The adventures of an ensign

_To My Wife._

The Adventures of an Ensign

By Vedette

Second Impression

William Blackwood and Sons Edinburgh and London 1917

_All Rights Reserved_

The Adventures of an Ensign.

Chapter I.

“Fair sets the wind for France!”

This story, like so many others in England’s military history, opens at Waterloo Station. We shall abridge the formalities of introducing its central figure, for he can only claim attention in connection with certain military events in which he played a diminutive _rôle_. Indeed, save for the fact that he is wearing the service uniform of one of the Guards’ regiments, there is nothing to distinguish him from the thousands of other second lieutenants, insignificant even as he, whose share in shaping the destinies of the world on the battlefields of France and Belgium has likewise begun at one or other of the great London termini.

Here, then, is our Ensign--a colloquial phrase for referring to a second lieutenant of the Guards, for the title was dropped many years ago--in company with a brother ensign, his fellow-traveller, known to the ante-room at home as “The Lad,” and, like the other, for the first time “proceeding on active service.” They are going out alone--that is to say, not as part of a draft--and beyond the known fact that they are bound for the Guards’ Base Depôt in France, what military writers call “the fog of war” envelops their future.

“Thank goodness, we’re not conducting a draft!”

Thus our Ensign, as he stood on the platform at Waterloo, to his fellow-traveller, indicating with a jerk of his head a flushed and heated youth, heavily laden with pack and equipment, who was chivvying a party of men to the train.

“Probably we should get up to the Front quicker if we were!” replied his companion gloomily. Waking and sleeping, The Lad was haunted by the fear that the war would be over before he could get into the firing line.

“We shall get there quick enough, don’t you worry!” replied the other; “there’s something happening in France. I was at Broadstairs yesterday, and we heard the guns all day!”

For this was in those summer days of 1916, when even in Kent the air throbbed to the unending tremulo of the guns playing the overture to the battle of the Somme.

It was a beautiful morning--a Saturday--and the train was very crowded. The two officers started their journey under the most favourable auspices. On returning to their compartment of the train, after purchasing papers at the bookstall, our Ensign found a bearded cleric seated upon his Wolseley valise on the floor of the carriage, for every seat was taken. The Lad and our young friend made room for the ecclesiastic upon the seat between them, and in the conversation which ensued The Lad identified the stranger as a Bishop travelling down to Winchester to see a school cricket match.

“In this heat,” said The Lad to our Ensign, after taking leave of the Bishop at Winchester, “he must have mentally blessed us for coming to his rescue, so I think we’ve made a pretty good start!”

At the port of embarkation, which the Censor will hardly let me name, a timely hint recurred to them as they drove down to the docks in an ancient fly. The advice had been offered by a veteran of Mons and Ypres.

“Don’t go on board the transport too early,” this authority had said, “or the M.L.O. or one of those fellows will rope you in for the job of O.C. troops going across. They generally pick on somebody who is not conducting a draft!” So the two young officers, having ascertained that the transport would not sail till the late afternoon, dumped their kits on the quayside and fled back to the town for lunch. Cold beef and pickles and very stale bread and tired butter laid out on a stained table-cloth, in a depressing atmosphere of faded victuals, amid red wall-paper, whisky advertisements, and dyed grasses--truly we English love to soften the pangs of parting from our native shores! Nevertheless the travelling companions made an excellent luncheon, and even professed to recognise feminine allurements in the dingy slattern who served them.

The transport which was to take them to France was not a prison hulk such as bore young Colonel Wesley to his first taste of active service on the West Indies expedition, nor was she verminous like the coffin ships that conveyed the Guards to Malta in ’54; but when it is noted that she was clean, nothing remains to be said. There were a few bunks for officers below; but these were appropriated by the early comers. Everybody else, officers and men, sprawled about on the decks and in the bare open spaces made by clearing out the first and second class saloons--for, in her youth, the transport had been a passenger steamer.

The ship was very crowded. On board were big drafts of the King’s Royal Rifles, with their black cross badges, of London Territorials, and of Irish Rifles and Irish Fusiliers, a fine rowdy lot of Irishmen these two last, as well as some yeomanry and various oddments coming back from leave. Our Ensign, who possessed to some extent the faculty of observation, noticed that the leave men did not seem to return to the prospect before them with that blitheness of heart of which the lady war writers tell us. On the other hand, the men were by no means gloomy. They just sat about on their packs and smoked their fags and chatted about the good time they had had in Blighty, and cracked a little joke or two about the life to which they were going back.

Our two young Guardsmen walked the upper deck until the transport was well out in the open sea. Then the prostration became so general that progress was a sort of egg-dance. So they turned their steps towards the stairs leading to the lower deck, where they ran into a Grenadier subaltern. They stopped and chatted. He was going back from leave. They told him they were going to the Base.

“Do you think they’ll keep us there long?” asked The Lad hastily.

“Can’t say,” answered the other; “things are pretty quiet up Ypres way.”

Then they talked about the amenities of life in the Salient, and about mutual acquaintances out in France with the Guards’ Division and in the Brigade at home.

“I believe there’s some kind of restaurant place on board for officers,” suddenly remarked the Grenadier; “suppose we go and have something to eat!”

They found a tiny place, literally crammed to the narrow door with officers, packed as tight as herrings in a barrel, round several small tables, the napery of which showed signs of the tossing of the vessel and the rough-and-scramble of the accommodation. Fortunately some one there espied a submarine through the port-hole, and in the ensuing rush for the deck the three officers managed to wedge themselves in at a table. Here, in the course of time, they received successively from the hands of the perspiring stewards a piece of cold beef, a sardine in a saucer, a loaf of bread, considerably damaged, a knife, a spoon, a teapot full of very hot and very strong tea, and a plate. With these ingredients they contrived to make a very fair supper on the co-operative system.

After that the trio parted company, and our Ensign and The Lad, after much scrambling over prostrate forms, found an empty boat into which they clambered, and slept comfortably till daylight.

Our Ensign awoke to find The Lad shaking him. The rising sun was daubing the wide stretch of sky with a grand splash of colour. The transport was lying alongside a quay where lines of khaki figures were forming up on the greasy planking among cranes, gangways, and stacks of packing-cases.

“Listen!” said The Lad in a reverent voice.

But our Ensign had already heard it--that steady throb of distant cannon, an incessant pounding, as it seemed, upon the roof of the sky.

The guns of the Somme!

An officer, the snout of a megaphone to his face, was bawling orders.

“All leave men to come ashore at once. The remainder stay on board!” he boomed from the quayside.

“H--l!” exclaimed The Lad in a tone which suggested that peace might be declared before they could disembark.

“H--l!” echoed his companion.

Then they went and searched the vessel for breakfast. A Coldstream sergeant, whom The Lad had met on a bombing course somewhere at home, meeting them, volunteered the information that hot cocoa was going in the cook’s galley. There, sure enough, our heroes found two grimy-looking privates in their shirt sleeves presiding over dixies of some dark and scalding liquid. The procedure was simple. You grabbed a mug from somebody who had finished--officers and men were all mixed up together in that little place--and had as many dips as you could contrive in the scrum. Hot cocoa in the chilly dawn is nectar.

Soon after the travelling companions landed, and a very friendly M.L.O. abbreviated formalities for them and indicated an hotel where breakfast and a bath might be obtained before they went on to the Guards’ Base Depôt, the intermediate stage on their journey towards the Front.

The air still vibrated to the throb of distant gun fire. The whole town was throbbing in sympathy. The morning _communiqué_ was full of the story of the British successes on the Somme, with a long tale of prisoners and guns captured. People stood about the docks and at street corners in the bright sunshine discussing the great news. At the barber’s where they were shaved, at the hotel where they bathed and breakfasted, the new-comers heard little else save enthusiastic comments on the British advance.

Later in the day our Ensign and The Lad found themselves staring wide-eyed at a broad stretch of hillside, covered, as far as the eye could see, with a vast and mighty camp--a sea of tents and huts and sheds all astir with life.

Here, presently, they reported at an office in company with a throng of officers from every arm of the service, and were directed to proceed to the portion of the camp set apart for the Guards’ Division. A long, well-kept road, fringed on either side with tents and huts of all descriptions, led them through a series of camps, past orderly-rooms and guard-rooms and cinema sheds and Y.M.C.A. huts and church tents, with little gardens and regimental crests worked in white and black stones, to a low slope, dotted with huts and sheds and bell-tents in orderly rows, with a well-known flag floating from a flagstaff on the roof of a long low building.

A white star on a red and blue ground--it was the Brigade flag.

Chapter II

“And look ... a thousand Blossoms with the Day Woke ... and a thousand scattered into clay.”

--Omar KhayyáM.

Within the confines of that camp within a camp, the young officers found themselves at once at home.

In the long pavilion over which floated the Brigade flag, our Ensign and The Lad found the Officers’ Mess--a long dining-room and an ante-room, with bright curtains and basket-chairs, and a bridge-table or two, and the latest papers--rather like a golf pavilion. On the white distemper of the wall some one with an artist’s hand had executed a few hasty sketches of the Guards in their uniforms of peace time--an officer in overalls, a private in white fatigue jacket.

In the Mess the new-comers found assembled officers from every regiment in the Brigade--youngsters who had just come out from home, veterans returning to the Front for the second or third time, officers passed for light duty acting as instructors at the great training-ground where drafts of all arms waiting at the Depôt underwent a further period of training before being sent up to the firing line. Here our Ensign was joyously hailed by officers of his own regiment, who gave him the latest news from the Front. Here, too, he experienced that first unforgettable shock--he learnt of the death of a brother officer, one who had been his friend, killed in the trenches that very morning.

Along one corner of the little “square,” white bell-tents were pitched in neat array. In these were quartered men from every regiment in the Brigade of Guards, waiting their turn to be drafted into the firing line. The long stretch of canvas on the hillside, surrounded on every side by similar lines of tents stretching far away into the distance, reminded our Ensign of an old photograph he had seen somewhere of the Guards’ camp at Scutari in ’54, then, as now, hemmed in all round by the camps of other Brigades.

The camp was the picture of neatness. The well-metalled road traversing it was kept scrupulously clean. The officers were quartered in a little colony of square Armstrong huts, with canvas sides and timber flooring, set up in mathematically precise rows across from the Mess at the foot of a delightful little garden, laid out behind rustic fencing enclosing a Badminton court. The officers’ huts were gay with coloured prints cut out of ‘La Vie Parisienne’ and ‘The Sketch,’ the little gardens bright with flowers, the natty paths carefully swept. In short, the whole place was the perfection of order.

Life at the Guards’ Depôt in France differed from life with the Guards at home to this extent, that, instead of having their drills on the “square,” the men were marched up daily to the common training-ground, situated on a plateau overlooking the camp. Each day one or two officers per regiment were detailed for the uncongenial duty of marching the men of their regiment up the dusty winding hill to the training-ground, one of the pipers of the Scots Guards at their head. The other officers, save the Piquet (or Orderly) Officer who had his round of duties at the camp to attend to, took a short cut to the ground, involving a brief but precipitous climb up a steep hillside.

Our Ensign still carries in his memory a picture of the training-ground as he saw it on that first hot morning. It was a spectacle so overwhelming that it drove from his mind for the moment all the impressions he had been absorbing during his months of training with the Guards. As he gazed at the vast panorama of the plateau, he felt his heart throb in answer to the patriotic appeal of that picture of Britain in arms. For, from all sides and by every road, he saw dense columns of men converging on a great central parade-ground. With brass band, with drums and fifes, or with pipes and drums at their head, the thick brown columns poured in by every approach, the men in full marching order, their rifles slung, the sweat trickling down their sunburnt faces from their climb up the steep ascent. Cockneys, men of Kent, men of the Midlands, and men of the West country, “Geordies,” Lowlanders and Highlanders, Catholics and Orangemen, Australians, New Zealanders, Canadians ... all were there. You could almost hear the pulse of Empire beat as they swarmed in their thousands on to the parade-ground.

Undulating ripples ran here and there along the close ranks of that vast host as company after company ordered arms and stood at ease. Commands were shouted: instructors, with yellow arm-bands on their sleeves, ran hither and thither in the press. Still that endless stream of khaki deluged forth on to the parade-ground: still the blare of brass, the squeal of fifes, or the skirl of pipes proclaimed the coming of fresh legions along the roads of the camp.

“Take a good look at that picture!” said a captain of the Coldstream at our Ensign’s elbow, “for you’ve never seen so many British soldiers together before!”

Our Ensign nodded. Truly that place of assembly was an unforgettable sight, a picture that he knew would never fade from his mind.

The Guards’ officers, our Ensign learnt, were to accompany the men of their regiments to the different courses of instruction given at the training-ground--bayonet-fighting, wiring, bombing, and so forth--under instructors trained in the firing line. Thus he and The Lad presently found themselves listening to a sun-browned sergeant of the H.L.I., whose bonnet looked somewhat incongruous worn with “shorts,” expounding in the accents of “Glasgie” the whole art of laying out barbed-wire entanglements. While his men were busy with the prickly rolls of wire, stakes, pickets, and mallet, our Ensign heard French being spoken behind him.

He turned and saw a detachment of Canadians, thick-set, sturdy, and rather swarthy for the most part, drawn up in front of another “wire lecturer” a dozen yards away. By the instructor’s side stood a Canadian soldier, a corporal, who, as the lecturer proceeded, translated his remarks rapidly into French.

It was rather an extraordinary performance. The lecturer was a Cockney.

“You tike the stike, ...” said the lecturer, suiting the action to the word.

“Alors, vous prenez la broche ... comme ça,” fluently translated the interpreter, adding shrilly--

“Mais faites donc attention, nom de Dieu, vous, Le Sage!”

“... you measure orf five yards, like this ’ere....”

“Et puis, vous mesurez cinq aunes ... au pas n’est-ce pas?”

Listening with wondering ears, our Ensign realised the strength of the Empire tie that had sent these French Canadians, who could not speak our language, across the seas to war.

It was a scene of amazing activity, that training-ground. The brisk breeze that blew joyfully across the sun-bathed plateau brought with it the sounds and smells of a great fair, fitful bursts of music, bugle-calls, shouts and cries, the pungent odour of horses, the acrid taste of dust, the faint scent of burning wood.

One day a long train of German prisoners wound its melancholy way through the camp _en route_ for England. Our Ensign stood by the roadside as they passed and noted how the indifference faded from the faces of the officers at the head of the _cortège_, how the weary and mud-stained figures behind them shook themselves free from their apathy at the scene of busy movement enacted all around them. The columns marching along the roads, the charging lines of bayonet-fighters, the endless lines of practice trenches, the bustle, the orderly confusion, the noise ... all this must have made them realise the giant strength piling up behind the fierce onslaught before which they had laid down their arms on the Somme. The sad procession passed our Ensign by with the dawn of a great enlightenment in the eyes of the prisoners.

The forcefulness of the training at the camp was amazing. Men who had got a little stale in long months of training at some pleasant centre at home were shaken up into life by the galvanising vigour of the instructors’ addresses. There was one sergeant in particular, an instructor in bayonet-fighting, to whom our young man never tired of listening.

That sergeant was magnificently built, with the finely developed physique of the army gymnastic instructor. He was simply attired in a vest, khaki trousers and gym. shoes, his short-sleeved jumper leaving open to view a brawny and sunburnt pair of arms that wielded rifle and bayonet as easily as though they were a swagger-cane.

He was a fine picture of British manhood, that sergeant, as he stood bareheaded in the sunshine on the parapet of a trench. Behind him dangled from a long gibbet the sacks of straw upon which presently the budding warrior would test his skill with the bayonet; before him, a sea of sunburnt faces, a wide horseshoe of capless, jacketless men, sleeves rolled up, rifle and bayonet in their hand. In fluent direct English he would harangue his audience somewhat after this style--

“Now then, lads, just you listen to me for a bit. You all know what you joined the Army for. You didn’t join just to learn a bit of arm-drill, nor yet to polish your buttons and look pretty, nor yet to go out walking with a pack o’ gals ... yes, I can see a lot of you know all about that too. No! you joined the army _to fight_! That’s what they’ve brought you out here for! _To fight, to kill Germans_, ... that’s your job out here. You’ve left the gals and the pictures and the pubs behind in England. This here is WAR! D’you know what WAR means? I’ll tell you. War means that if you don’t kill the other feller first, he’ll blooming well kill YOU! Now you just get that into your thick heads.

“Listen here again! This little friend here” (patting the bayonet), “this little friend o’ mine on my arm ... some of you lads have had plenty of little friends on your arms in your time; I can see that with half an eye, ... this little sticker here is going to help you to get back home alive to the gals and the pictures and all the rest of it. Shells are all right, the rifle’s all right, but it’s what’s on the end of the rifle that’s going to save your life when it’s man to man in a stand-up fight.

“When a great hulking Hun sees one of you chaps coming for him close in with the bayonet, what does he do? Does he send a messenger with his compliments to Fritz at the battery behind him and ask him, please, for a barrage? Does he lower his sights and take careful aim with his rifle? Not on your life. For why? Because there isn’t time. The old Hun blooming well knows that if he don’t stick YOU, you’ll stick HIM!

“Now you’ve learnt your bayonet practice, and I could teach you here by the book, so that you’d do it all so pretty you’d make a Guardsman blush. But I can’t teach you quickness: I can’t put the ginger into you so as you’ll go hell for leather for the Huns first time you see them, and through them and their blooming trench before they can say ‘Potsdam.’ You don’t want to use your brains, you don’t want to reason it all out nicely; _you’ve all, every one of you, got to be the man that sticks first_!

“There’s lots of fellers been out here who thought they’d take it easy, and trot up to Fritz and give him a gentle prod and watch him surrender. Do you know where most of those fellers are, lads? Under the ground, that’s where they are, with a nice little wooden cross, and a bit of writing atop to say what fine chaps they were. Ah! a dead man’s always a hero. But you don’t want to be dead, lads! A wooden cross is not the sort of cross you’ve come out here after. You want to live, and go home to the gals and tell ’em all what a hero you are.

“Now we’ll try a little bit of assaulting....”

Thus he would run on, the very incarnation of the soldier spirit, erect and manly, the sunshine playing round his light-brown hair and the polished steel of his “little friend.”

Despite the manifold interests of the training-ground, time hung rather heavy on the hands of our young man. Every day the very firmament quivered to the distant thunder of the guns; sometimes in the night, particularly towards dawn, the throbbing of the air was so marked as to awaken the officers in their airy huts. There is something uncontrollably unsettling about gun fire. It upset our young man sadly, and he chafed at his detention at the base. As for The Lad, he positively raged.

Sometimes our Ensign marched the party for the training-ground up the hill behind the piper with his kilt of Royal Stuart tartan. Notwithstanding the dusty climb, our Ensign rather liked these marches up the hill and back. The weather was beautifully fine, and the men were always in excellent fettle, so laughter and chaff flew from mouth to mouth. Nothing sharpens wits so well as throwing a few battalions of different regiments together. The humour was generally pointed, but often decidedly witty, and the jokes were always taken in good part. One morning the young officer, plodding along in the dust at the head of the training-ground party, heard a voice behind him exclaim--

“Eyes right to the Welsh Guards, lads!”

The officer instinctively glanced to the right, and saw a gentle nanny-goat gazing sad-eyed from behind the hedge at the column as it passed. This sally at the expense of the regimental pet of the Welsh Guards elicited roars of laughter, in which--in justice, be it said--the Welshmen of the party also joined.

Thus the summer days rolled on, and with every day our Ensign grew browner and fitter for the fray. One evening at the bridge-table the Adjutant of the Guards’ Base Depôt, after opening a message brought in by an orderly, said to our Ensign who was his partner--

“You’re for the Guards’ Division to-morrow evening, and,” turning round to The Lad who was writing a letter at the window behind him, “you too!”

That night the two young officers went to bed with a joyful heart. To-morrow they were going to the Front.

* * * * *

The guns of the Somme are throbbing more frantically than ever. Time flies: time presses sorely when the blood runs hotly in the veins. Let us hasten, then, over the ceremony of departure, and pause but for a moment to watch the group at the door of the Mess waving a last farewell to the two figures, girt on with all the panoply of war, stalking into the mellow dusk of a perfect summer evening down the road to the Camp Commandant’s office, where a motor-lorry is waiting to take them to the train.

“Now we shan’t be long!” murmured The Lad as the lorry whirled them away through the white dust. He spoke true. Ere three months had run their course that eager spirit was swallowed up and lost in the mirk and reek of those very guns to whose summons he had so impatiently listened.

* * * * *

It was The Lad who did the trick that secured our young friends a compartment to themselves through both stages of their long journey up to the Front. In the gloomy yard in which their train--of prodigious length, it seemed to be--was drawn up The Lad produced a piece of chalk from his pocket.

“Watch me!” he said with his merry smile.

On the door of the first-class coupé which they had selected for themselves he wrote in chalk--

“O.C. Troops.”

“Infallible!” replied The Lad to his sceptical companion. “A fellow I met at the machine-gun course at Chelsea put me up to the dodge. It scares ’em all away. You see? We shan’t be disturbed!”

Nor were they, though at various times before the train started heavily laden young officers approached the carriage. At the sight of that forbidding inscription, however, they bolted precipitately. And so our young friends journeyed through the night in much comfort to the old French town where they were to change trains and spend the day.

After a shave, a bath, and breakfast, they set out together on a pious pilgrimage to the grave of a friend who for a twelvemonth had lain buried in the British Military Cemetery beyond the racecourse on the outskirts of the city. Without difficulty they found the simple grave at the foot of its big white cross, with many newer and whiter crosses all around. After consultation with the Corporal Gardener, a First-Gravedigger kind of person with lugubrious mien and Yorkshire accent, they purchased from a genial Frenchwoman at the lodge of the cemetery a number of plants to be put on the grave.

“A’ll tell ’er A’ll put un in!” said the Corporal Gardener, and, raising his voice to a shout, he bawled at the woman--

“Moa ... fleurs ... tombo ... arpray!”

“Vous allez les planter vous-même?” replied the woman with perfect comprehension--“bon, bon.”

And thus, our Ensign reflected, a British graveyard forms a tiny link in the chain of the Entente to bring Normandy and the East Riding together.

After that came an interminable railway journey lasting from after luncheon that day until far into the next afternoon. But for a tiny break _en route_ it would have passed altogether out of our Ensign’s mind, that snail-like progress from Normandy to Belgium. Somewhere about the hour of 7 in the morning the long train halted in what seemed to be a tract of flat and barren country. Alighting, our heroes found themselves opposite a long low shed with open doors, giving a glimpse of gleaming urns and piles of bread-and-butter, towards which everybody in the train seemed to be flocking. Behind this wayside canteen our travellers found a small and cheery room, with a bright red-tiled floor, natty curtains, and old-fashioned furniture, where two or three ladies were dispensing breakfast to the officers. In comparison with the boon of breakfast in that barren place, after a long, cold night journey, the charges were outrageously low. But better than the steaming tea, the delicious sandwiches, the tempting fruit, was that little glimpse of England--the pretty English room, the warm welcome of those devoted Englishwomen in their pleasant English voices.

Nothing more happened to break the tedium of their journey until actually they had set foot to the ground on alighting at their destination.

At that moment, the ears of our heroes were affrighted by a sound, the like of which neither had ever heard before.

Chapter III.

Whee ... ee ... ee ... oo ... oo ... PLUNK!

A rushing noise as of great wings beating the air, a reverberating crash, like the slamming of an iron door, blended with the sound of jangling glass, of splintering wood; then an unfamiliar, high-pitched cry, “A ... a ... ah!” followed by a mechanical chant on a rising key, as it passed from mouth to mouth--

“Stretcher-bearER!”

The platform of the station was deserted. A very familiar name stared down upon our heroes from the lamps. Their fellow-travellers by the train ... a handful of all sorts, officers, Australian privates, some R.A.M.C. orderlies, a couple of Belgian interpreters ... had long since vanished into safety.

The sky seemed full of odd noises. Every minute or so the new arrivals heard the long-drawn-out whistle of a shell, cut short on its rising note by the crash of the explosion. The first shell they had heard had seemed to strike very close at hand: the succeeding crashes, though equally loud, appeared to be farther away.

Everybody knows the sound of a shell, even when he hears it for the first time. Concerned mainly with the fear lest the other should notice that he “had the wind up,” our two young Guardsmen hastily pulled their kits out of the train, and leaving them where they fell on the platform, made for the station-hall.

There they saw two men on their knees beside a stretcher. To the right of them a notice painted in white on a blackboard announced the office of the R.T.O. or Railway Transport Officer, where our young men had to report.

In the R.T.O.’s office, installed in what had probably been a lamp-room or something of the sort, they found most of their fellow-passengers assembled. Under the influence of their original welcome, everybody was conversing in whispers.

The R.T.O. was shortish in his manner. (It is not easy to be polite under shell fire.)

“Report at Headquarters of Guards’ Division!” he said curtly to our Ensign and his companion when they had given in their names and regiment.

“Where is that?” said our Ensign promptly.

Resignedly the officer explained. Yes, it was a goodish way; no, there was no conveyance of any kind; yes, they would have to go through the town; no, it was not safe; the town was being shelled. Had they not heard the shell fall outside the station a minute ago?

“Next! Australian Light Horse?”

The R.T.O. turned to the next man.

“We’ll just have to foot it,” said our hero to The Lad as they made their way outside, “unless we can get a lift of some kind. We’d better leave our kits here in charge of some one!”

Outside in the station-hall our Ensign heard a stamp and a click beside him, a familiar sound, the sound of a Guardsman saluting. Our Ensign turned and saw a private in breeches and spurs, a well-known crest in his cap, an old sleeveless rain-coat flying out behind him like a pair of wings.

“I have a horse for you, sir,” he said, “to take you up to the transport. I couldn’t get here before on account of the shelling.”

Our Ensign and The Lad were going to different battalions. The moment of parting had come.

“Your mess-cart has come for you, sir,” said the groom to The Lad, “but the driver waited outside until the shelling had stopped. If you will come along with my officer, I can show you where I left him.”

On a long country road lined by tall poplars our Ensign found a couple of horses and a little Maltese cart. He and The Lad shook hands; the latter climbed into the cart, while our Ensign mounted a small brown mare. Then the cart rattled off towards the centre of the town, while our Ensign trotted down the road, the groom behind him.

Presently our young man drew rein to allow the groom to come up level. The Ensign began to talk to the soldier.

“They,” said the groom, with a jerk of his head in the direction which the mess-cart had taken, “are in rest, sir. Our Battalion is in the line. The Transport Officer thought you would dine with the Transport, and then go up along of him and the rations after dark to-night.”

The groom was a veteran of the original Expeditionary Force. So was the little mare which our Ensign was riding, the man told him.

“Many’s the fine officer that little mare’s carried, sir,” he said, scanning her affectionately: “there was Captain X., him as was killed back at Soupeers, and Captain Y.--it was on the Zillebeke Ridge where he got it, sir--and Captain Z., him as was shot by a sniper in the trenches at Givenchy. Ah! I’ve seen some grand gentlemen go, sir!”

He shook his head mournfully.

“Maybe you’ll want this little switch of mine, sir,” the groom added, handing our Ensign a small ash plant; “one or two draws o’ this won’t be after hurting that little mare, she’s that idle!”

Our Ensign welcomed this change in the conversation. The groom’s train of thought made him slightly uncomfortable in the circumstances.

For a mile or so along the road out of the town the noises still resounded from the sky. The shells came “whooshing” over so loudly above their heads that our Ensign felt an irrepressible titillation in the neck--a strong inclination to duck. To distract his thoughts, he looked about him.

It was a flat and uninteresting country, but well wooded and very green. Every house they passed was wrecked by shell fire, more or less completely; but he noticed that there were still some civilians about. Practically all the soldiers they met, he observed, were Guardsmen, and, though their cap-stars and buttons were dull and unpolished, their uniforms stained and often badly worn, the men were all well shaved and well brushed, with puttees neatly tied and boots well greased. They were taking their ease in the cool of the evening, standing gossiping in the streets of the villages through which our Ensign passed, or sitting on the benches outside the estaminets.

A ride of more than an hour brought our hero and the groom to a muddy side-track which led into a pleasant green field. Here a number of tents were pitched. From a field in rear a prodigious squealing of fifes and beating of drums resounded in a hopeless cacophony. “The Drums” (by which generic term, in the Guards, the fife and drum band is understood) of two battalions were practising in separate groups under the trees.

The Transport Officer and the Quartermaster made our Ensign welcome in the mess-tent, gave him a drink and a cigarette, informed him that he was to dine with them, and eventually showed him into the Interpreter’s tent, where our hero was much astonished to find his kit lying. It had apparently been wafted there by some supernatural means from the platform at the railway station. This was, of course, the Quartermaster’s doing, but our Ensign was as yet too ignorant of usages in the field to appreciate that heaven-sent boon, a good Quartermaster. So he accepted it all as a matter of course, and proceeded to change his clothes and don warmer things in anticipation of his first night in the trenches.

The Belgian interpreter was sitting on the bed in his tent, warbling a little air to himself. After our Ensign had disabused him of his first impression--namely, that the new-comer proposed to take forcible occupation of his sleeping apartment--he became extremely affable, and produced water and soap and a towel. He was a sunny-natured person with remarkable fluency in English, and made the young officer free of his every possession with unbounded hospitality.

Then our Ensign dined in the mess-tent off an enamel plate, and drank innocuous Belgian beer out of a tin mug. A captain of the Coldstream, who turned out to be the Transport Officer of his battalion, dined with the party. Outside the daylight was failing and a few pale stars had begun to twinkle. The drums had ceased their practice, but the crickets and the frogs supplied the table-music in their place.

“I hope you can ride,” said the Transport Officer to our Ensign, with a note of warning in his voice.

Our Ensign pleaded guilty to a slight familiarity with that gentlemanly accomplishment.

“... because,” the Transport Officer went on, “we have a good eight miles to go, and the limbers with the rations started an hour ago. So we shall have to ride fairly hard for the first part of the way to catch ’em up.”

Our Ensign smiled in a superior fashion, as much as to say the other could not ride hard enough for him. “Unconscious of his doom, the little victim plays!” Our young man was to have a rude awakening.

By the time the groom had announced that the horses were waiting, our Ensign was ready for the road. He had to carry on his person his whole panoply of war--revolver, glasses, compass, gas-helmet, ammunition pouch, and lamp--all slung on his belt, which he was wearing outside his rain-coat. He felt like a trussed fowl, and it required a helping hand from the groom to get him into the saddle. When he was up, the Quartermaster handed him a steel helmet, which the groom slung on the saddle for him. Then the Transport Officer led the way out along the muddy side-track on to a better road, and immediately spurred his powerful horse into a fast trot.

Several thoughts passed through our Ensign’s mind in rapid succession. The first was that, if he did not shake “The Fat Lady” (for such was the mare’s name) out of her contented amble, he would be left behind in the dark, and irretrievably lost. The second was that, if he went any faster, he must certainly part company with one or other article of his equipment, which was dancing a merry jig round his waist. The third was that he would take an early opportunity of verifying a suspicion which had crossed his mind at dinner, from certain allusions in the conversation--namely, that the Transport Officer man had acquired his familiarity with horses in the hunting-field in Ireland!

Our young man had retained the ash plant, and, under the influence of half a dozen “dhraws” applied to her flanks at regular intervals, the mare bestirred itself, albeit protesting.

Thus our Ensign rode forth unto battle, in the Ethiopian blackness of a close muggy night, sorely shaken, jingling like a jester, drenched with perspiration, with a feverish eye on the dim figure of the rider jogging briskly through the darkness ahead of him.

Far away in the distance, vivid white lights spouted continually into the sky. Of gun fire there was little. It seemed a quiet night. By the roadside, from time to time, the jagged silhouette of a broken wall, a tottering chimney, a devastated church tower, stood out against a patch of lighter cloud. Figures took shape suddenly out of the gloom, marching in silence through the night, filling the empty road with the acrid smell of hot and dirty men, filling the air with the crunch-crunch of their feet. Guns jingled past them at the trot, with cursing drivers plucking at their horses’ heads to keep their teams to the road.

Presently, a continuous rumbling echoed out of the patch of blackness enveloping the road ahead. Low voices came back with snatches of conversation. The dark outline of a long string of tossing limbers loomed out of the gloom. The Transport Officer galloped off up to the head of the column. A whistle sounded. The rumbling ceased. The limbers stopped. The Transport Officer’s voice spoke out of the darkness; our Ensign could not see the speaker.

“We send our horses back here,”--our Ensign heard him spring to the ground,--“better put your helmet on now! We are going to walk, and we generally get shelled to blazes over this next bit that’s coming!”

Stiffly, our Ensign slipped his foot out of the stirrup and precipitated himself from the saddle. He was wondering to himself whether all wars were as uncomfortable as this one. He had only thought of death on active service as a quick finish in the midst of an exhilarating charge at the head of an excited band--not of a death that came screaming suddenly at you out of the dark, when you were clammy and stiff and tired, and generally uncomfortable!

The young man doffed his cap, and carried it in his hand. He put on his helmet. It was heavy, and hideously unwieldy. He felt it would topple over on his nose with very little provocation.

They plodded on in silence at the head of the rumbling limbers. After an hour’s walk through the blackness (our Ensign had not the remotest idea where they were), the blurr of many figures sitting about the grass of the roadside bulked out in the gloom. The Transport Officer switched on his light. The familiar features of the Drill Sergeant who had initiated our hero into the intricacies of squad drill at home stood revealed in the bright beam. About him, in silent groups, were the ration parties, who, without delay or confusion, set about the work of unloading the limbers.

The night was singularly quiet. Not a gun spoke. Never a shell came to justify the Transport Officer’s gloomy forebodings. Only from the higher ground ahead, the never-ceasing fountain of white lights showed that the opposing lines of trenches were unremitting in their vigilance.

Darkness not only obscures the eyes,--it also clouds the memory. The next thing our Ensign remembers was coming to what looked like a row of ancient _tumuli_ in a field and a gap in a hedge which seemed to be shaken by a violent wind, though the night was perfectly still. There was a loud “swish ... swish ...” in the air and a quick “patter ... patter ...” all around. Then a voice said very distinctly out of the darkness--

“Blast that machine-gun!”

The swishing sounds ceased, our Ensign turned on his lamp and saw an officer in a Burberry with a revolver hung on his belt worn outside. The new arrival instantly recognised him as one of the most joyous spirits of the ante-room at home. He was known to all and sundry as “Peter.”

“Hullo!” said the other, switching on his light, “there you are! I didn’t know if you’d be up to-night or not. I believe you’re coming to our company. I suppose you are going to see the Commanding Officer now. He’s in the dug-out. I’m out with a carrying party. See you later. Where the devil’s that orderly gone?”

He turned off his light and was swallowed up in the dark amid a shuffling throng of men. Our Ensign found the Commanding Officer in a small dug-out with a very low entrance. Candles in white metal candlesticks threw a yellow light over a roughly carpentered table, where maps were spread out amid the remains of a meal. In the corner an officer was bending over a telephone.

“This is the Adjutant speaking,” he was saying, “... oh, that is Mr Barnard ... right.... Minnies were they ... yes, it sounded like them ... not in the trench ... good ... right ... we’ll get retaliation!”

“Four Minnies into No. 1 Company, sir,” he said, putting down the receiver and addressing the Commanding Officer; “Barnard thinks he’d like some retaliation. Shall I ask for it?”

The Commanding Officer nodded and offered the Transport Officer and our Ensign a drink. Then he told our Ensign that he would be attached to No. 2--Peter’s company,--the latter was commanding in the absence of the regular company commander who was on leave. The company was at present in support in trenches close at hand. The battalion was coming out of the line the next night. Then they talked of the general situation, the advance on the Somme, the situation in the Salient, what the Russians were doing, whether the Rumanians would come in. Finally, our Ensign took his leave, and the Transport Officer escorted him along the trench to a small and extremely evil-smelling dug-out, where they found a Grenadier subaltern working out chess-problems on a travelling chess-board, by the light of a candle stuck in its own grease on the table. He explained to the Transport Officer that he was in command of two platoons left behind to help with the carrying work at night.

That night our Ensign slept in a low narrow hole, scraped out of the parados of the trench. On turning in, he found that his servant, whom he had brought up with him from the Base, had spread the dug-out with nice clean sandbags. With his haversack for a pillow, and his rain-coat spread over him as a wrap, the new-comer, who had never spent a night out of bed in his life before, slept solidly for eight hours. When he awoke the trenches were flooded with sunshine, and a most comfortable smell of hot bacon stole across the clear morning air.

* * * * *

The company was not in the firing line, so that the men could move pretty freely in and about the trenches. The weather was very fine and warm, and the existence was not strenuous. The following evening Peter marched half the company away into reserve, on relief by another battalion, leaving our Ensign behind, with two platoons to help with the carrying. In two days’ time our hero would rejoin his battalion in reserve.

The new arrivals in the company Mess in the dirty little dug-out were genial souls. Our Ensign took his meals and played chess with them, and discussed the papers which came up with the utmost regularity in company with the letters every afternoon. After dark our young man slung his lamp and his revolver on his belt and went round the trenches and the outposts, his orderly at his heels, a Celtic type of youth, MacFinnigan by name.

The two days passed pleasantly enough. There was a little sporadic shelling, generally after the passage of a Hun aeroplane, glittering aloft, with black crosses on the under-surface of its planes, amid little puffs of shrapnel and the “peugh ... peugh ... peugh” of the anti-aircraft guns. The first afternoon--it was at tea--two sharp salvoes of whizz-bangs rang out from farther up the trench. Our Ensign sallied forth to review the situation. Up the trench he found a big Grenadier lying on his face motionless in a great welter of blood, while round the traverse an Irish Guardsman was flat on his back on the trench-boards, a little rosary between his fingers, with a stretcher-bearer ripping up one of his puttees, which was soaked with blood.

The wounded man lifted a pallid face to the officer as he came up. The stretcher-bearer was soothing him gently as he worked.

“Be asy now,” he was saying, “a little skelp like that won’t kill yez. I’ll put yez in the dug-out beyond ... ye’ll be grand and snug there till it’s dark, and then we’ll take yez down.”

“The others is all right, sir,” the stretcher-bearer added to our Ensign; “him round the traverse was killed on the spot, but there’s nobody else touched barrin’ this chap here!”

The wounded man said nothing, but his breath came heavily. His face was very pale. The officer saw him tucked away into the dug-out, and went back to tea with a heavy heart. It was his first casualty....

The next night our Ensign led his two platoons out of the trenches in the wake of a guide sent up to meet them. He was a little disappointed to find how lightly his responsibility as an officer rested upon him. He had not the least idea of where they were going as they followed the guide out into the darkness.

Their journey came to its finish on a timbered walk, leading past a long array of shelters dug out of a bank and protected by layers of neatly built-up sandbags. Everybody had gone to bed, for it was after 2 A.M.--that is, everybody save our Ensign’s servant, who, after our hero had seen his men safely into their quarters, led the officer into a fine roomy dug-out with a wooden door and wooden flooring. There, on a bed made of sacking stretched over a framework, he found his sleeping-sack spread, with his pyjamas on top; his canvas washing-bucket, full of hot water, smoked on a primitive-looking washstand; while a complete change of clothes was laid out on a soap-box beside the bed.

“And what time will I call you in the morning, sir?” said Johnson--such was the name of our Ensign’s servant--at the door.

“What time is parade?” asked the officer.

“There’s no parade for you, sir,--only rifle inspection at eleven. Perhaps you’d care for a bath in the morning, sir!”

Our Ensign jumped at the suggestion and ordered a hot bath for half-past nine. He crept gratefully into his sleeping-bag, his mind bewildered by the sudden contrasts in his new and remarkable life....

Chapter IV.

The period in reserve had brought the whole battalion together once more. The companies were no longer separated as they had been in the trenches. Our Ensign found the officers established in regular messes in the sand-bagged shelters of this pleasantly rural retreat, and the whole routine of the Guards running smoothly on very similar lines to the life in barracks at home.

Life was not at all strenuous in reserve--at any rate not in the day-time. In the trenches the men get short commons in the way of sleep, so during the period in reserve they are not worked very hard. At night, however, fatigue parties were generally sent up to the support or front lines on various digging undertakings. Otherwise, a rifle inspection in the morning, and sometimes, additionally, an inspection of feet (an army may fight on its stomach, but it marches on its feet) or of gas helmets, was the only parade of the day.

Each company took it in turn to be “in waiting”--that is to say, to be in readiness for any emergency. The company in waiting furnished the guards and fatigue parties for any special jobs about the camp. During the period in waiting, which lasted twenty-four hours, from one afternoon to the afternoon of the following day, the officers of the company in waiting were not supposed to leave the precincts of the camp, and, the company commander excepted, they took it in turns, during the period “in waiting,” to act as Piquet Officer, whose functions in reserve were practically confined to stamping the letters with the battalion censor stamp in the Orderly Room (a sand-bagged shelter), before the post corporal collected the mail in the afternoons.

Our Ensign slipped very easily, almost imperceptibly, into his place as a tiny cog in the great wheelwork of the army in France. He came out prepared to have a roughish time in very congenial company--and in neither respect was he disappointed. The Mess in which he found himself had all the attraction of a cosmopolitan club in miniature. His fellow-officers in the company to which he had been posted--No. 2--had what was known as a double-company mess with the officers of No. 1 Company. At the quarters in reserve the mess was located in an ambitious sort of sand-bagged shelter, with stain-glass windows, timber floor and walls, a white deal sideboard (home-made), and a long table and chairs. Here our Ensign met his company commander, a serene and placid person, with a somewhat judicial manner, who, for that reason, answered to the name of “The Beak.” Most of the other officers our Ensign had known at home, so that he did not feel so much an intruder as he had feared he would.

The double-company mess was a very happy family. In every stratum of society type balances type. It is this easy counter-poise that makes the world revolve. That great leveller, the War, has thrown together in officers’ messes for a spell of intimate association a number of men whose pursuits in other circumstances would all have radiated in different directions. In that mess there were, amongst others, a brace of budding diplomats, two Balliol undergraduates, a rancher, a “literary gent.,” and an engineer. Some of the officers had decided to adopt the Army as their profession, and to remain on in the regiment after the war, but others would simply return to their pursuits and professions on the proclamation of peace. The pleasant _cameraderie_ which reigned in the double-company mess must be based, our Ensign decided, on the equilibrium of all these different temperaments and mental outlooks balanced one against the other. So far as regimental duties were concerned, every type was tempered down to the average consistency given by the identical training which every Guards’ officer receives on the square at home.

Therefore, though many and furious were the arguments on every conceivable topic with which the young lions of the double-company mess whiled away their leisure hours, there was perfect accord in the general realisation by each of his duties and responsibilities as an officer. In the privacy of the mess there might be heated wrangles regarding the respective merits of No. 1 and No. 2 Companies; but the whole mess presented a solid front in backing the two companies against the rest of the battalion, the battalion against the rest of the Brigade, and the regiment against every other regiment in the Brigade of Guards.

Our Ensign had two or three spells in reserve at this peaceful spot, and always looked forward to returning to it after the battalion’s turn of duty in the trenches. There was practically no shelling; any German shells that came over mostly fell in a more exposed position several hundred yards away. All around them lay spread out the fair garb in which summer dresses the Belgian countryside, and not even the ruined farms or the shell-scored roads could detract from the beauty of the poppies and corn-flowers running wild among the neglected fields, or the roses and the hollyhocks and the snapdragon that bloomed in the little gardens of the ravaged farms.

The men revelled in the snatch of quiet, in the pleasant surroundings, in the beautiful summer weather. When their day’s work was done they sat about in the shade, writing letters home, reading the newspapers, or idly watching the afternoon spectacle of German _v._ British aeroplanes. Some spent every moment of their leisure in dragging one of the canals in which Belgium abounds for fish. The drag-net was a marvel of ingenuity, constructed as it was out of rabbit netting, barbed wire, bits of string, sandbags, and branches, towed along by eager hands on either bank. Incredible as it may seem, the fishermen made quite respectable catches of pike and eels, which they cooked for supper over wood-fires, and consumed with relish,--all heedless of dark allusions by their less enterprising comrades to the fabled discovery of portions of a German helmet in the maw of one of these aquarian monsters.

The officers went for walks in the neighbourhood, extending their rambles, with the perversity of youth, to the ruined city of Ypres, still the shell-trap _par excellence_ of the countryside for miles around. One afternoon, a subaltern in our Ensign’s mess who went by the name of Apollo, from his statuesque appearance, and who was a perfect Baedeker of information about the local attractions wherever the battalion went, took Peter and our Ensign and one of the Balliol men, known as The Don, to a certain field where, among various shell-holes and felled apple-trees, a few rows of depressed currant bushes yet lingered. The currants were red and scanty and abominably sour, and an unusually large number of “dud” shells were falling in dangerous proximity to the party from an “Archie” or anti-aircraft gun that was vigorously shelling a German raider. There was plenty of fresh fruit in the mess where the young men could have sat in the cool of the shelter and eaten their fill, but they preferred to stand in the hot afternoon sun and munch unripe currants at imminent risk of their necks. Truly youth is a wonderful thing!

Another day a band of them strolled out over the fields to a certain billet, where previously the battalion and other Guards’ battalions had been quartered for some time. There they visited the pretty garden which the Guards had laid out with wonderful centre-pieces, representing the different regimental crests of the Guards in coloured stones. But, while the Guards had been away, the heathen had raged. There were shell-holes in the garden, and the rains had begun to gnaw at the centre-pieces.... In the Salient everything, living and dead, seems vowed to destruction.

The night fatigues were dull, dangerous, and depressing. Night after night parties sallied forth with pick and spade, often in gum-boots, if there was work to be done on a wet trench, and plodded through the darkness to a more or less apocryphal rendezvous.

All the open ground close up to the Front in the Salient is sprayed by machine-gun fire at night, and a brisk burst of shell fire in addition was no uncommon experience for the nightly fatigue parties. Sometimes the sapper folk would be late at the trysting-place, and the men would stand huddled up together like a flock of sheep on a moor, while the officers would fret and fume and mutter dire menaces about “reporting the fellow to the Brigade.” Then the sapper would arrive, and the officer, about to deliver himself of a few weighty and well-considered remarks on punctuality, which is the politeness of soldiers as well as of kings, would find himself confronted by an obsequious R.E. corporal protesting that the “orficer” was “jest over there.”

Translated into the plain language of fact, this indication might mean anything from 300 yards to a mile; but at length the sapper officer would appear, silencing with honeyed words and profuse apology the torrent of reproach bubbling at the Guardsman’s lips. After that the sapper officer would take charge, and the Guards’ officer would find his _rôle_ restricted to walking up and down for anything up to three or four hours, bored to tears, unable even to smoke, because smoking on these night fatigues is forbidden to the men. He had not even the mental occupation of keeping the men to their task. They knew that they could not go home to bed until the job was finished, whatever it was, and therefore every man worked with a will, jackets discarded, sleeves rolled up.

Everybody who has been up in the Salient knows what the “trenches” there are like. The Hun holds the high ground everywhere: he has the dry soil, the observation. In the British lines the ground is so wet that a foot below the surface you strike water ... and probably a dead man as well, so thick do they lie in this blood-drenched region. Therefore the parapets are for the most part built up, and indeed the whole defences--parapet, traverses, and parados--have to be built up with sandbags, which, under the influence of shell fire and the weather, have to be continually renewed and repaired.

A parapet that will shelter a platoon of the line will not do for a platoon of Guardsmen. It is a question of inches. When the Gurkhas relieved the Guards in the trenches in the Béthune region early in the war, the Guards had to put a double tier of sandbags along the fire-step so that the little hillmen could look over the top of the parapet. Therefore, in the Salient, it often happened that the Guards found themselves sheltering in the open behind a thin parapet in bad repair, behind which they had to kneel in order to protect themselves against the enemy snipers.

Work, with a capital “W,” loomed large in the orders of every company commander of the Guards in the Salient. In truth, there was much to be done. In places, the trench lines were not connected, parapets were low and by no means bullet-proof, parados were distinguished mainly by their absence. Thus, when one battalion of Guards relieved another in the Salient, it took over not only the trench but a vast programme of “improvements,” as the house-builders say.

The first night our Ensign went up to the front line with the company, the Guards’ battalion which they were relieving had a big scheme of work to hand over. As junior officer, our Ensign was given charge of the men in the front line, for the first half of their turn “in,” whilst The Beak and Peter remained, according to usage, in the company headquarters in the support line. For the second half, Peter was to relieve our Ensign.

While the relief was being effected, an ensign of the outgoing company took our young man round the trench, and, with the air of a Commissioner of the Office of Works, showed the new-comer the work which had been begun, which the incoming company was to finish. The barbed wire was probably defective and would have to be inspected and possibly repaired; here they had put in three new traverses; here they had repaired the parapet that had been blown in by an enemy trench mortar; there they had started to build a parados; this part of the parapet was not bullet-proof ... they had had a man wounded passing there the previous day; and so on, and so forth. The officer explained everything with admirable lucidity, and then, his men having all filed out, trotted away, leaving our Ensign, rather bewildered, standing on a precarious trench-board, half immersed in yellow water, with an overpowering odour of death in his nostrils.

Both The Beak and Peter presently came up to help him over his difficulties at his first taste of trench warfare, and together they mapped out a scheme to spread the work remaining to be done over the time they were to spend in the front line. The platoon sergeants were called into consultation: they had already got the sentries posted in the fire-bays, and the rest of the men they set at the task of filling sandbags. It was agreed that our Ensign should go out and have a look at the wire, and also the outside of the parapet, to see how it could best be made bullet-proof.

A little later the officer, in company with his orderly, his rifle slung at his back, a handsome and self-possessed young man, who was introduced as the wiring corporal, and a rugged Irish sergeant called Kinole, slung his leg over the parapet and dropped out into the open on the other side.

It was a dark windy night. In front of them the German star-shells were soaring aloft, and the night was alive with noises reverberating in the darkness. Machine-guns on both sides coughed their harsh “tack-tack ... tack-tack-tack.” Rifle shots rang out here and there; and every now and then, with a bang and a whizz, a Verey light whirred up into the dark sky from the trenches behind the little party. Somewhere on the right a mighty British _strafe_ was in progress: our Ensign could hear the steady racket of the shells and see their orange flicker in the sky as they burst against the surrounding blackness.

The chinking of tools resounded very faintly out of the dark in front of them.

“’Tis Fritz out workin’,” muttered Sergeant Kinole hoarsely. “Iv’ry night ’tis the same, sir.... He works like anny ould mole.”

The party crossed a very wet ditch and came to the wire. Here the wiring corporal took the lead and they all crawled along behind him, bending their heads low, as he did, to examine the strands of wire against the sky. In places the wire was broken and would have to be replaced.

Then our Ensign took a look at the parapet from the outside. There was no room to strengthen it from within, and outside the trench the ground sloped away into a morass. The only thing would be to lay an earth foundation and build it up on that. The sergeant hopped back into the trench, and presently returned with a horde of bulky figures with pick and shovel who scrambled over the parapet, and, dropping on the other side, started shovelling dry earth on to the wet ground at the foot of the parapet.

All night they worked and shovelled and built, inside and outside the trench, while the star-shells spouted and the machine-guns rapped loudly. With the first flicker of dawn they trooped in, and then, while the dawn was breaking sullenly, the men stood to on the fire-step all along the trench, while our Ensign, empty and cold and dreadfully sleepy, wondered why the trench smells were so overpoweringly accentuated in the early morning.

With the coming of dawn the men stood down, our Ensign inspected rifles, the Commanding Officer, on his daily round of the trenches, appeared and asked him a question or two, and after that, amid a general sizzling of bacon all along the trench, the officer made for the earthen cave which had been pointed out to him as his quarters. There was the faithful Johnson with a mug of hot cocoa; there was our Ensign’s blanket and his air-pillow arranged on a carpet of clean sandbags.

Our young man slept until ten o’clock, and then rose to find his washing things spread out in the sunshine, Johnson close by boiling his shaving water in a mess tin. He made a leisurely toilet, then sauntered down the communication trench to the company headquarters, where he breakfasted joyously with The Beak and Peter off eggs and bacon and tea and bread-and-butter and strawberry jam. Of course the double-company mess was broken up when the battalion was in the line, so, by mutual arrangement, No. 1 Company took the mess cook, and No. 2 the mess waiter. It was the latter, rather more dishevelled than his wont, who served the three officers at breakfast in a tiny dug-out four feet square.

One turn in the trenches is very much like another. Sometimes they got shelled, and on the first occasion, our Ensign, emerging rather hastily from his cubby-hole to find out what the noise was about, was shamed into complete nonchalance by the unshakable phlegm of the men. He soon learned to adopt the prescribed air of indifference to such attentions from the enemy, but, like most people, he never got used to shelling. Once or twice he went out patrolling with his orderly, a completely fearless, wholly unsqueamish, and eminently practical young man. It was a messy business, crawling through the wet grass in the dark, and rather trying to the nerves. But, as a sage friend of our Ensign’s used to say, “If you can’t see the Hun, he can’t see you,” and our young man more than once drew comfort from this practical maxim as he and MacFinnigan crawled through No Man’s Land with eyes and ears strained for sight or sound of the enemy.

Letters and newspapers arrived with unfailing regularity in the front line every afternoon at tea-time. So they knew all about the great events that were happening on the Somme, especially as the latest bulletins came up daily from the army headquarters, and were stuck up (by means of a cartridge driven into the sandbag walls) outside the company headquarters. Everybody speculated endlessly as to the moment when the Guards would be hurled into that boiling cauldron in the south. Rumours of all kinds were rife: everybody had his own theories and “information,” especially the men. Our Ensign used to hear them gossiping round their breakfast fires in the trenches, where every cookhouse rumour was thoroughly examined.

At last one day, when the Battalion was expecting to go out of the trenches altogether for several weeks’ rest, it was reported that the Somme was its next destination. This time rumour spoke true. About one o’clock A.M., on a mellow summer night, the Battalion marched quietly by companies across the market-place of an old Belgian town, where it would in a day or two entrain for the Unknown.

Chapter V.

And now the scene changes. The stage is set afresh for another act of the great drama in which our hero plays the leading part or the tiniest of _rôles_, according as we take his conception or history’s of the great events amongst which his life is running its course. For, by analysis, war is found to be made up of millions of little dramas in which the “lead” is played by every single combatant, in which the greatest actors may have but the shadowiest of _rôles_, in which the most portentous moments of history are but “noises of.” It is only the historian, coldly surveying the stage through the lorgnette of posterity, who can disentangle the myriad threads of these subsidiary incidents and weave them into the mighty drama, in which the great actors are seen in their proper _rôles_, where such pygmies as our Ensign are but blurred figures in a vast stage crowd, a moving background, as it were,--after the Meiningen school of the drama,--against which the events of history are enacted.

The scene shifts, then, from Belgium to France. Gone are the flat plains, the ugly red-brick houses, uglier than ever now that war has stripped them from roof to cellar; gone the dull, straight roads with their strip of uneven, red-hot _pavé_ in the centre; gone that everlasting ragged silhouette of Ypres’ ravaged towers, seen from every angle of the salient; gone the stagnant canals, the dirty estaminets. Slow and protesting, with many halts, the train bearing the Battalion southward, through the heat and dust of a blazing summer day, leaves the Belgian scene of war behind. It carries them deep into the fair land of France, among the green hills and undulating valleys, the long white roads, the pretty and prosperous villages, the old-world chateaux with their seigneurial dove-cots and weather-stained towers peering forth from the summer foliage, the natty _auberges_ with their white-curtained windows and little tables before the door. This is all but the “front cloth,” however, behind which the stage is being set for the drama in which the Battalion is yet to play its part. This fair picture of France, spread out in the warm afternoon sunshine, is only the foreground. Behind it somewhere, where the guns are growling dully, lies the Unknown, the Land of Adventure for which they are ultimately bound.

Motor-lorries met them at the railhead where their train journey ended, and whirled them, in a long procession of white dust-clouds, to a large and comfortable village where already other Guards’ battalions were lodged. As the men, white as masons with the dust, descended from the lorries, our Ensign looked about him. There was the Billeting Officer, perspiring and protesting (as is the way of the Billeting Officer), the quartermaster-sergeants, his accomplices, beside him. On every door stood the traces of their handiwork. “2 Platoons, No. 1 Coy.,” “1 Platoon, No. 4 Coy.,” “Pioneers,” “2 officers,”--these were some of the inscriptions our Ensign saw scrawled in chalk on the doors of houses and sheds and on the posts of the farmyard gates.

Three platoons of his company, our young man discovered, were billeted in the buildings of a big yard behind an estaminet, a number of large sheds and outhouses, some of red brick, others with merely wattle walls, running round three sides of the yard. Our Ensign ardently desired a wash and also a drink, but he found that all the officers were busy looking after the comfort of their men, seeing that their quarters were reasonably clean, and inquiring from the dispassionate French peasants as to facilities for water. That is the rule of the army,--the men first, the officers afterwards.

So our young man lost no time in following the example of The Beak and Peter, and visited his platoon in their billet. They were very well off, for their lodging was in a large, dry, clean loft, with a cement floor, above the stables. He and his brother officers between them were successful in begging some straw off the lady of the estaminet, whose sole concern appeared to be for her fowls.... _Ah, Monsieur, il y avait des Anglais chez nous qui out volé mes poules.... Oh, la, la, qu’ils ont volé!_...

But our Ensign soothed her fears by clinching on the spot a contract for eggs for the double-company Mess, as long as the Battalion should be there, and by paying down five francs on account. Quite mollified, the lady showed them a horse-pond near by where the men might wash, and the village well, where (after due analysis of the water by the doctor, in accordance with the Brigade order) the men might draw drinking water.

Leaving the men, stripped to the waist, carrying in their hands little ends of soap and rather dingy towels, swarming about the horse-pond, our Ensign and his brother officers fared forth to locate their own quarters. In the village street they found the Billeting Officer the centre of an indignant group. In the whole of B----, he announced, wiping his damp brow, there were but four beds for officers--the company commanders were to have these,--the rest must forage for themselves. The double-company Mess was quartered in the estaminet behind which the greater part of our Ensign’s company was billeted. There might be some tents for officers later....

There was a chorus of obloquy. What slackness on the part of the Billeting Officer! Had one ever heard the like? Why, the place was full of comfortable-looking houses where, for a franc or two, one might get a clean and comfortable bed! One wouldn’t mind paying....

The discussion lasted whilst the young lions of the double-company Mess lapped up white wine and soda in the dark and filthy back-room of the estaminet where the mess was situated. Poultry walked between their legs: there were millions of flies: a dishevelled wench stirred a saucepan over a red-hot stove, and ancient, gnarled peasants, murmuring “_Bien le bon jour, m’sieurs!_” entered and sat down with them at the table. Apparently the back-room was a kind of village club. In the front room of the estaminet, judging by the trampling of feet and the frantic cries of “Doo beer, Ma!” the greater part of the Battalion was refreshing itself after the heat of the day.

Peter had a servant, a prodigy among men, and a pearl among servants, which his name was Cardwell. Even our Ensign lowered before the Admirable Cardwell the banner he bore so proudly aloft on behalf of the faithful Johnson. For Cardwell spoke French: Cardwell knew the ways of the peasants: Cardwell had been known to extract a meal and a bed out of the dourest old harridan who ever bolted her door with the cry--“_Je ne veux pas des soldats chez moi!_”

So Peter drew our Ensign aside, and whispered--

“Cardwell will find us something: leave it to Cardwell!”

But even Cardwell drew a blank in B----; he returned to the estaminet, where his “master,” as the soldier servants say, was sitting hopefully among the flies and the poultry and the peasants, and ruefully announced his failure. The village was overflowing with refugees from the occupied territory (under the French Government relief scheme): the Billeting Officer had spoken true,--there was not a bed in the place. But then the faithful Johnson came to the rescue. In the courtyard of the estaminet he had laid out soap and water and a towel for our Ensign to have that much-needed wash; and he informed his “master” that tents were to be had, and if our Ensign would furnish the men to draw the tent from the Quartermaster, and indicate a spot where it should be pitched, he would attend to it at once. There was a clean garden behind the estaminet which might do, the man added.

Peter and our Ensign inspected the spot, and decided that it would do: the needful authority was obtained from The Beak, the tent was pitched behind the estaminet, and the two officers had their kits deposited therein, thereby inaugurating a tent partnership which lasted through the summer.

That evening a select party consisting of our Ensign, Peter, Apollo, The Don, and a tall and serious-minded subaltern of their Mess, whom everybody called Roderick, dined in state at a hotel in a neighbouring town, to which they were conveyed through the kindly offices of a motor-ambulance driver. There, among all kinds of big-wigs of the Guards’ Division, they ate a thoroughly bad dinner, at an extortionate price, washed down by utterly spurious _Château Laffitte_, and professed themselves hugely delighted with their evening. It was a glorious summer night, and when they got back to their billet Peter and our Ensign pulled their valises out of the tent and slept beneath the stars.

As the result of an argument on the art of foraging on active service, springing from severe strictures on the paucity of the fare at the double-company Mess, Peter and our Ensign were bidden to dinner the next night with a brother officer, who professed, after experience of active service in half a dozen wars, to be able to get an epicurean meal in any village, no matter how short local supplies were--and B---- was very short. The troops going through on their way to the Somme had seen to that!

The veteran acted as his own cook, and the four--for one of the company commanders made up the _parti carré_--dined under an apple-tree, beneath the stars, off three young ducks and two young chickens, with delicious fresh peas and new potatoes. The guests contributed, as their share of the repast, two bottles of _Roederer_ purchased in the neighbouring town.

As a dinner it was a _tour de force_, for heaven alone knows what blandishments these succulent dishes represented: as a meal, it was a frankly gluttonous performance. Our Ensign, who was Piquet Officer that day, felt that he could scarcely walk, so gorged was he with food, when he rose from the table under the apple-tree to go and turn out the guards. But in war you learn to be thankful for what you can get to-day, for the morrow is ever uncertain.

The Battalion arrived at B---- on a Sunday, and at six o’clock on the following Tuesday morning it was on the road again. It rendezvoused with the rest of the Brigade at a given point _en route_, from which the whole Brigade marched to its destination at V----, some seventeen or eighteen miles distant.

The day was a regular “scorcher.” Even at the early hour of their departure there was a touch of fiery heat in the sun’s rays. There was not a cloud in the sky, and already the heat was shimmering among the corn-stooks in the stubble. The road was deep in dust, and every wayside leaf was powdered white.

The country was terribly hilly, and the men--who were in marching order, their steel helmets strapped on the back of their packs--were sweating freely even at the end of the first mile of the march. Trench warfare gives the men scant opportunity for exercise, and a long march in the summer heat over hilly roads with a heavy load is a strain on the fittest of troops.

But the men made light of the heat and the dust as they trudged along, marching at ease with their rifles slung, with the drums crashing out in front of them. When soldiers are standing a march well, there is a constant ripple of conversation, of chaff, and little snatches of song running up and down the ranks. The men were frankly delighted with the pretty French countryside, the cows in the fields, the sheep on the uplands, the geese and ducks and cocks and hens in the villages--all these were reminders of their country homes, reminders such as they had seldom seen in the mournful land of death from which they had come. A donkey braying behind a hedge, a drove of pigs on the road, set them all a-laughing. Like children, they commented in a running vein of criticism upon everything they saw.

“Och!” said a voice behind our Ensign, “’tis kilt I am wid the heat intoirely. Did ye ever see the like o’ thim lads in front? Sure, they’re runnin’ us off our legs!”

“’Tis the same old game,” declaimed disdainfully Sergeant Kinole, plodding along at the head of the platoon; “I know them lads in front of the company! One, two--left, right--keepin’ the step with the Company Commander’s horse. I declare to God we’ll all be goin’ on our hands and knees be the time we get in!”

This flight of fancy elicited a general laugh. Then the running commentary broke out afresh. A venerable-looking old peasant was digging in a field.

“Bon jour, Daddy!” cried a voice.

“Is ut diggin’ spuds ye are?” asked another.

“Arrah, let him be,” said a deep voice. “’Tis diggin’ his own grave he is, th’ ould rascal!”

The “ould rascal” looked up from his digging with a sheepish, toothless grin, and the Battalion tramped by in a cloud of dust and a ripple of jests and laughter.

They joined up with the Brigade and marched on, drums beating gaily in front, baggage-limbers and carts and cookers trailing out to the rear, through the torrid heat. The passing of the Brigade was an event in the little town where our Ensign and his friends had dined. The streets were crowded, every window had its frieze of faces, every shop-door its knot of gossips, to see the column go by. It was the first time for a century that the Guards had been in those parts.

The heat was truly terrific. The sun beat down fiercely out of a brazen sky. The dust was choking: the hills merciless. The chatter and the chaff gradually died away, and when the whistles sounded for the regulation halt at the end of each hour of marching, the men fell out, dragged off their packs and dropped heavily on the grass.

At last, when the sun was high in the sky, they reached their destination. V---- was a straggling little village built on either side of the slope of the white high-road, smothered in dust, shaken to its very foundations by the incessant rumbling of motor-lorries passing through, with a soporific and neglected-looking château, where ducks promenaded solemnly in the courtyard, a wisp of river and a camp of huts.

The men were lodged in the huts,--regular cauldrons of heat they were, too, infested by flies,--pitched on an unprotected slope of sun-baked earth from which every blade of grass had been trodden. Huts had been set apart for the officers, but they would have none of them. Some one, with a taste for epigram, said the place looked like a dismantled poultry show. The officers, one and all, voted for quarters in the open air, as the weather was so beautifully fine.

After various negotiations, in which Apollo, who had the gift of tongues, played a leading _rôle_, permission was obtained from the local _châtelain_, who was henceforth known and is referred to in this narrative as The Baron, to pitch tents on the grass in a pleasant old apple orchard across the road from the huts. In this picturesque old-world _verger_ the officers of the Battalion were lodged. Headquarters’ tents were ranged at one end of the orchard, the officers’ tents pitched all round its edge, and the different company messes installed in the open air.

For ten delightful days the Battalion spent a peaceful routine existence. The order went forth that cap-stars and buttons would be polished, and once more, at the morning inspection, our Ensign found himself, as in bygone days in barracks at home, scrutinising the men of his platoon for any signs that might betray a hasty or indifferent toilet. The Division or the Brigade--anyhow, the authority that governs these things--decided that the village streets were unduly dirty, and the supervision of a daily scavenging party was added to the duties of the Piquet Officer. Rubbish and dirt lying about the camp were collected and burnt, the village streets were picked clear of empty Woodbine cases and sardine tins and matches and bits of newspaper, and swept and garnished, so that when the Brigade marched out of V---- it left a clean village behind.

Three times within a hundred years had the high tide of war swept across the village and the little château where The Baron and three generations of his family before him had been born. On a window-pane of his house was still to be seen the name “JULIE,” scratched with a diamond on the glass by the wife of a Cossack officer quartered at the château in 1812, while Europe was breathing again after the departure of The Ogre to Elba. In 1870 The Baron, while yet a lad, had seen the Prussians, most insolent of conquerors, lodging at the château; forty-four years after, in the heyday of their victorious advance, he had watched their cavalry passing through the village before the Battle of the Marne had sent them to the right-about and shattered all their hopes. Since those black August days of 1914 The Baron had seen all manner of fighting-men in and about his ancient home, _poilus_ and cuirassiers and Spahis and _goumiers_, at first, and then, after a little time, the British,--English and Scots and Welsh and Irish, and Indians and Australians and Canadians and South Africans. From the windows of his château he had seen the whole flood of battle flowing down to the Somme--and he was a little shy of soldiers.

For in war, he told our Ensign over a glass of home-brewed cider, poultry goes a-missing from the farmyards, and the game vanishes from the woods, and the orchards are bereft of fruit, and young trees unaccountably hacked down.... “One does not grudge it, ... enfin, c’est la guerre!”

But when The Baron found that the new-comers did not loot his chickens or poach his rabbits or break down his trees, his heart warmed to his guests in the orchard. He sent the officers, as a present, a hamper of his delicious home-brewed cider; he plundered his kitchen-garden to supply them with vegetables at a very moderate price--_les affaires sont les affaires, n’est-ce pas?_--(and vegetables are hard to come by where the locust hosts of the Somme have passed), and he sold them his ducklings. One night he dined with the double-company Mess beneath the apple-trees in the orchard, and made himself as charming as a well-bred Frenchman can. Of the Guards he said: “_On voit bien ce sont des gens qui savent se conduire!_”

It was The Baron who told the double-company Mess of the little river in which they enjoyed many bathes in the hot summer afternoons. It was a few miles distant, an ice-cold, crystal-clear stream with a chalky bottom, that emptied itself into a deep and surging mill-pond at the foot of a ruined mill. Our Ensign and his brother officers used to ride over after tea, and, passing by the mill-pond, where the men of the Coldstream and Grenadiers quartered in the neighbourhood used to disport themselves, would ascend the stream a little and plunge in off the grassy banks. They often had a silent spectator of these bathes--a grey-haired man who sat for hours, a dog beside him, fishing in the stream. One day they spoke to him, and discovered that he was a citizen of Lille, a _réfugié_, waiting in a quiet spot for the day of victory. Patting his dog, he used to say in his mournful way, “_Lui, aussi, est Lillois: c’est tout ce qu’il me reste de ma famille!_”

Thus the summer days went by very pleasantly. Routine duties filled in their mornings, short route-marches to keep the men fit, parades, company drill, and, of course, daily “orders”; in the afternoons there was bathing or rides out to other Guards’ battalions quartered about the place, or a concert by the Irish Guards’ band, which had come out in its turn from London to spend a few weeks with the Guards’ Division. One afternoon The Lad, whom our Ensign had not seen again since their rather hasty parting under shell fire, came over with one or two others from his battalion and stayed to dinner in the orchard. Our Ensign and some of the others returned this visit, and dined with the other battalion in a camp of huts in a wood, and, after a very merry dinner, wobbled perilously home on bicycles in the dark, over an execrable road.

The weather remained magnificent. Every night the majority of the officers slept outside their tents in the orchard, under a velvety sky spangled with a vast array of stars, sometimes with the moon hung like a great lamp among the trees. The awakening in the freshness of dawn was a sheer delight, with the birds chirruping in the apple-trees, the sky benign and blue in the gentle light of the newly-risen sun, the grass which formed their _descente du lit_ glittering with the morning dews. The men also, in their camp, dragged forth their packs at nightfall from the huts and lay down to sleep _à la belle étoile_.

On Sundays there was Brigade Divine Service in an orchard behind the château. On one or two occasions the band was in attendance and accompanied the old English hymns with fine effect. It was an unforgettable scene--the lines of tall, well-knit figures in khaki, bare-headed, standing on the grass in the sunshine or in the shade of the fruit trees, the Brigade Chaplain in his white surplice in the centre, close to him the little group of officers, a few patients with bandaged heads or arms from a local casualty clearing station, a knot of wide-eyed French youngsters, and the deep tones of the men’s voices blending with the solemn strains of the band.

No less impressive was the Irish Guards’ Mass held on the same spot every Sunday at an earlier hour, the R.C. Chaplain to the Battalion, his leggings protruding unexpectedly below his sacerdotal vestments, celebrating at a portable altar surrounded by the kneeling figures of the big Irishmen--a wonderful and deeply impressive sight. Mass invariably concluded with an Irish hymn--

“O glorious Saint Patrick, Dear Saint of our Isle!”

which the Irishmen used to sing with immense religious feeling and with a volume of sound that must have made the château windows tremble.

Every day came news of further successes on the Somme: every day our Ensign and his friends discussed the Battalion’s chances of an early share in the great push: every day there were fresh rumours of great tasks supposedly awaiting the Guards on the Somme; but nothing ever came of them.

On the last day of their stay, the King, who was visiting the Army in France, came to see the Brigade, and walked into the orchard where the officers of our Ensign’s Battalion were quartered and where they were waiting to be presented. The double-company Mess had ransacked the village for flowers to put on the mess-table in honour of the occasion, and had procured some beautiful La France roses which, placed in soda-water bottles, lent a nice touch of colour to the table. It was at the mess-table under the trees where they were presented to the King, so they felt that their labours had not been in vain.

The Battalion left V---- with many regrets on a dull steamy day, and marched to a dirty fly-ridden camp in the woods of M----, where it rained mercilessly and life was squalid and drear. There they stayed for two days and a half, a wonderful night bombardment of the Hun lines by the British artillery the only diversion, and then received unexpected orders to leave. Everybody believed that the Battalion was going straight into the fight, and some of the young officers summoned the Battalion barber to their tents and got their hair cut on the strength of the rumour.

But their hour had not yet struck. The village of L---- was their next destination. Here they spent two days, and were then informed that they were going into the trenches again for a short spell. This rumour was at first received with incredulity. Nevertheless it was true.

By the following evening the Battalion was once more in the front line.

Chapter VI.

Inscrutable appear the ways of the Staff to the young lions of our army in France. For a month the Battalion had been fondly nursing the idea of going into action, yet here they were back again in the old routine of trench warfare. True, they were on the battlefield of the Somme, though that singularly diminutive stream was away to the southward of them; but there was no sign of immediate action in their neighbourhood--the traces were all of the fighting which had been.

A modern battle is run very much on the lines of a railway time-table. The attack is entrusted to certain armies, and the corps of which these armies are composed send their divisions and brigades “over the top” in due course and duly take them out of the line, whereupon fresh troops take their places. Each corps has its own billeting area, towns and villages and camps, where its troops are billeted on the way to or from battle. As one division or brigade moves out of one billet, the successor moves in by schedule, just as, on the railway, one train follows another on the same set of metals. This disposition of troops in a vast battle, over widely devastated country, is a very important feature of the operations; for nothing must be left to chance, and, with the tide of battle ebbing and flowing, success or failure may depend on the accessibility of the reserves.

But the hot blood of our young officers does not always comprehend these strategical considerations, and our Ensign’s Battalion groused mightily at the way the Guards were being “shunted about,” while the rest of the British army were busily collecting laurels on the Somme.

The Battalion took over from some very cheery “Kitchener chaps,” and the officers of the company which our Ensign’s company relieved in the support position--a bowl-shaped chalk quarry with some excellent dug-outs--provided our Ensign and his brother officers with a very good luncheon. As No. 2 Company had been in the front line on the last occasion, it was now their turn to be in support, where their only duties were fetching rations and water for themselves and the companies in the front line. During their wanderings the double-company Mess had received some fresh members, including one Bryan, who went to our Ensign’s company, and one Duke, who went to No. 1,--our Ensign had been friends with both men in barracks at home, and their coming in no wise disturbed but only increased the _cameraderie_ of the double-company Mess.

The principal duty of the Guards in these trenches, as far as the front-line companies were concerned, was to “clean up.” This part of the line had been the scene of a holding attack in the earlier stages of the Somme battle. The troops concerned had done their work, but had not been able to hold the ground gained, and had fallen back to their front line, which had had a regular pounding from the German artillery. The trenches were badly battered and required a lot of repair, the dead bodies were scattered thickly about, and the atmosphere, especially in the warm showery weather then prevalent, was very bad.

So every night parties sallied forth, some to wire, others to repair the parapet, others again to bury the dead and salve the equipment lying about, both British and German. The burial parties had the worst time: you wanted strong nerves to stomach the sights about those trenches. Our Ensign used to see the fruits of these midnight salvage enterprises laid out afterwards in the trench--pay-books and identity discs and rifles and boxes of ammunition and helmets--ready to be sent down to the Brigade. Altogether, during the few days they were in that part of the line, the Battalion buried several hundred bodies and brought in a very large amount of salvage, for which good service they subsequently received the thanks of their Brigadier.

Life was pretty quiet in those trenches. The Hun was having such a desperate struggle to keep his line together where the sledge-hammer blows were being dealt, that in the quieter spots he was only too glad to live and let live. The daily Intelligence Summary showed clearly, on the plain testimony of German army orders, letters found on the dead, and the less reliable statements of prisoners, that not only was the invincibility of the German army exploded amongst the very men who had most sedulously spread the myth, but that the German Higher Commands were seriously concerned at the growing demoralisation of the troops, as shown by such significant symptoms as desertions, slackness in patrolling, and the like.

As a scrupulous chronicler of the adventures of our Ensign, I must not overlook a curious experience that befell him one morning in these trenches. Lured by the promise of a perfect dawn, he ventured forth before breakfast to visit the officers in the front line, foolishly omitting to take his Burberry with him. As he was walking down to have breakfast with The Beak and Bryan in the chalk quarry, he was surprised by a drenching downpour of rain. The approach to the front line was very simple--any one of four communication trenches would take you there--but, in his haste to get home out of the wet, our Ensign took a wrong turn and presently found himself in a part of the front line which seemed unfamiliar to him.

Now, out in France, one trench looks very much like another. It was daylight, and the sentries had stood down, and in that downpour every man who was not on duty would naturally take shelter in the dug-outs. So our Ensign was not surprised to find the trench deserted, thinking that presently he would come to a sentry who would tell him where he was. He noticed rifles leaning against the fire-steps, and boxes of bombs in shelves cut in the parados, and here and there a pack or a mess-tin left outside a dug-out. In fact, the trench looked very much as most trenches do in the early morning, after the men have had their breakfast and are snatching a few hours’ sleep.

In places the trench was very battered: at one point a huge gap had been blown clean away, so that he found himself in full view of the German lines. Presently, as he hurried along, with his head down before the driving rain, he began to notice that the trench showed signs of most unusual untidiness. Picks and shovels were lying about all over the place: here a greatcoat had been trodden down into the mud, there a box of small-arms ammunition lay gaping on the ground. Then, even as he realised that the broken fire-bays were void of sentries, and that the trench was deserted, he came to a dead stop. For there, in the bottom of the trench, half a dozen yards from him, a khaki-clad figure lay face downwards in the mud.

An eerie sensation crept over our young man. He felt like the hero of that stirring tale of old Clark Russell’s when he boards _The Frozen Pirate_ and finds himself in the midst of an arrested life. For, after stepping gingerly over the prone figure in the mud, he came to a dug-out before which a stretcher stood. On the stretcher lay a man with head swathed in bandages, and he was dead. So was the stretcher-bearer on the ground beside him, amid a litter of field-dressings. And there were many other dead bodies, besides these two, in that abandoned trench.

Our Ensign faced round and retraced his steps the way he had come, for he was fearful lest he should walk into the German lines if he went any farther. On his return he noticed many little signs that had escaped him in his previous haste,--remains of food spread out on tables in the silent dug-outs, old books and newspapers, sodden and mud-stained, some gum-boots lying in a pile behind the trench, a woollen waistcoat hanging on a nail in a ruined shelter; it was a desolate, uncanny place, and our Ensign was glad when he heard the sizzle of bacon and walked into a bombing-post of the Welsh Guards, who were holding the right of his Battalion, and was put on his road for home.

The Battalion came out of the line on a chilly Sunday afternoon--the approach trenches were so good that reliefs could be effected by daylight--and marched to a camp in a forest, charmingly situated on high ground outside a large village. The forest had not been touched by shell fire; only the trees had been thinned a little to make room for the huts and tents. The ground was clean, not fouled like their last sylvan camping-ground in the wood of M----, and the green moss made a soft carpet under their feet. There was a series of camps where the whole Brigade was lodged, and the black-roofed huts and the white bell-tents made a pretty picture spread out among the trees, the blue smoke from the wood fires curling up between, and vistas of forest glades on every hand.

The Brigade spent a very agreeable two days in the forest. The weather completely reformed itself. A fine warm burst set in, bringing out all the healthy, resinous odours of the woods. The men exulted in their surroundings--a wholesome change, in truth, from their long nights burying the dead in the rain. When their day’s work was done, they sat about in groups on the mossy ground under the trees and smoked and yarned. And (tell it not in Gath!) they sometimes contrived to have rabbit for supper.

There were a lot of Guards in and about the forest. Our Ensign, route-marching with the company, used to meet them on the road. Such encounters generally started the men on anecdotes and reminiscences of the old 4th (Guards’) Brigade, extending back to the days of the Retreat from Mons. In conversation with each other the men always referred to the Guards by their different nicknames, most Guards’ battalions having a sobriquet of some sort. Thus the Coldstream are “the Coalies,” the Scots Guards, “the Jocks,” and the Irish Guards, “the Micks.”

Every morning the drums of the different Guards’ battalions in the camps roused the echoes of the forest (and everybody generally) with the stirring strains of the _Grand Réveille_: every evening at Retreat, in the dying sunshine, they made the woods resound to their music until that pause came, bringing every man instinctively and by anticipation to his feet, after which the fifes squealed and the drums rolled out the National Anthem.

The company messes, which were all lodged in one long hut, had a great dinner to celebrate their coming out of the Line. Ah! those first dinners when the Battalion comes out of the trenches! Will the future--that dim “After the War,” which is the great European query-mark to-day--ever see their like? I doubt it.

How mind and body exult when you have had a hot bath, and there is the cool caress of fresh linen next your skin, and you have cast off your soiled uniform and heavy boots and changed into another jacket and comfortable trousers and shoes, and the port has come from Christopher’s, and the mess-sergeant has procured a melon! The past is shoved behind you, with its blood and mud and evil odours; the present is all high spirits and grateful relaxation; and as for the future, you give it not a thought. Yet the future was there, though the Guards in their forest camp did not realise it--somewhere out there beneath that patch of starry sky framed in the low mess door, somewhere in the Unknown where the guns throbbed faintly in the night.

* * * * *

Their next halting-place in their wanderings was no less pleasant--a large comfortable village which had almost escaped the flow of humanity towards the Somme. The barns where the men were billeted were spacious and clean and dry; milk and butter and eggs and vegetables were obtainable in plenty; and there were beds for all the officers. The whole Brigade was billeted in the village, and made its entry down a long slope leading to the main street, with drums beating at the head of each long column of dusty, sun-browned men--a brave show.

Peter and our Ensign had a knotty point of military law to settle with respect to their billet. Is an estaminet _consigné à la troupe_--that is to say, put out of bounds for troops by the Assistant Provost-Marshal for some contravention of the regulations--likewise out of bounds as a billet for officers? For they were not using the estaminet part of the establishment--they were merely to sleep in a bedroom above it.

Madam and a mild-mannered old gentleman, who turned out to be her husband, together with three or four peasants, seized upon this tortuous point of law, when Madam very frankly stated her case to the two officers and debated it ardently.

“_Ce sont les artilleurs_,” Madam sighed, “_qui sont venus comme ça boire de la bière à la porte du derrière ... on est seule, n’est-ce pas? On ne fait pas attention, n’est-ce pas? Et puis voilà, le Prévôt-Maréchal qui vous consigne pour quinze jours! Mon Dieu, c’est dur!_”

The husband echoed--

“_Sapristi, c’est dur!_”

And the peasants, removing their pipes to spit, chanted in chorus--

“_Bien sûr que c’est dur!_”

The upshot of it was that Peter and our Ensign, deciding that the bedroom was not the estaminet within the meaning of the Act, passed a very comfortable night on good beds in Madam’s exceptionally clean room. They likewise purchased for a five-franc note two very plump white and grey lop-eared rabbits, which the _patron_ carried grimly into a back-yard and brought back neatly and expeditiously slain. The mess waiter fetched them across to the mess, and they formed the _pièce de résistance_ at dinner that evening.

When troops arrive in a village out at the Front they swamp it: they make it their own. Within an hour or two of the Guards’ arrival in this comfortable French hamlet, neat little boards or flags hung outside the different billets clearly indicating who lodged there, the Headquarters and billet guards were mounted, and, with their clothes brushed and their faces shining with the recent vigorous application of yellow soap and water, the men strolled out in groups to see what refreshment local establishments could offer, and also to buy those sentimental picture post-cards in which all soldiers delight.

The main street simply overflowed with troops, big and brown and tranquil; and for an officer to pass along was to run the gauntlet of a never-ceasing fire of salutes.

That evening Operation Orders announced that on the following morning the Battalion would march on. And our Ensign found himself entrusted with the duties of Billeting Officer.

Chapter VII.

Just contemplate the Billeting Officer’s parlous position. The briefest period of grace is conceded to him, in which he and his accomplices cycle furiously ahead of the Battalion to distribute the billets in the area allotted to them. Even as the Billeting Officer, dusty and damp-browed, receives, on arriving at his destination, from the Staff Captain of the Brigade, the list of billets set apart for his Battalion, he can hear, with the ears of his mind, the Battalion marching towards him with the leaden feet of inexorable destiny. Every minute brings them nearer; every minute shortens that brief breathing space in which he must complete all his arrangements and present himself, calm and unruffled, with a complete map of the locality in his mind, at the entrance of the village, to lead the incoming troops to their quarters.

The Billeting Officer must combine the organising genius of a William Whiteley with the quickness of decision of a Napoleon. He must be gentle as the dove, cunning as the serpent. He must be all things to all men--firm with recalcitrant peasants, persuasive with fussy beldames, glib with weary and fractious officers who look for beds when there are no beds.

The Billeting Officer must be an optimist, unfailing and uncompromising. He must survey the world through the rosy spectacles of the house agent. As in the house advertisements in the newspapers, so to him all residences must be “stately” or “well-appointed,” all villas “pretty” or “charming,” all rooms “lofty,” all barns “spacious.”

He and every man of his Billeting Party are cold and calculating egoists. The four Quartermaster-Sergeants of the Battalion who accompany him are, each and individually, solely concerned with securing the best billet for their own companies. The Pioneer Sergeant has come forth to seek the largest and roomiest barn in sight for the housing of the Quartermaster’s stores; the Drill-Sergeant is heart and soul devoted to the interests of the Orderly Room, the Guard Room, the Medical Inspection Room, and quarters for the signallers and the Drums; as for the poor Billeting Officer, tossed to and fro like a shuttlecock between all these conflicting currents, his dominant idea is to find some kind of decent billet for the Commanding Officer and Headquarters. Nor must he ever lose sight of the fact that, if he gives the officers of his own company anything like good quarters, he will unload upon his own devoted head all the lightnings of the other company messes.

The Billeting Party, headed by our Ensign, set off on bicycles on a delicious summer morning for the village of F----, the next half of the Brigade, on what some one called its “one night stands” about the country. The faithful Johnson had procured for his “master” from the Signalling Sergeant a bicycle, which, in consideration of a little cleaning and oiling, ran somewhat better than army machines generally do. On the road they fell in with billeting parties from the other battalions of the Brigade, and on the face of each Billeting Officer dull care had graven a deep furrow.

Outside the church of F----, an ugly bogus Gothic structure, red and staring, like the picture on a child’s box of bricks, the Staff Captain met them by appointment, and handed each Billeting Officer a list setting forth the numbers of the different billets at the disposal of the Battalion. Every house in the war zone in France bears a number stencilled on the door, and underneath, an entirely fabulous computation of the numbers of “Hommes” or “Chevaux” that can be lodged there.

Billeting at F---- was unusually easy. The barns were large and in good repair, and the local inhabitants, while somewhat resigned, were friendly. The four companies were allotted billets without difficulty, and even the Drill-Sergeant found quarters for all his different charges. But accommodation for the officers was a different matter. Our Ensign found lodgings for the four company commanders, _tant bien que mal_; the Interpreter, who was of the party, arranged with the local curé to put up the Chaplain; and our Ensign kept in his mind’s eye a certain _coquet_ little red-brick villa, marked down on his list as affording accommodation for five officers, for the Headquarters billet.

But at the very door of the villa disaster was lurking. Two dragoon officers met them in the garden.

“Is this billet free?” asked our Ensign with fear in his heart.

“No,” said one of the dragoons promptly; “there are five of us in here--Corps cavalry--been here for weeks.”

“But it’s down on my list as our billet,” objected our Ensign.

“I know,” was the calm reply; “we’ve had about six fellows before you after it--I’ve told the Mayor to scratch it off!”

Our Ensign looked at the list again. Then he saw a tiny smudge, which on closer investigation proved to be an asterisk. “Probably occupied” was the note he read at the foot of the page.

The list was exhausted--none of the rooms they had seen would do for Headquarters; so our Ensign, with the optimism of the Billeting Officer nascent in his breast, started to look for a clean bivouac where Headquarters might be accommodated in tents. They presently found a large grassy orchard which seemed suitable for the purpose. It lay behind a farm, where our Ensign duly demanded the requisite permission.

An extremely dirty, red-eyed old woman was the _propriétaire_. She had a large, bare, and very dilapidated room, swarming with flies, which she offered; but she resolutely set her face against letting the orchard be used.

She wagged her old head stubbornly.

“_Non, non, non!_” she croaked, “_j’n’veux pas! La dernière fois les soldats ont joué au ballon dans le verger ... ils ont tout abimé ... j’n’veux pas!_”

Our Ensign explained with much persuasiveness, but with a horrid fear in his mind that the Battalion would arrive any instant, that only officers would be lodged there who never played football, and who, by their very presence, would prevent the irruption of _ballon_-kicking soldiery.

Then the Interpreter took a hand and drew a superb word-picture of the innate courtliness and good behaviour of every British officer--of these officers in particular--and of the Commanding Officer most of all.

The old harridan began to yield.

“_Mais, bien sûr_,” she muttered irresolutely, “_ils vont casser mes arbres...._”

The Interpreter spoke again. These officers were rich and generous. They would do no damage, but any damage they might do would be paid for: of that she might rest assured. The officers would buy her chickens, her butter, her eggs: the noble young man at his side was even at that moment ready to invest five francs in the produce of the farm (this on a whispered suggestion from our Ensign). She would be reasonable; she would not regret it.

Then, at last, the old lady gave way.

“_Je veux bien, alors_,” she said, “_pourvu qu’on ne va pas jouer au ballon!_”

Thus it was settled, the double-company mess was installed in the old lady’s room in consideration of a _douceur_ of 2 francs 50 a day, and our Ensign rushed away to the entrance of the village to await the coming of the Brigade.

The Brigade arrived with its usual punctuality in a cloud of dust behind the Drums, each Battalion being taken charge of by its Billeting Officer as it marched in, the quartermaster-sergeants leading the different companies into their billets. The men swarmed into the farmyards and dumped their packs and rifles in the barns, then lined up in the yards of their billets for the customary foot inspection--in bare feet, their boots and socks in their hands. The cookers, all smoking, with their begrimed attendants trudging behind, lumbered into the billets, the little billet-boards appeared outside gateways and doors, the guards were mounted, and then the officers, dusty and hot, came streaming into the messes where the mess servants, surrounded by dogs and cats and poultry and small children, were unpacking the mess-boxes and getting lunch.

Our Ensign walked up to the Mess to receive congratulations on the success of his arrangements. He was given a chilly reception.

“I suppose we have the worst mess in the place,” said Roderick gloomily; “the cobbler’s children are always the worst shod, and the Billeting Officer’s mess always gets the rottenest accommodation!”

“I can’t imagine,” said El Capitan, one of the company commanders, “why you put me to sleep next door to X. I have to go through his room to get to mine, and you know how he hates being disturbed!”

“I suppose you’ve arranged for tents,” said somebody else darkly; “of course the simple life is very healthy and all that, but there’s the devil of a storm blowing up, and what sleeping out in the open in your beautiful orchard to-night will be like, the Lord only knows!”

Then the mess waiter, entering, informed our Ensign that there were no potatoes: could he get some anywhere? That Madame would not allow the cook to make a fire in the courtyard: would he speak to her? That they had sent up word from the medical inspection room to know whether the Heavies were entitled to be in the same billet: would the Billeting Officer mind stepping across there and seeing about it?

Our Ensign put down his drink untasted, and holding his head in his hands, staggered out into the hot sunshine. In the street he met an ensign of one of the other companies, dusty, doleful, and dejected.

“Got a good mess?” he asked our Ensign.

Our young man assumed an air of Christian resignation.

“Nobody could have a worse mess than we’ve got,” continued the other, and added pointedly, “but, _of course_, you’re all right!”

Our Ensign laughed bitterly and went his way. Black is the lot of the Billeting Officer.

But when he returned to his mess the soothing influence of luncheon had worked wonders. The gramophone was playing, and the mess beamed at its late victim over its coffee and cigarettes. The sun was shining brightly out of the blue sky; the tents were being pitched in the orchard; altogether life had assumed a fairer hue. The gust had passed. And our Ensign, eating his lunch, reflected that campaigning is, after all, but a series of gusts: a gust of pleasant days, a gust of bad ones; a gust of easy times, a gust of unfortunate incidents and “strafeing,” when everything seems to go wrong; a gust of peaceful wanderings like the present, and then a gust of war, of stern reality, the gust to come.

That afternoon some of them took horses and rode across to visit the adjacent “Grottoes,” which, according to the Interpreter, were the principal attraction in the way of sight-seeing in that part of the country. In the village outside which the Grottoes were situated, our Ensign came across The Lad, whose Battalion was billeted in the place. The Lad, with a party of his brother officers, was, to our Ensign’s intense delight, engaged in heated controversy with his Billeting Officer. As few things are harder to bear than the annoyance of a good example, so is nothing more consoling to the victim of injustice than to see his fellow in the same pass.

The Grottoes consisted of a series of high-roofed caves and narrow galleries cut out of the soft chalk, and running far into the bowels of the earth. To the archæologist or geologist they would doubtless have proved of enthralling interest, for the old gentleman who had made their exploration his life work had filled case upon case with those chipped and dusty fragments of flint in which the scientific mind rejoices. To our Ensign and his companions the main interest of the Grottoes consisted in the fact that they were beautifully cool, and also that the Germans were known to have made good use of similar caves in such fortified villages as Beaumont Hamel and Les Bœufs.

The young French girl who showed them round by the light of a candle informed them, with all the glib fluency of the professional guide, that in feudal times the Grottoes had been quarries in which the serfs quarried the chalk for local lordlings, and that at different periods of history the caves had afforded refuge to various bands of brigands, including some jolly fellows rejoicing in the name of the Flayers of the North. Refugees had found sanctuary there in the French Revolution, and at the time of the Prussian invasion of 1870 the civil population had likewise made the caves their hiding-place.

“The Grottoes extend for two kilometres,” wound up the young French lady; “one franc is the charge for the whole trip: fifty centimes for the shorter journey.”

“How far did she say?” asked one of the visitors.

“Two kilometres,” replied our Ensign.

“Tell her we’ll give her a franc and take the short trip,” came back the reply ... and Science hid her head.... “I want my tea!”

As they paid the girl at the entrance, before going away, our Ensign asked her if she were the regular guide.

“_Avant la guerre_,” she answered, “_c’était mon père qui faisait le guide. Mais lui et mes deux frères sont partis pour l’armée et depuis, il n’y a que moi et ma sœur qui restent!_”

“Are they all right, your father and brothers?” somebody asked.

“_Papa est tombé à Verdun_,” she replied; “_un de mes frères est prisonnier en Allemagne: l’autre est encore là-bas, au front!_” And she wiped her eyes.

You can’t move far in France to-day without stepping into the shadow of the people’s mourning.

Then they went back into the blinding sunshine, and, mounting their horses, clattered back to F----. At the horse-lines, where they left their horses, they learnt that “Retreat” was to be played in the main street of the village by the massed Drums of the Brigade. So they all strolled off to the main street and found retreat in full swing.

It was a good show. The broad street running between the long, low, white farmhouses, with big gateways opening into the square courtyards, was thronged with men from the different battalions of the Brigade. Tall and sunburnt and well brushed, with their cap-stars and buttons well burnished, they lined the sides of the street, leaving the centre of the road free for the passage of the Drums.

In F---- was quartered a labour company of Senegalese, extraordinary nightmare objects, loose-limbed, lanky negroes, with coal-black faces seamed with tribal cuts, grinning from beneath high yellow tarbooshes, round the edge of which their thick woolly hair was fuzzed out, huge pouting lips, and a highly comic attire consisting of voluminous jebbahs of coarse canvas, snowy white, reaching below the knee, baggy white trousers, and heavy marching boots. Parties of these weird-looking creatures were now scattered about among the thick lines of Guardsmen, jolly as only negroes can be at the sound of music, grinning with a white flash of teeth, and chattering volubly in their African lingo. They were an extraordinary company, and their morning parade with picks and shovels, before going out to work on the roads, was the most excruciatingly funny thing a man ever saw.

Down the centre alley, between the lines of men, came the Drums, four drum-majors with their staffs in front. Behind them came the side-drums, the drummers’ hands raised high and falling together, the tenor drums, the fifes and the brass drums. On reaching the top or the bottom of the street, as the case might be, the leading files turned and marched through the succeeding files, each rank following suit.

It was a great moment for the Drums. The whole Brigade was in the street, from the Brigadier downwards: every eye was on the Drums, and the Drums bore themselves right gallantly. They crashed through all the well-known marches, to which the Brigade had trudged many a weary mile in France, and then came the crowning moment, the march based on the regimental airs of the Brigade of Guards.

One after the other the old familiar tunes rang out, amid a roll of drums that made the very windows rattle,--“The British Grenadiers,” of the Grenadiers; “Milanello,” that quaint, jingling march which the Coldstream picked up in Spain, and of which tradition says the original Spanish words are unprintable; the Scots Guards’ “Hieland Laddie,” the frankly joyous “St Patrick’s Day” of the Irish Guards, and the sonorous “Men of Harlech” of the Welsh Guards.

After the fantasia had ended in an abrupt crash, the Senior Drum-Major marched stiffly across the street to the Brigadier, and, saluting, asked for permission to dismiss. Then every officer’s right hand went to his cap and every man stiffened to attention as the Drums played “God Save the King,” the tones of which, both on land and sea, announce to the fighting forces the coming of night.

* * * * *

The next day the Brigade moved on again.

Chapter VIII.

Take a large French village, shell it a little and bomb it a little from aeroplanes so that all the windows are broken and most of the roofs damaged, remove the civilian inhabitants, pass several hundred thousand troops through it, plant horse-lines all round it, so that every road approaching it is churned into a morass by the horses’ hoofs, make the road running through it one of the main arteries leading into battle, and choke it--day and night--with marching troops and motor ambulances and long strings of lorries, smear it alternately with layers of dust and mud, add several billion flies--horse-, house-, and bluebottle--pop in a hundred thousand rats or so, bring back a few score civilians to take possession of the only whole houses remaining, and serve hot--extremely hot--and stinking. And there you have the village of M----, the Brigade’s next halting-place, as it presented itself to our Ensign and his billeting party about the hour of noon on a blazing hot day.

Behind them they had a twenty-mile cycle ride, under a fierce sun, against a violent and exhausting head-wind. And now, soaked to the skin with perspiration, covered with dust, thirsty, tired, and (to speak for our Ensign only) extremely cross, they pushed their heavy machines up the long slope of the main street amid a dense mass of traffic and clouds of petrol-scented dust.

They were early for their rendezvous with the Staff Captain: in fact, they had more than half an hour to spare. They stacked their bicycles together outside the Town Major’s office, which was to be their trysting-place, and forthwith went their several ways in search of shade and refreshment, to meet again at the appointed time. Our Ensign was carried off by a billeting Coldstream officer to a Y.M.C.A. establishment, where, among more flies than our Ensign had ever seen together before, they quaffed some cold, green liquid, retailed at a penny a glass as lemonade by a bespectacled Hebe (_masculini generis_) behind the cake-laden counter. Our Ensign and his brother officer absorbed several glasses of this refreshing beverage, and then went forth to find the Town Major.

He was sitting in his office, a large, clean-shaven major of infantry, urbane and charming. He mopped his brow, and sighed when he saw them enter.

“Oh dear!” he groaned, “you keep on coming in, and I haven’t the least idea where you are all to go. I do hope you’re not expecting anything great in the way of billets: you’ll not get ’em here. Half the place is in ruins, AND the dirt! AND the smells! You never saw anything like it! Oh, damn these flies!”

He whisked his handkerchief round his head.

“Well,” he continued, “I think there’s some Perrier left: I believe I got the last case in this part of the country: and I expect there will be some whisky, too. Come along into the garden: the rest are there!”

His frankness boded ill: like Billeting Officers, Town Majors are generally optimists, and chatter gaily about the “unexceptional advantages” of the billets in their domain. The two officers followed their host in silence into the garden, where they found the other Billeting Officers of the Brigade, in various stages of exhaustion, conversing in gloomy tones over the Town Major’s whisky and Perrier.

The garden was a dirty backyard contrived so as to collect all the sun’s rays as in a burning-glass. It commanded a view of a flat green field in which the principal object was an abandoned incinerator.

In due time the Staff Captain appeared and distributed the billeting lists. He, too, was brutally frank about the accommodation: they had best expect nothing, he told them. Our Ensign found allocated to his battalion a short patch of houses in the main street, opposite and on either side of the Town Major’s office. The list looked promising enough: several billets were marked down as furnishing accommodation for as many as a hundred men at a time: one even--as shown on the list--would take two hundred. But as soon trust a company prospectus as a billeting list; the element of truth is about the same in both.

It was a quarter to one when our Ensign started his round of the billets. The billeting parties had come across country on their bicycles; the Brigade was going to cover part of the journey by rail and march the rest; they were not expected to arrive before three o’clock at the earliest, so our Ensign felt that he could take things fairly easily.

The peasants were not friendly--and why should they be, poor creatures?--returning, with the French peasant’s fatalistic attachment to his native soil, to find their houses wrecked, their gardens ravaged, and their barns and sheds occupied by an ever-changing succession of foreign soldiers. They came to their house doors and pointed silently to the barns and outhouses about the yard, then shut the door in our young man’s face.

Things went all right at first. Everything was filthy and swarming with flies, everywhere the ground was befouled, and in many of the once trim gardens, amid the full-blown roses and the straggling and broken lines of peas and scarlet runners, water-logged and evil-smelling dug-outs were crumbling into oblivion--mementoes of the days when the German artillery was close enough up to shell the French troops in their billets. But our Ensign managed to get billets for three out of the four companies, though most of the places had holes both in the roof and in the wattle walls. He intended to put the remaining company in the billet noted as accommodating 200 men.

This was where the billeting list let him down badly--an act of base betrayal. For the farmer came out of his house at the officer’s summons and announced, politely enough but with great firmness, that the _granges_ were no longer available, for the harvest, which was to be brought in that afternoon, would fill them to the rafters.

Here was a staggering blow indeed. The whole Battalion was provided for except the officers; and now, unless the Town Major could allot them another billet, the whole billeting scheme would have to be rearranged and a quart crammed into a pint pot--that is to say, a thousand men packed into billets for 750.

Back to the Town Major’s office our young man went. It was already half-past two; neither Headquarters nor the messes nor the officers had yet been provided for. The Town Major was out. He had been carried off by the Brigade Medical Officer, who was clamouring for a site for the field ambulance. Sending one of his party to watch the entrance of the village in case the Brigade should appear before its time, our Ensign set off feverishly on the track of the Town Major.

It was three o’clock by the time that our young man had found him. There was no sign of the Brigade as yet. Heedless of the clamouring throng of petitioners at the Town Major’s heels, our Ensign resolutely button-holed him and poured his pathetic story into his sympathetic ear. Our young man’s desperate situation stirred the generous heart of that Town Major.

“The harvest again!” he groaned, clasping his brow. “I’ll go and see what I can do with the fellow, but I fear we are undone!” As they hurried up the street, he explained to our Ensign that, by virtue of some dark arrangement between the British and French authorities, the peasants had the right to claim exemption from billeting to make room for the crops.

The Town Major’s fears were justified: the farmer was in the right; his position was incontestably sound; they would have to forego the billet.

Together, the Major and our Ensign inspected two other billets--“emergency billets” the Town Major called them, the last two in the place. One was occupied by an artillery store, but they contrived to filch from the gunners accommodation for one platoon; the other was a gaunt barn, open all along one side, with shell-holes in the further wall, and the corrugated iron roof abundantly perforated by shrapnel.

Our Ensign shook his head, thanked the Town Major, and fled. The whole billeting scheme had to be rearranged. He picked up his billeting party once more and started the round again, reshuffling the billets, redistributing the men, cramming in half a platoon here and tucking little packets of men away in there, deaf to expostulation and entreaty, coldly ignoring the dismay in the faces of his quartermaster-sergeants.

Half-past three! No Brigade yet: now for the officers ... two or three in this empty room, with sacking stretched in front of the paneless windows, and the mess across the entrance-hall in a dirty apartment, where fat bluebottles hovered greedily about decaying fragments of bully beef; this silent and forbidding house, to which they obtained access through a window, with three filthy little rooms, would accommodate six or seven officers--say, the members of the double-company mess: some tents could be put up in the garden at the back; another mess here, the company commanders there ... but where, oh where, to put Headquarters?

There was nothing suitable under a roof, but our Ensign remembered the field with the incinerator behind the Town Major’s garden. Four o’clock: not a drum to be heard: the Brigade was late: back to the office to obtain from the ever-patient Major a lien on the field. Done! and three tents promised into the bargain in case it rained that night and the billets leaked.

It had already started to rain when our Ensign, his appointed task over, hastened down the village street to the cross-roads by the river by which the Brigade would come in.

There he found his fellow-billeters in the Brigade, each with his tale of dirty billets and leaky roofs and swarming flies, each with his story of the treachery of billeting lists, for the harvest surprise, our Ensign found, had been sprung on them all.

They waited patiently in the rain for hours. The traffic never ceased to pour into the village in a double stream, going in both directions to and from the battlefield, troops and guns and transport and ambulances and motor-cars. A red-capped sergeant of military police stood on point duty at the cross-roads, immutably calm and affable amid the confusion and the din; eternally side-tracking strings of horses, which were not allowed through the village, and which persevering grooms, well knowing the prohibition, hoped yet to be able to get through, patiently answering inquiries from dust-powdered lorry-drivers who had lost their way.

The shades of evening deepened gently amid a depressing drizzle, but still the Brigade did not come, still the traffic flowed past without a moment’s break.

“It looks as if the Brigade were not going to arrive until after dark!” said one of the Billeting Officers; “and in this squash there’ll be the most holy confusion--the Lord help us!”

A Grenadier subaltern, who had discovered a wayside café just past the cross-roads, led some of them to it. None of them had had anything more substantial than a sandwich since breakfast, and they demanded food. All that Madame could produce was a box of wafers, very sweet and sickly, which they ate with some excellent coffee which Madame prepared over the stove.

Outside night fell, muggy and wet. Then the Brigade transport, which had come by road, arrived, a long train of rumbling limbers, with the Transport Officers on horseback. They had no news of the Brigade, but a little later a staff car, which the Billeting Officers stopped, reported that it had passed “some Guards or other” on the road about two miles back.

And then at last they came ... at eight o’clock. The dark and the traffic notwithstanding, the Guards made their entry to the tap of drum, and, despite all forebodings, each battalion got safely tucked away in its billets. When he reached the mess our Ensign found that his brother officers had so many remarks to offer on the slowness of the train that had conveyed them, and the general inefficiency of railway transport in particular, that they altogether omitted to comment on the nature of the billets which he offered them.

Though the sleeping quarters were indescribably bad, the actual mess-room proved to be better than might have been expected. It was a room in a small farmhouse occupied by a Frenchwoman, whose husband was in the trenches, and who, after the gifted Apollo had talked to her a little in his most Parisian French, proffered her services as cook. And so, while the traffic rumbled, and the rain splashed down outside, they made a good dinner, and eventually repaired to their squalid lodging in excellent spirits. There they found their sleeping-valises spread on the dusty floor, and there they laid them down to sleep, promising to turn every available servant on to swabbing in the morning.

M---- proved itself to be every bit as bad as it had promised. The billets were positively filthy, and for days the battalions of the Brigade swept and garnished and burnt, filling in the rubbish pits which gaped, stinking, in every garden, and leaving a trail of chloride of lime behind them wherever they went. Fly-papers and fly-swatters proved illusive against the indomitable breeding energy of the flies, and only days of unremitting hard work contrived at length to abate this very disagreeable and very unhygienic pest.

It rained for days on end. In a few hours the deep dust of the road turned first to a thick morass of mud, and then into a liquid lake of slime which flowed across the gutters to the very gateways of the billets. To avoid wading in mud up to the ankles, the men built little causeways to bridge the gutters, using the bricks from the more dilapidated houses, and laying branches on top. Nearly all the billets leaked, and the yards, filthy as they always are abroad with a vast and sodden midden-heap in the centre, were ankle-deep in slush. What was possible to do with tarpaulin to stop the gaps in roofs and walls was done, but while the rain lasted the men had a very thin time, which they bore, as all men do in France, without grousing, reserving their grumbling for superficial and insignificant details, as is the way of the British soldier.

The billets were so bad and the weather continued to be so wet that a rum issue was ordered, though the season of the daily rum issues had not yet arrived. An officer superintended the issue of rum to each company, for the regulation is that each man must drink his tot on the spot where it is issued, in the presence of an officer--this to prevent hoarding and its attendant evils.

Accordingly, our Ensign found himself one wet evening attending the issue of rum to the company. On the floor of the barn stood a lighted candle, the centre of a number of mess-tins representing the portions of the different groups in the company. At our Ensign’s side was the Company Sergeant-Major with the rum-jars. Silent and expectant, the men stood all around and in the yard without.

The Company Sergeant-Major poured the rum out into the different tins, announcing as he did so the name of the recipients--“No. 5 Platoon,” “The Cooks,” “The Pioneers,” and so on. Then, after much shuffling about in the outer darkness, the men got formed up, mess-tin in hand; but before the first received his noggin, the Company Sergeant-Major put to our Ensign that time-honoured question, “Would he try a little drop?”

Rum on an empty stomach before dinner is not to be recommended, but our young man knew what was expected of him, and with suitable gratitude accepted the offer. About a mugful of raw spirit was thereupon poured out for him, greatly to his dismay, but he picked it up, and crying “Here’s luck!” drained it. The rum burnt his throat and brought the tears to his eyes, but he finished off the portion and held the mug upside down, as the men do, to show that it was empty--all this amid profound silence, with every man’s eye upon him. Then, one by one, the men emerged out of the gloom into the yellow circle of light, with outstretched tin or mug, received their portion, tossed it off, inverted their drinking vessel, and moved away, wiping their mouths on the backs of their hands. When every man had been served, the Company Sergeant-Major picked up the last tin, and, tipping it down for the officer to see the contents, said--

“For the sergeants and myself.”

This last portion was divided between them and consumed. Then the C.S.M., shaking the rum jar, said--

“There’s some left yet, sir.”

“Everybody had his tot?” asked our Ensign.

“Yes, sir,” was the reply.

“Right,” answered the officer; “tip the rest out!”

(For such is the inexorable rule of the Army: what is left over from a rum issue must be spilled. Rum does not keep.)

“Sir!” replied the C.S.M., and in obedience to the order he emptied a brown gush of the spirit upon the earthen floor under the sorrowful gaze of the men. Our Ensign would have gladly given them an extra tot all round, for the night was raw and chill, but an order is an order....

And now the Guards found themselves within measurable distance of the ultimate goal of all their wanderings, the Battle of the Somme. Day and night the little village street resounded to the tramp of marching columns, to the thunder of the jarring, quivering trains of ammunition lorries. In that cramped and crowded village the only parade-ground was the dirty courtyards of the different billets, where the most stentorian word of command would often be lost in the roar of traffic from the street.

But while the stream of men and munitions flowed unceasingly eastward towards the Somme, from the battlefield came daily reports of further successes. Every sign pointed to the imminent participation of the Guards in the great offensive. There were frequent conferences, and, day after day, the Guards marched out by platoons, by companies, by battalions, past the little military cemetery, past the vast camps stretching away to the horizon, past the gangs of grubby German prisoners working on the roads, to the training-ground, where the coming attack was rehearsed in every detail. There were field-days and night operations and lectures and several false alarms, ... warnings to be in readiness for immediate departure, which were afterwards cancelled.

A few days after the arrival of the Brigade at M----, the Guards’ Divisional Canteen turned up and installed itself in the main street, and was followed shortly afterwards by the Guards’ Divisional Cinema, which was set up in that very barn with shrapnel-riddled roof which our Ensign had rejected as a billet. Tarpaulin supplied the missing wall, a little gas-engine furnished the power, and on the many wet evenings that the Clerk of the Weather bestowed on the Guards at M----, “the pictures” proved a great attraction. There, on one of the rare fine afternoons, our Ensign and a large party of his friends sat in a stifling atmosphere and saw the Somme battle film. Save for a few gunners and sappers, the whole audience consisted of Guardsmen, and their comments on this celebrated series of pictures were instructive--for they made none. They only cheered and laughed every time “Fritz” was seen on the screen.

The Guards’ Divisional Baths--a travelling concern this, that plants itself in any empty building that seems adapted to the purpose, or, in default of such a building, erects its own premises--happened along with its array of tubs and heating apparatus and vast supplies of towels and clean shirts, socks, and underwear. Every day parties of men were marched down by an officer under a scheme that ensured to every man one bath a week.

There was much entertaining between the different Messes. Everybody was always dining out with one or other of the company Messes in the different battalions, with the Brigade machine-gunners, or with the Stokes Mortars, who are charming fellows, but whose propinquity in the trenches is unpopular owing to the disagreeable tendency of their murderous weapons to draw fire.

In the double-company Mess all went as merry as a wedding bell. Madame, in whose house the Mess was lodged, proved herself a jewel and cooked them wonderful omelettes and ragouts, and a _Potage Bonne Femme_ before which Escoffier himself would have doffed his hat. The Mess raged and wrangled and argued, as young men do the world over, but the underlying good fellowship was never disturbed. The past tense is ever a kindlier critic than the present, but our Ensign, looking back on those pleasant summer days, cannot recollect that there was a single discordant element in that little band of men.

But the sand in the hour-glass had all but run out. At last the word for their departure came. And Battalion Orders that evening closed with a significant paragraph. Under the heading Dress, it ran--

“The polishing of buttons and cap-stars is discontinued until further orders.”

_A bon entendeur, salut!_

Chapter IX.

From now on, the shadows of the events that stood before began to be more sharply defined. As the Brigade marched out of M---- behind the Drums on a dull grey morning, there were many besides our Ensign there who felt that the moment was close at hand when they would take their places in the battle-line of the Somme. Indeed, hardly had the men got shaken down in their new quarters--a bivouac on a bare and dirty hillside amidst rolling downs covered, as far as the eye could see, with camps and horse-lines and abandoned trenches,--than a message arrived--

“The Battalion is on ten minutes’ notice!”

Now they were on the very fringe of the fight. The bivouac was within the zone of “the heavies.” All that day, with a blinding flash of green flame, a sickly burst of yellow smoke, and a ponderous roar, the big guns gave tongue from their positions among the downs. All that day, down the white road running through the ruined village on the fringe of the bivouac, snorted and rattled and tramped the vast outgoing traffic of the battlefield. Motor ambulances whirred by in a constant stream, slowing up at the end of the village, where in cavernous dug-outs white-robed surgeons toiled over the human _débris_ of the fight. Motor-lorries fetching shells, ammunition limbers and water-carts going down to be filled, baggage carts--all through the morning and afternoon our Ensign saw them bumping slowly down the hill in the dust.

Between the gaps in the traffic, marching in a dense white haze, came the remnants of the battalions which had just written Ginchy in letters of blood upon their colours. Our Ensign had seen that splendid Irish Division marching into action less than a week before, with pipes skirling out the old Irish airs and green flags waving, a jaunty, defiant, deathless band. Not a whit less jaunty, not a whit less defiant, though the Reaper had been busy in their ranks, our Ensign saw them again to-day, slow-footed and mud-stained, dirty and unshaven, yet marching with the gait of victors.

Somewhere down the road the cry rang out--

“’Tis the Dubs.!”

In an instant the road was overflowing with Irish Guardsmen, swarming forward in the dust-clouds raised by the Dublin Fusiliers in their passage.

“Jasus! ’tis the Micks!” rang out a voice in the midst of the column.

Cheery salutations were exchanged. Here and there a brown hand stretched out from the roadside grasped a muddy one thrust forward from the ranks of marching men in a warm clasp. Chaff was freely bandied about as the Irishmen trudged past, “Dubs.” and Munsters and Connaughts and the rest.

“So they didn’t get yez this time, Micky, me boy!” shouted a droll Irish voice from the roadside.

“True for you, Patsy, true for you!” flashed back the answer from the ranks. “I’ll be meetin’ yez in Ould Dublin yet!”

“Begob! ye’ll have to get a move on yez, the Micks,” drawled out a rich brogue from the road, “if ye want to find anny of the Gerboys left! We didn’t lave manny of thim for yez! Didn’t we an’ the Dubs. knock hell’s own blazes out of thim?”

There was a roar of laughter and cheers, then brogue and its owner were swallowed up in the dust....

At tea that afternoon somebody announced that the Welsh Guards up in the front line had had a very bad shelling, and were probably coming out that night. Another battalion was to take their places, and two companies of our Ensign’s battalion were to go up and replace this battalion in support. After tea our Ensign was sent for by the Commanding Officer, and told to go on ahead and reconnoitre the route for the two companies as far as the Headquarters of another Guards’ Brigade, so that they should not lose their way in the dark. From Brigade Headquarters guides would take the two companies up to the line.

It was getting dusk, and there was no time to lose. Our Ensign sent his servant to the Signallers to borrow two bicycles; and after beating the bivouac for his orderly, and failing to find him, he selected a bright lad in the company to act as orderly, and a little later the pair might have been seen pushing their bicycles through the dust up the steep road leading towards the Front.

The experiences of that night lingered long in our Ensign’s memory. The road was terribly rough; and though, with the coming of evening, the traffic was less, there was still enough about to make riding in the half-light distinctly dangerous. Their way led them past miles of empty trenches, where weather-beaten wooden crosses, hung with withered flowers, remained to tell of the time when the French were holding these positions, then the front line. As they drew nearer to the Front, they passed imperceptibly from the zone of the biggest guns into the region of the lighter pieces. The guns were waking up. Now and then, as they pedalled along, a huge shell travelled over their heads, coming from their rear, “hooshing” and wailing as it sped through the air. Now from right and now from left of them ear-splitting reports resounded.

The traffic grew heavier as they approached their destination. At the entrance to a gloomy and shattered village, so wrecked by shell fire that every house was razed, the press of vehicles and of troops going up and coming down was so great that our Ensign and his orderly had to get off and walk their bicycles. Presently all further progress was hindered; so, after waiting for a spell, our Ensign shouldered his heavy machine and struck out among the ruins to try and get round the block in the road. It was very heavy going; but at last, soaked with perspiration and breathless, our Ensign and his orderly emerged upon a fairly clear stretch of road, and pedalled off into the gathering darkness.

Fortunately the way was not difficult to find. At a cross-roads, where a mass of blackened poles sticking up against the evening sky denoted the former location of a wood, our travellers branched off to the left into a small country road.

Guns were firing everywhere now. The stench of their fumes lay heavy on the air. It was almost dark, and the green glare of their discharges lit up fitfully the struggling masses that thronged the little road. Long lines of men in single file, stooping beneath the weight of two petrol tins filled with water, slung across their shoulders; similar lines laden with coils of wire, stakes, pickets and shovels; long columns of troops going to relieve battalions in the line; trains of mules, with tossing tails, plodding forward amid a hail of curses; ammunition carts, water-carts, ... all were jumbled up together in that narrow way. From time to time came the low cry: “Make way! Stretcher-bearers!” and a stretcher would appear carried shoulder-high by four sweating bearers. Now and again, by the flash of the guns of a neighbouring battery, our Ensign cau