I

I

Sometime in the second week of February I crossed to Havre on a detestable boat named Archangel. As soon as the boat began to move I was aware of a sense of relief. It was no use worrying about the War now; I was in the Machine again, and all responsibility for my future was in the haphazard control of whatever powers manipulated the British Expeditionary Force. Most of us felt like that, I imagine, and the experience was known as “being for it again.” Apart from that, my only recollection of the crossing is that someone relieved me of my new trench-coat while I was asleep.

At nine o’clock in the evening of the next day I reported myself at the 5th Infantry Base Depot at Rouen. The journey from London had lasted thirty-three hours (a detail which I record for the benefit of those who like slow-motion wartime details). The Base Camp was a couple of miles from the town, on the edge of a pine forest. In the office where I reported I was informed that I’d been posted to our Second Battalion; this gave me something definite to grumble about, for I wanted to go where I was already known, and the prospect of joining a strange battalion made me feel more homeless than ever. The 5th I.B.D. Adjutant advised me to draw some blankets; the storeroom was just round the corner, he said. After groping about in the dark and tripping over tent ropes I was beginning to lose my temper when I opened a door and found myself in a Guard Room. A man, naked to the waist, was kneeling in the middle of the floor, clutching at his chest and weeping uncontrollably. The Guard were standing around with embarrassed looks, and the Sergeant was beside him, patient and unpitying. While he was leading me to the blanket store I asked him what was wrong. “Why, sir, the man’s been under detention for assaulting the military police, and now ’e’s just ’ad news of his brother being killed. Seems to take it to ’eart more than most would. ’Arf crazy, ’e’s been, tearing ’is clothes off and cursing the war and the Fritzes. Almost like a shell-shock case, ’e seems. It’s his third time out. A Blighty one don’t last a man long nowadays, sir.” As I went off into the gloom I could still hear the uncouth howlings.

“Well, well; this is a damned depressing spot to arrive at!” I thought, while I lay awake trying to keep warm and munching a bit of chocolate, in a narrow segment of a canvas shed about four feet high. Beyond the army-blanket which served as a partition, two officers were chattering interminably in rapid Welsh voices. They were comparing their experiences at some squalid pleasure house in Rouen, and their disclosures didn’t make the War seem any jollier. It was, in fact, the most disgusting little conversation I’d ever listened to. But what right had I to blame the poor devils for trying to have a good time before they went up to the Line?⁠ ⁠… Nevertheless, the War seemed to be doing its best to make me feel unheroic.

Next day I found the 5th I.B.D. Mess dispiriting. I knew nobody, and it wasn’t a place where people felt inclined to be interested in one another, since none of them were there for more than a few days. They agreed in grumbling about the alcoholic R.C. padre who managed the mess; the food was bad, and four and threepence a day was considered an exorbitant charge. When they weren’t on the training ground (known as “the Bull Ring”) officers sat about in the Mess Room playing cards, cursing the cold weather, and talking tediously about the War with an admixture of ineffective cynicism which hadn’t existed twelve months before. I watched them crowding round the notice board after a paper had been pinned to it. They were looking to see if their names were on the list of those going up to the Line next day. Those who were on the list laughed harshly and sat down, with simulated unconcern, to read a stale picture paper. On the same notice board were the names of three private soldiers who had been shot for cowardice since the end of January. “The sentence was duly carried out.⁠ ⁠…” In the meantime we could just hear the grumbling of the guns, and there was the Spring Offensive to look forward to.

I was feeling as if I’d got a touch of fever, and next morning the doctor told me I’d got German measles. So I transferred myself ingloriously to No. 25 Stationary Hospital, which was a compound of tents with a barbed wire fence round it, about 300 yards from the Camp. There were six in the tent already and my arrival wasn’t popular. An extra bed had to be brought in, and the four cardplayers huddled against a smoky stove were interrupted by a gust of Arctic wind. There was snow on the ground and the tent was none too warm at the best of times. “Now, Mr. Parkins, I’m afraid you must shift round a bit to make room for the new patient,” said the nurse. While my bed was being lugged into position by an orderly, Mr. Parkins made it plain that six had been company in that tent and seven was an inconvenience. One of his opponents told him to stop chewing the rag and deal again. The cards had been blown off the table and Parkins had lost what, he said, was the first decent hand he’d held that morning. But the additional overcrowding soon ceased to be a grievance, and I didn’t spoil their well established circle by offering to cut in at bridge, for I was content to read a book and observe my fellow-invalids.

The quietest of them was Strangford, a specimen of adolescent simplicity, lanky and overgrown and credulous. He wore a kilt, but came of good North Irish stock. Though barely nineteen, he had done several months in the trenches. His father kept a pack of harriers in County Down, and his face would light up when I encouraged him to tell me about them. But unless he was talking or had some little job to keep him busy, his brain appeared to cease working altogether. He would sit on the edge of his bed, slowly rubbing his knee which had a bad sore on it; a mop of untidy brown hair hung over his forehead, and his huge clumsy hands and red wrists had outgrown his tunic. After rubbing his knee, he takes a letter from his breast pocket, bending his gawky, unformed face over it; once he smiles secretly, but when he has read it through he is solemn⁠—wondering, perhaps, when he will see his home and the harriers again.

Parkins was an obvious contrast to this modest youth. Pent up in the accidental intimacy of army life, men were usually anxious to exhibit themselves to the best advantage, particularly as regards their civilian antecedents. “I’ll bet he was jolly well-dressed before the war,” was a type of remark frequently made by young platoon commanders. Parkins was about thirty, and often reminded us that he had been to Cambridge; in private life he had been a schoolmaster. Plausible at first, he soon revealed his defects, for the slovenly tedium of that tent brought greed and selfishness to the surface. With his muddy eyes and small dark moustache, he wasn’t a man one took to. But he was self-satisfied, and did his best to amuse us with indecent rhymes and anecdotes. He was also fond of using certain stilted expressions, such as “for the nonce” and “anent.” “I’ve no complaints to make anent this hand,” he would say when playing cards. He posed as a gay dog, chaffing the nurses when they brought in the food, and quoting Omar Khayyám at them⁠—“a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou beside me, singing in the Wilderness”⁠—and referring to the tent as “this battered Caravanserai whose portals are alternate Night and Day.” Parkins did not conceal his dislike of the Front Line, and was now in hopes of getting a job as Railway Transport Officer. But he was the sort of man who would get killed in some unutterably wretched attack after doing his best to dodge it.

Young Holt was another second-rate character, plump, smooth-faced and spuriously smart. He had escaped from the Infantry into the Balloon Section, and now fancied himself in a leather overcoat with a fur collar⁠—playing at “being in the Royal Flying Corps.” He felt that R.F.C. officers had a social superiority to the Infantry. Being up in a balloon elevated a man in more ways than one, and he often aired his discrimination in such matters. Speaking of the Artillery, he would say, “Yes, there’s more tone in the R.F.A.⁠—much more tone than you find in the Garrison Gunners!” Holt was a harmless easygoing creature, but we got very tired of his incessant repetition of a stale joke which consisted in saying in a loud voice, I will arise and will go unto my father and will say unto him: Father, stand-at-ease!

Then there was White, a sensible Territorial Captain who had been in charge of Heavy Trench Mortars. Short and thick set, with a deep, humorous voice, he talked in a muddled way about the War⁠—sardonic about English methods, but easily impressed by notable “public names” of politicians and generals. He liked discussing Trench Mortar technicalities, and from the way he spoke about his men I knew that he had earned their gratitude.

There was another youngish man who had been a clerk in the Colonial Office and had gone to Egypt as a Yeomanry Sergeant before getting his Infantry commission. He talked to me, in a cockney accent, about his young wife, and was evidently kindly and reliable, though incapable of understanding an original idea. Two days after I’d seen the last of him, I couldn’t remember either his face or his name.

The last of my six companions was Patterson, aged nineteen and fresh from Edinburgh University with a commission in the Field Artillery. His home was in Perth and he admitted that he loved porridge, when asking the nurse to try and wangle him a second helping of it. He talked broad Scots and made simple-minded war jokes, and then surprised me by quoting Milton and Keats. Self-reliant with a sort of pleasant truculence, he was thorough and careful in everything he did. With his crisp fair hair, grey eyes, and fresh complexion, he was a pattern of charming youthfulness. If he lived, he would be a shrewd, kindly man. Did he live, I wonder?⁠ ⁠…

After the first few days I used to slip through the wire fence and walk in the clean-smelling pinewoods. The surf-like sighing of the lofty colonnades could tranquillize my thoughts after the boredom of the tent and the chatter of the cardplayers crouching by the stove. The pine-trees are patiently waiting for the guns to stop, I thought, and I felt less resentment against the War than I had done since I left England.⁠ ⁠… One afternoon I followed an alley which led downhill to a big shuttered house. Blackbirds were scolding among the bushes as I trespassed in the untidy garden, and someone was chopping timber in a brown copse below the house. A dog barked from the stable-yard; hens clucked, and a cow lowed. Such homely sounds were comforting when one was in the exile of army life. I thought of the lengthening spring twilights and the lovely wakening of the year, forgetful of the “Spring Offensive.” But it was only for a short while, and the bitter reality returned to me as I squeezed myself through the hospital’s barbed wire fence. I was losing my belief in the War, and I longed for mental acquiescence⁠—to be like young Patterson, who had come out to fight for his country undoubting, who could still kneel by his bed and say his simple prayers, steadfastly believing that he was in the Field Artillery to make the world a better place. I had believed like that, once upon a time, but now the only prayer which seemed worth uttering was Omar Khayyám’s:

For all the Sin wherewith the face of Man

Is blackened⁠—Man’s forgiveness give⁠—and take.