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.