.

I sat, with my bundle of papers tucked in beside me, in a corner of a Pullman car. Opposite me was an officer. I recognised, by the look of his Sam Browne belt, that he was an old boy, that he had been there before. I did not know then, being wholly unskilled in pips and badges, what he was. My impression now is that he was an artillery captain, probably returning to the front after leave. It seems ridiculous to be afraid to speak to an artillery captain; but nothing would have induced me to begin a conversation with that man. For all I knew he might have been a general, and it might have been the worst kind of bad form for a mere padre to speak to a general. I even thought of saluting him when I first caught his eye, but I did not know how to salute.

It was he, in the end, who spoke to me. We had reached the end of our train journey and were gathering coats and haversacks from the racks above our heads. I left my papers—Punch and The Bystander—on the seat.

“You ought to take those with you,” he said. “You’ll find lots of fellows jolly thankful to get them over there.”

So I was going to a land where men could not easily come by Punch and The Bystander. In a general way I knew that before he spoke. I had heard of the hardships of war. I was prepared for my share of them. But I had somehow failed to realise that it might be impossible, under certain circumstances, to buy Punch if I wanted it.

The boat, though we arrived beside it early in the morning, did not actually start till afternoon. I might have gone to an hotel and had a comfortable luncheon. I was afraid to do anything of the sort. Military discipline is not a thing to play tricks with. I had made up my mind about that before I started, and in the orders given me for my journey there was not a word about luncheon. I went hungry—foolishly, no doubt.

I heard a story once about a sergeant and several men who were cut off by the Germans from their battalion. They held out for forty hours and were finally rescued. It was found that they had not touched their iron (emergency) ration. Asked why they had gone hungry when they had food in their pockets, the sergeant replied that the eating of iron rations without orders from a superior officer was forbidden. His was a great devotion to discipline—heroic, though foolish. My abstinence was merely foolish. I could not claim that I had any direct orders not to go to an hotel for luncheon.

While I waited on the deck of the steamer I met M. He was alone as I was; but he looked much less frightened than I felt. He was a padre too; but his uniform was not aggressively new. It seemed to me that he might know something about military life. My orders were “to report to the M.L.O.” when I landed. I wanted very much to know what that word “report” meant. I wanted still more to know what an M.L.O. was and where a stray voyager would be likely to find him.

It was not difficult to make friends with M. It is never difficult for one padre to make friends with another. All that is necessary by way of introduction is a frank and uncensored expression of opinion about the Chaplains’ Department of the War Office. The other man’s soul is knit to yours at once. I cannot now remember whether M. or I attacked the subject first. I know we agreed. I suppose it is the same with all branches of the service. Combatant officers are, or used in those days to be, one in heart when discussing the Staff. I never met a doctor who did not think that the medical services are organised by congenital idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C. subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees that the War Office is the refuge of incompetents. Padres, perhaps, express themselves more freely than the others. They are less subject to the penalties which threaten those who criticise their superiors. But their opinions are no stronger than those of other people.

Even without that bond of common feeling I think I should have made friends with M. No franker, more straightforward, less selfish man has crossed the sea to France wearing the obscured Maltese Cross which decorates the cap of the padre. It was my first real stroke of luck that I met M. on the deck of that steamer. As it turned out he knew no more than I did about what lay before us. His previous service had been in England and he was going to France for the first time. An M.L.O. was a mystery to him.

But he was cheerful and self-confident. His view was that an exaggerated importance might easily be attached to military orders. If an M.L.O. turned out to be an accessible person, easily recognised, we should report to him and set our consciences at ease. If, on the other hand, the authorities chose to conceal their M.L.O. in some place difficult to find, we should not report to him. Nothing particular would happen either way. So M. thought, and he paced the deck with so springy a step that I began to hope he might be right.

Our passage was abominably rough. M., who dislikes being seasick in public, disappeared. I think what finished him was the sight of an officer in a kilt crawling on his hands and knees across the wet and heaving deck, desperately anxious to get to the side of the ship before his malady reached its crisis. M.’s chair was taken by a pathetic-looking V.A.D. girl, whose condition soon drove me away.

It is one of the mitigations of the horrors of this war that whoever takes part in it is sure to meet friends whom he has lost sight of for years, whom he would probably lose sight of altogether if the chances of war did not bring unexpected meetings. That very first day of my service was rich in its yield of old friends.

When I fled from the sight of the V.A.D.’s pale face, I took to wandering about the decks and came suddenly on a man whom I had last seen at the tiller of a small boat in Clew Bay. I was beating windward across the steep waves of a tideway. His boat was running free with her mainsail boomed out; and he waved a hand to me as he passed. Once again we met at sea; but we were much less cheerful. He was returning to France after leave, to spend the remainder of a second winter in the trenches. He gave it to me as his opinion that life in the Ypres salient was abominable beyond description, and that no man could stand three winters of it. I wanted to ask him questions about military matters, and I might have got some light and leading from him if I had. But somehow we drifted away from the subject and talked about County Mayo, about boats, about islands, and other pleasant things.

M., recovering rapidly from his seasickness, proved his worth the moment we set foot on dry land. He discovered the M.L.O., who seemed a little surprised that we should have taken the trouble to look him up. We left him, and M., still buoyant, found another official known as an R.T.O. He is a man of enormous importance, a controller of the destinies of stray details like ourselves. He told us that we should reach our destination—perhaps I should say our first objective—if we took a train from the Gare Centrale at 6 p.m. We had a good look at the Gare Centrale, to make sure that we should know it again.

Then M. led me off to find a censor. Censors, though I did not know it then, are very shy birds and conceal their nests with the cunning of reed warblers. Hardly any one has ever seen a censor. But M. found one, and we submitted to his scrutiny letters which we had succeeded in writing. After that I insisted on getting something to eat. I had breakfasted at an unholy hour. I had crossed the sea. I had endured great mental strain. I had tramped the streets of an exceedingly muddy town in a downpour of rain. I felt that I must have food and if possible, wine. M. is indifferent to food and hardly ever tastes wine. But he is a kind-hearted man. He agreed to eat with me, though I am sure he would much rather have looked up another official or two, perhaps introduced himself to the Base Commandant.

We went to an hotel, the largest and most imposing in the town, but, as I discovered months afterwards, quite the worst. There I found another friend. Or rather, another friend found me. He was a young man in the uniform of the R.A.M.C. and he rushed at me from the far end of a large salon. I am ashamed to say that I neither recognised him nor knew his name when he told it to me. But there was no doubt of his friendly feelings. He asked me where I was going. I told him, “G.H.Q.” It appeared that he had just come from G.H.Q. in a motor. How he came to have control of a motor I do not know. He was a very junior officer, not on anybody’s staff and totally unconnected with transport of any kind. He offered us the car and said that we could start any time we liked. He himself was going on leave and the car had to go back to G.H.Q. I had been distinctly told by the R.T.O. to go in a train and—it was my first day in the army—I had a very high idea of the importance of obeying orders. M. laughed at me. So did my other friend.

“Nobody,” he said, “cares a pin how you get there, and it doesn’t matter when. This week or next, it’s all the same. In fact, if I were you I should take a couple of days off and see the country before I reported at G.H.Q.”

I know now that I might have done this and that no one would have been surprised or angry if I had. But the new-boy feeling was still strong on me. I was afraid. It seemed to me an awful thing to go for a tour in the war zone in a kidnapped motor, which might for all I knew be a car specially set apart for the use of the Commander-in-Chief.

At 6 o’clock we started in that car, M., I, and a total stranger who emerged from the hotel at the last moment and sat on my valise. There was also the driver and M.’s luggage. M. had a great deal of luggage. We were horribly cramped. It rained with increasing fury. We passed through a region of pallid mud, chalk, I suppose, which covered us and the car with a slimy paste. But I enjoyed the drive. Sentries, French and English, challenged us, and I could see the rain glistening on their bayonets in the light of our lamps. We rushed through villages and intensely gloomy woods. Sign-posts shone white for an instant at cross roads and disappeared. The wind whipped the rain against our faces. The white slime utterly dimmed my spectacles, and I looked out at walls of darkness through frosted glass.

The stranger, balanced perilously on my valise, shouted to me the news that G.H.Q. had been bombed by aeroplanes the day before. It was all that was wanted to complete the sense of adventure. I could have wished for a bomb or two which would miss us, for the sight of a Taube (they were Taubes, not Fokkers or Gothas, in those days) swooping into sight suddenly through the darkness and vanishing again. None came.

We took the advice of our unknown travelling companion and engaged rooms in the hotel he recommended. It was not at all a bad hotel. If we had had any sense or experience, we should have dined and gone straight to bed. That was what M. wanted to do. I suffered from an attack of conscience, and insisted that we ought to report ourselves to the Deputy-Chaplain-General.

“Our orders,” I reminded M., “are to report on arrival.”

We set out to look for the Deputy-Chaplain-General, M. averring that he had a special talent for finding his way in strange towns at night. Owing to what are officially known as the “unhappy divisions” of the Christian Church, there are two chief chaplains in France. One controls the clergy of the Church of England. The other drives a mixed team of Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and others who owe spiritual allegiance to what is called “The United Board.” At that time both these gentlemen had offices in the same town.

In spite of M.’s instinct for locality we came on the wrong one first. Our chief was located in the most obscure corner. We found him at last, or rather we found his office. The good man himself was probably in bed. An orderly invited us to write our names in block capitals, insisting severely on the block capitals, in a large book. Then—he must have recognised that we were new boys and gullible—he said that we ought to report ourselves to some one else called the billeting officer.

The fact that we were already provided with beds made no difference. To the billeting officer we ought to go. It is greatly to our credit that we did. I followed M. through the streets of that town, very narrow streets, very twisty and very badly lighted. I felt as Carruthers did when Davis piloted him across the sand-banks through the fog to Memert. It was 11 o’clock when we found the billeting officer. He was playing bridge and did not in the least want to see us, appeared indeed to think that our visit was unnecessary and troublesome. We left him hurriedly.

Our hotel seemed a home when we got back to it. A friendly subaltern helped us out of a difficulty and increased our knowledge of the French language by telling us that:

“In this country when you want soda water you say ‘Oh, gas us.’ ”

We said it to the damsel behind the bar, and I have seldom been more surprised than I was when she produced a siphon. After that we went to bed.