IX + 

In the Army + 

I + 

Sitting in the sunshine one morning early in September, I ruminated on my five weeks’ service as a trooper in the Yeomanry. Healthier than I’d ever been before, I sat on the slope of a meadow a few miles from Canterbury, polishing a cavalry saddle and wondering how it was that I’d never learned more about that sort of thing from Dixon. Below me, somewhere in the horse-lines, stood Cockbird, picketed to a peg in the ground by a rope which was already giving him a sore pastern. Had I been near enough to study his facial expression I should have seen what I already knew, that Cockbird definitely disliked being a trooper’s charger. He was regretting Dixon and resenting mobilization. He didn’t even belong to me now, for I had been obliged to sell him to the Government for a perfunctory fifty pounds, and I was lucky not to have lost sight of him altogether. Apart from the fact that for forty-five months he had been my most prized possession in the world, he was now my only tangible link with the peaceful past which had provided us both with a roof over our heads every night. + 

My present habitation was a bivouac, rigged up out of a rick-cloth and some posts, which I shared with eleven other troopers. Outside the bivouac I sat, with much equipment still uncleaned after our morning exercises. I had just received a letter, and it was lying on the grass beside me. It was from someone at the War Office whom I knew slightly, it offered me a commission, with the rank of captain, in the Remount Service. I had also got yesterday’s Times, which contained a piece of poetry by Thomas Hardy. “What of the faith and fire within us, men who march away ere the barncocks say night is growing gray?” I did not need Hardy’s “Song of the Soldiers” to warn me that the Remounts was no place for me. Also the idea of my being any sort of officer in the Army seemed absurd. I had already been offered a commission in my own Yeomanry, but how could I have accepted it when everybody was saying that the Germans might land at Dover any day? I was safe in the Army, and that was all I cared about. + 

I had slipped into the Downfield troop by enlisting two days before the declaration of war. For me, so far, the War had been a mounted infantry picnic in perfect weather. The inaugural excitement had died down, and I was agreeably relieved of all sense of personal responsibility. Cockbird’s welfare was my main anxiety; apart from that, being in the Army was very much like being back at school. My incompetence, compared with the relative efficiency of my associates, was causing me perturbed and flustered moments. Getting on parade in time with myself and Cockbird properly strapped and buckled was ticklish work. But several of the officers had known me out hunting with the Ringwell, and my presence in the ranks was regarded as a bit of a joke, although in my own mind my duties were no laughing matter and I had serious aspirations to heroism in the field. Also I had the advantage of being a better rider than a good many of the men in my squadron, which to some extent balanced my ignorance and inefficiency in other respects. + 

The basis of my life with the “jolly Yeo-boys” was bodily fatigue, complicated by the minor details of my daily difficulties. There was also the uncertainty and the feeling of emergency which we shared with the rest of the world in that rumor-ridden conjuncture. But my fellow troopers were kind and helpful, and there was something almost idyllic about those early weeks of the War. The flavour and significance of life were around me in the homely smells of the thriving farm where we were quartered; my own abounding health responded zestfully to the outdoor world, to the apple-scented orchards, and all those fertilities which the harassed farmer was gathering in while stupendous events were developing across the Channel. Never before had I known how much I had to lose. Never before had I looked at the living world with any degree of intensity. It seemed almost as if I had been waiting for this thing to happen, although my own part in it was so obscure and submissive. + 

I belonged to what was known as the “Service Squadron,” which had been formed about three weeks after mobilization. The Yeomanry, as a Territorial unit, had not legitimately pledged themselves for foreign service. It was now incumbent upon them to volunteer. The squadron commanders had addressed their mustered men eloquently on the subject, and those who were willing to lay down their lives without delay were enrolled in the Service Squadron which for a few weeks prided itself on being a corps élite under specially selected officers. Very soon it became obvious that everyone would be obliged to go abroad whether they wanted to or not, and the too-prudent Home Service men were not allowed to forget their previous prudence. + 

As I sat on the ground with my half-cleaned saddle and the War Office letter, I felt very much a man dedicated to death. And to one who had never heard the hiss of machine-gun bullets there was nothing imaginatively abhorrent in the notion. Reality was a long way off; I had still to learn how to roll my “cloak” neatly on the pommel of my saddle, and various other elementary things. Nor had I yet learned how to clean my rifle; I hadn’t even fired a shot with it. Most of the letters I had received since enlisting had been bills. But they no longer mattered. If the War goes on till next spring, I ruminated, I shall be quite rich. Being in the Army was economical, at any rate! + 

The bugle blew for twelve o’clock “stables,” and I went down to the horse-lines to take Cockbird to the watering trough. Everyone had been talking about the hundred thousand Russians who were supposed to have passed through England on their way to France. Away across the hot midday miles the bells of Canterbury Cathedral refused to recognize the existence of a war. It was just a dazzling early autumn day, and the gaitered farmer came riding in from his fields on a cob. + 

As I was leading Cockbird back from watering I passed Nigel Croplady, who was one of the troop leaders. He stopped to speak to me for a moment, and asked whether I had heard from Denis Milden lately; this caused me to feel slightly less déclassé. Calling the officers “sir” and saluting them still made me feel silly. But I got on so comfortably with the other troopers that I couldn’t imagine myself living in the farmhouse with the officers. The men in my troop included two or three bank clerks, several farmers and small tradesmen’s sons, a professional steeplechase jockey, and the son of the local M.P. (who had joined at the outbreak of war). They were all quite young. Discipline was not rigorous, but their conduct was exemplary. I soon found out, however, that they were by no means as efficient as I had expected. The annual training had been little more than a three weeks’ outing. “Solidarity on parade” was not an impressive element in the Service Squadron, and squadron drill was an unsymmetrical affair. Nevertheless, we talked impressively among ourselves as though being ordered abroad was only a matter of weeks or even days, and our officers regaled us with optimistic news from the Western Front. Many of us believed that the Russians would occupy Berlin (and, perhaps, capture the Kaiser) before Christmas. The newspapers informed us that German soldiers crucified Belgian babies. Stories of that kind were taken for granted; to have disbelieved them would have been unpatriotic. + 

When Aunt Evelyn came over to see me one hot Sunday afternoon I assured her that we should soon be going to the Front. Her private feelings about “men who march away” had to be sacrificed to my reputability as a cavalryman. She brought with her some unnecessarily thick shirts and the news from Butley, where I was, I surmised, regarded as something of a hero. Enlistment in the Army had not yet become an inevitability. Everyone thought it splendid of me to set such an example. I shared their opinion as we went along the horse-lines to look at Cockbird. Aunt Evelyn was bearing up bravely about it all, but it was no good pretending that the War had brought any consolations for her, or for Dixon either. + 

Dixon had taken Cockbird to Downfield the day after mobilization, and had returned home just in time to interview some self-important persons who were motoring about the country requisitioning horses for the Army. Harkaway had been excused on grounds of old age, but the other two had been taken, at forty pounds apiece: the plump mowing-machine pony was not yet needed for a European war. + 

When we had finished making a fuss of Cockbird I took Aunt Evelyn up to inspect our bivouac; several of my companions were taking their Sabbath ease in the shade of the rick-cloth; they scrambled shyly to their feet and Aunt Evelyn was friendly and gracious to them; but she was a visible reminder to us of the homes we had left behind us. + 

As I lay awake after lights-out, visual realizations came to me of the drawing-room at Butley, and Miriam’s successor bringing in the oil-lamp; I had not liked it when I was seeing my aunt into the train at Canterbury⁠—the slow train which took her home in the evening sunshine through that life-learned landscape which, we all felt, was now threatened by barbaric invasion. I had never thought about her in that way while I was enjoying myself up at Packlestone, and my sympathetic feeling for her now was, perhaps, the beginning of my emancipation from the egotism of youth. I wished I hadn’t told her that “we should probably be going out quite soon.” She would be lying awake and worrying about it now. The ground was hard under my waterproof sheet, but I was very soon asleep. + 

The cloudless weather of that August and September need not be dwelt on; it is a hard fact in history; the spellbound serenity of its hot blue skies will be in the minds of men as long as they remember the catastrophic events which were under way in that autumn when I was raising the dust on the roads with the Yeomanry. But there was no tragic element in my own experience, though I may have seen sadness in the sunshine as the days advanced toward October and the news from France went from one extreme to the other with the retreat and advance of our expeditionary force. + 

I can remember the first time that I was “warned for guard,” and how I polished up my boots and buttons for that event. And when, in the middle of the night, I had been roused up to take my turn as sentry, I did not doubt that it was essential that someone in a khaki uniform should stand somewhere on the outskirts of the byres and barns of Batt’s Farm. My King and Country expected it of me. There was, I remember, a low mist lying on the fields, and I was posted by a gate under a walnut tree. In the autumn-smelling silence the village church clanged one o’clock. Shortly afterwards I heard someone moving in my direction across the field which I was facing. The significance of those approaching feet was intensified by my sentrified nerves. Holding my rifle defensively (and a loaded rifle, too), I remarked in an unemphatic voice, “Halt, who goes there?” There was no reply. Out of the mist and the weeds through which it was wading emerged the Kentish cow which I had challenged. + 

By the third week in September the nights were becoming chilly, and we weren’t sorry when we were moved into the Workhouse, which was quite near the farm where we had been camping. Sleeping in the Workhouse seemed luxurious; but it put an end to the summer holiday atmosphere of the previous weeks, and there were moments when I felt less lighthearted than I would have admitted to myself at the time. Soon afterwards young Nunburne (the M.P.’s son) was whisked away to Sandhurst, his father having decided that he would be more suitably situated as a subaltern in the Guards. His departure made a difference, but it did not convince me that as I ought to become an officer myself, though Cockbird, also, had in a manner of speaking, accepted a commission. + 

For the daily spectacle of Cockbird’s discomforts (the most important of which was the enormous weight of equipment which he had to carry) had induced me to transfer him to the squadron commander, who was glad to get hold of such a good-looking and perfect-mannered charger. Having got a tolerably comfortable horse in exchange, I now had the satisfaction of seeing Cockbird moving easily about with a lightweight on his back and a properly trained groom to look after him. I felt proud of him as I watched his elegant and pampered appearance. + 

“Of course you’ll be able to buy him back at the end of the War,” said the squadron commander; but I knew that I had lost him; it was a step nearer to bleak realization of what I was in for. Anyhow, I thought, Dixon would hate to see old Cockbird being knocked about in the ranks. As for Cockbird, he didn’t seem to know me since his promotion. + 

It must have been about this time that I began to be definitely bored with Yeomanry life. It was now becoming a recognized fact, even in the ranks, that we were unlikely to be sent to the Front in our present semi-efficient condition. It was said, too, that “Kitchener had got a down on our Brigade.” I remember riding home from a Brigade Field Day one afternoon at the end of September. My horse had gone lame and I had been given permission to withdraw from the unconvincing operations. During three or four leisurely miles back to the Workhouse I was aware of the intense relief of being alone and, for those few miles, free. For the first time since I’d joined the Army with such ardours I felt homesick. I was riding back to a Workhouse and the winter lay ahead of me. There was no hope of sitting by the fire with a book after a good day’s hunting. + 

I thought of that last cricket match, on August Bank Holiday, when I was at Hoadley Rectory playing for the Rector’s eleven against the village, and how old Colonel Hesmon had patted me on the back because I’d enlisted on the Saturday before. Outwardly the match had been normally conducted, but there was something in the sunshine which none of us had ever known before that calamitous Monday. Parson Colwood had two sons in the service, and his face showed it. I thought of how I’d said goodbye to Stephen the next day. He had gone to his Artillery and I had gone to stay at the hotel in Downfield, where I waited till the Wednesday morning and then put on my ill-fitting khaki and went bashfully down to the Drill Hall to join the Downfield troop. I had felt a hero when I was lying awake on the floor of the Town Hall on the first night of the War. + 

But the uncertainty and excitement had dwindled. And here I was, riding past the park wall of Lord Kitchener’s country house and wondering how long this sort of thing was going to last. Kitchener had told the country that it would be three years. “Three years or the duration” was what I had enlisted for. My heart sank to my boots (which were too wide for my stirrups) as I thought of those three years of imprisonment and dreary discomfort. The mellow happy looking afternoon and the comfortable Kentish landscape made it worse. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been doing something definite. But there was nothing to write home about in this sort of existence. Raking up horse-dung before breakfast had ceased to be a new experience. And the jokes and jollity of my companions had likewise lost freshness. They were very good chaps, but young Nunburne had been the only one I could really talk to about things which used to happen before the War began. But there was burly Bob Jenner, son of a big farmer in the Ringwell Hunt; he was in my section, and had failed to get a commission on account of his having lost the sight of one eye. What I should have done without him to talk to I couldn’t imagine. I had known him out hunting, so there were a good many simple memories which we could share.⁠ ⁠… + 

Escape came unexpectedly. It came about a week later. My horse was still lame and I had been going out on the chargers of various men who had special jobs in the squadron, such as the quartermaster-sergeant. One fortunate morning the farrier-sergeant asked me to take his horse out; he said the horse needed sharpening up. We went out for some fieldwork and, as usual, I was detailed to act as ground scout. My notion of acting as ground scout was to go several hundred yards ahead of the troop and look for jumpable fences. But the ground was still hard and the hedges were blind with summer vegetation, and when I put the farrier-sergeant’s horse at a lush-looking obstacle I failed to observe that there was a strand of wire in it. He took it at the roots and turned somersault. My wide boots were firmly wedged in the stirrups and the clumsy beast rolled all over me. Two young men, acting as the “advance guard” of the troop, were close behind me. One of them dismounted and scrambled hurriedly through the hedge, while the other shouted to him to “shoot the horse,” who was now recumbent with one of my legs under him. My well-meaning rescuer actually succeeded in extracting my rifle from its “bucket,” but before he had time to make my position more perilous by loading it, Bob Jenner arrived, brought him to his senses with some strong language, and extricated me, half-stunned and very much crushed. The same day I was taken to a doctor’s house in Canterbury. It would be hypocrisy to say that I was fundamentally distressed about my badly broken arm. I couldn’t have got a respite from the Workhouse in any other way. But if I had been able to look into the future I should have learned one very sad fact. I had seen the last of my faithful friend Cockbird. + 

II + 

Staring at my face in a mirror two months after the accident, I compared my pallid appearance with the picture of health I used to see in a small scrap of glass when I was shaving with cold water in the Army. All my sunburnt health and hardihood had vanished with my old pair of breeches (which the nurse who looked after me had thrown away, saying that they made the room smell like a stable), but I had still got my skimpy tunic to remind me that I had signed away my freedom. Outside the doctor’s house where I was lodged, another stormy December afternoon was closing in with torrents of rain. Would it ever stop raining, I wondered. And would my right arm ever be rid of this infernal splint? Anyhow, my December face matched the weather in exactly the same way as it had done in August and September. + 

The Yeomanry were now in a camp of huts close to the town. Every Saturday Bob Jenner or one of the others came to see me; while they were with me my ardour revived, but when I was alone again I found it more and more difficult to imagine myself sharing the discomforts which they described so lightheartedly. But I had only exchanged one prison for another, and after reading about the War in the newspapers for nine weeks, the “faith and fire” within me seemed almost extinguished. My arm had refused to join up, and I had spent more than an hour under an anaesthetic while the doctor screwed a silver plate on to the bone. The fracture wobbled every time I took a deep breath, and my arm was very much inflamed. When I was out for a walk with my arm in a sling I felt a fraud, because the people I passed naturally assumed that I had been to the Front. When my squadron commander came to see me I couldn’t help feeling that he suspected me of not getting well on purpose. I still found it impossible to imagine myself as an officer. It was only half an hour’s walk to the Yeomanry camp, but I could never get myself to go up there. + 

The weather had been as depressing as the War news. Like everybody else I eagerly assimilated the optimistic reports in the papers about Russian victories in East Prussia, and so on. “The Russian steamroller”; how remote that phrase seems now!⁠ ⁠… Often I prayed that the War would be over before my arm got well. A few weeks later the doctor said the bone had united and I had another operation for the removal of the plate. In the middle of January I was allowed to return home, with my arm still in a splint. + 

Since my accident I had received a series of letters from Stephen, who was with an ammunition column on the Western Front and apparently in no immediate danger. He said there wasn’t an honest jumpable fence in Flanders; his forced optimism about next year’s opening meet failed to convince me that he expected the “great contest,” as he called it, to be over by then. Denis had disappeared into a cavalry regiment and was still in England. For him the world had been completely disintegrated by the War, but he seemed to be making the best of a bad job. + 

It was five and a half months since I had been home. I had left Butley without telling anyone that I had made up my mind to enlist. On that ominous July 31st I said long and secret goodbyes to everything and everyone. Late in a sultry afternoon I said goodbye to the drawing-room. The sun blinds (with their cords which tapped and creaked so queerly when there was any wind to shake them) were drawn down the tall windows; I was alone in the twilight room, with the glowering red of sunset peering through the chinks and casting the shadows of leaves on a fiery patch of light which rested on the wall by the photograph of Love and Death. So I looked my last and rode away to the War on my bicycle. Somehow I knew that it was inevitable, and my one idea was to be first in the field. In fact, I made quite an impressive inward emotional experience out of it. It did not occur to me that everyone else would be rushing off to enlist next week. My gesture was, so to speak, an individual one, and I gloried in it. + 

And now, although Aunt Evelyn fussed over me as if I were a real wounded soldier, I was distinctly conscious of an anticlimax. I had looked forward to seeing Dixon again, in spite of the sad state of affairs in the stable. But before I had been in the house five minutes Aunt Evelyn had given me some news which took me by surprise. Dixon had gone away to join the Army Veterinary Corps. This had happened two days ago. He was forty-three, but he hadn’t a grey hair, and he had stated his age as thirty-five. The news had a bracing effect on me. It wasn’t the first time that Tom Dixon had given me a quiet hint as to what was expected of me. + 

The worst of the winter was over and my arm was mending. Aunt Evelyn talked almost gaily about my going back to the Yeomanry in the spring. She had twigged that it was a comparatively safe location, and I knew from her tone of voice that she was afraid I might do something worse. If she had been more subtle and sagacious she would have urged me to exchange into the Infantry. As it was she only succeeded in stiffening my resolve to make no mistake about it this time. I had made one false start, and as I’d got to go to the Front, the sooner I went the better. The instinct of self-preservation, however, made it none too easy, when I was sitting by the fire of an evening, or out for a walk on a mild February afternoon; already there were primroses in the woods, and where should I be in twelve months’ time, I wondered. Pushing them up, perhaps!⁠ ⁠… + 

But I had struggled through the secret desperations of that winter, and I like to remember myself walking over one afternoon to consult Captain Huxtable about a commission in an infantry regiment. Captain Huxtable, who had always shown an almost avuncular concern for my career, had joined the Army in 1860. He was a brisk, freckled, God-fearing, cheerful little man, and although he was now over seventy, he didn’t seem to have altered in appearance since I was a child. He was a wonderful man for his age. Chairman of the local bench, churchwarden, fond of a day’s shooting with Squire Maundle, comfortably occupied with a moderate sized farm overlooking the Weald, he was a pattern of neighbourly qualities, and there was no one with whom Aunt Evelyn more enjoyed a good gossip. Time-honoured jokes passed between them, and his manner toward her was jovial, spruce, and gallant. He was a neat skater, and his compact homespun figure seemed to find its most appropriate setting when the ponds froze and he was cutting his neat curves on the hard, ringing surface; his apple-cheeked countenance, too, had a sort of blithe good humour which seemed in keeping with the frosty weather. He was a man who knew a good Stilton cheese and preferred it overripe. His shrewd and watchful eye had stocked his mind with accurate knowledge of the countryside. He was, as he said himself, “addicted to observing the habits of a rook,” and he was also a keen gardener. + 

Captain Huxtable was therefore an epitome of all that was most pleasant and homely in the countrified life for which I was proposing to risk my own. And so, though neither of us was aware of it, there was a grimly jocular element in the fact that it was to him that I turned for assistance. It may be inferred that he had no wish that I should be killed, and that he would have been glad if he could have gone to the Front himself, things being as they were; but he would have regarded it as a greater tragedy if he had seen me shirking my responsibility. To him, as to me, the War was inevitable and justifiable. Courage remained a virtue. And that exploitation of courage, if I may be allowed to say a thing so obvious, was the essential tragedy of the War, which, as everyone now agrees, was a crime against humanity. + 

Luckily for my peace of mind, I had no such intuitions when I walked across the fields to Butley that afternoon, with four o’clock striking in mellow tones from the grey church tower, the village children straggling home from school, and the agricultural serenity of the Weald widespread in the delicate hazy sunshine. In the tall trees near Captain Huxtable’s house the rooks were holding some sort of conference, and it was with a light heart that I turned in at his gate. It happened that as I rang the front-door bell an airship droned its way over the house. Every afternoon that airship passed over our parish, on its way, so it was said, to France. The Captain came out now to watch it from his doorstep, and when it disappeared he led me into his sanctum and showed me a careful pencil drawing of it, which he had made the first time its lustrous body appeared above his garden. Under the stiff little sketch he had written, “airship over our house,” and the date. It was his way of “putting on record” a significant event. Sixteen months afterwards he probably jotted down some such memorandum as this: “Between 11 and 12 this morning, while we were getting in the last load of hay, I distinctly heard the guns in France. A very faint thudding noise but quite continuous as long as it was audible.” But he wasn’t able to make a neat pencil drawing of the intensive preliminary bombardment on the Somme. + 

III + 

As a result of my conversation with Captain Huxtable he wrote a letter about me to the Adjutant at the Training Depot of the Royal Flintshire Fusiliers, which was his old regiment. As far as he was concerned the Flintshire Fusiliers were, as he said, ancient history; but the Adjutant happened to be the nephew of an old brother officer of his, and he jovially remarked that he would perjure himself for once in a way by giving me a good character. For him his old “corps” ranked next below religion, and to be thus almost actively in touch with the regiment gave him deep satisfaction. + 

His room contained many objects associated with his army life; he had seen garrison service in India; there were mementoes of that; and his little watercolour foreign sketches which I had often seen before. His sword, of course, was hanging on the wall. Everything connected with Captain Huxtable’s regimental career had suddenly become significant and stimulating. The Flintshire Fusiliers, which I had so often heard him speak about (and had taken so little interest in), had become something to be lived up to. I would be a credit to him, I resolved, as I went home across the dark fields. + 

The local doctor had said I might take the splint off my arm next day and that was a step in the right direction. I said nothing to Aunt Evelyn about my conspiracy with her old friend until a week later, when I received a favourable letter from the Adjutant. I was to make a formal application for a Special Reserve commission. The Special Reserve was a new name for the old Militia; a temporary commission in the New Army would have been much the same, but Captain Huxtable wanted me to do the thing properly. Greatly as he admired their spirit, he couldn’t help looking down a bit on those Kitchener’s Army battalions. + 

When I broke the news to Aunt Evelyn she said that of course I was doing the right thing. “But I do hate you doing it, my dear!” she added. Should I have to go all the way to Flintshire, she asked. I said I supposed I should, for the depot was there. + 

And although I agreed with her that it would have been nice if I’d been somewhere nearer, I had a private conviction that I wanted to make my fresh start among people who knew nothing of me. Dixon had said (when he brought Cockbird to Downfield the day after mobilization) that if I had to be in the ranks I ought to have done it somewhere where I wasn’t so well known. I found afterwards that there was a great deal of truth in his remark. The Yeomanry would have been more comfortable for me if none of the officers had known me before I joined. I now felt strongly in favour of getting right away from my old associations. Captain Huxtable had given me all I needed in the way of a send-off. Aunt Evelyn was helping at the Voluntary Aid Detachment Hospital, which, as she said, took her mind off things. + 

Stephen, when I wrote and told him about it, replied that since I was so keen on getting killed I might as well do it properly dressed, and gave me the name of his military tailor, which was a rather unfortunate one⁠—Craven & Sons. He had been expecting to get a week’s leave, but it had been “stopped owing to the big strafe” which was imminent; (the Battle of Neuve Chapelle happened soon afterwards). + 

Ordering my uniform from Craven & Sons was quite enjoyable⁠—almost like getting hunting clothes. Situated in a byway off Bond Street, the firm of Craven & Sons had been established a century ago in the cathedral city of Wintonbury. To the best of my knowledge the firm was exclusively military, though there may have been a demure ecclesiastical connection at the “and at Wintonbury” shop. I was warmly welcomed by a florid gentleman with a free and easy manner; he might almost have been a major if he had not been so ostensibly a tailor. He spoke affectionately of the Flintshire Fusiliers (“The Twenty-Fifth” he called them); he had “been up at the depot only the other day,” and he mentioned a few of the first and second battalion officers by name; one might almost have imagined that he had played polo with them, so dashing was his demeanour as he twirled his blond moustache. This representative of Craven & Sons was like the royal family; he never forgot a name. He must have known the Army List from cover to cover, for he had called on nearly every officers’ mess in the country during the periodical pilgrimages on which the prosperity of his firm depended. Newly gazetted subalterns found themselves unable to resist his persuasive suggestions, though he may have met his match in an occasional curmudgeonly colonel. Mr. Stoving (for that was his name) chatted his way courageously through the War; “business as usual” was his watchword. Undaunted by the ever more bloated bulk of the Army List, he bobbed like a cork on the lethal inundation of temporary commissions, and when I last saw him, a few months before the Armistice, he was still outwardly unconscious of the casualty lists which had lost (and gained) him such a legion of customers. + 

As soon as he had put me at ease I became as wax in his hands. He knew my needs so much better than I did that when I paid a second visit to try on my tunics, there seemed no reason why he shouldn’t put me through a little squad drill. But he only made one reference to the cataclysm of military training which was in progress, and that was when I was choosing khaki shirts. “You can’t have them too dark;” he insisted, when my eye wandered toward a paler pattern. “We have to keep those in stock⁠—they’re for the East of course⁠—but it’s quite impermissible the way some of these New Army officers dress: really, the Provost-Marshal ought to put a stop to all these straw-coloured shirts and ties they’re coming out in.” He lifted his eyes in horror.⁠ ⁠… + 

A few weeks later (a second lieutenant in appearance only) I arrived at the training depot of the “Twenty-Fifth.” The whole concern had recently migrated from the small peacetime barracks in Flintshire to a new camp of huts on the outskirts of Liverpool. On a fine afternoon at the end of April I got out of the local electric railway at Clitherland Station. Another evidently new officer also climbed out of the train, and we shared a cab up to the camp, with our brand new valises rolling about on the roof. My companion was far from orthodox in what he was wearing, and from his accent I judged him to be a Yorkshireman. His good-humoured face was surmounted by a cap, which was as soft as mine was stiff. His shirt and tie were more yellow than khaki. And his breeches were of a bright buff tint. His tunic was of the correct military colour, but it sat uneasily on his podgy figure. His name, he told me, was Mansfield, and he made no secret of the fact that he had chucked up a job worth £800 a year. “And a nice hope I’ve got of ever getting it back again!” he added. + 

When our luggage was unloaded we went to report ourselves at the orderly room. Everything was quiet and deserted, for the troops were drilling on a big field a few hundred yards up the road which went past the camp. We entered the orderly room. The Adjutant was sitting at a table strewn with documents. We saluted clumsily, but he did not look up for a minute or two. When he deigned to do so his eyes alighted on Mansfield. During a prolonged scrutiny he adjusted an eyeglass. Finally he leant back in his chair and exclaimed, with unreproducable hauteur, “Christ! who’s your tailor?” This (with a reminder that his hair wanted cutting) was the regimental recognition which Mansfield received from his grateful country for having given up a good job in the woolen industry. My own reception was in accordance with the cut of my clothes and my credentials from Captain Huxtable. + 

IV + 

It is ten years since I uttered an infantry word of command: and I am only one of a multitude of men in whose minds parade ground phraseology has become as obsolete and derelict as a rusty kettle in a ditch. So much so that it seems quite illuminating to mention the fact. “At the halt on the left form platoon” now sounds to me positively peculiar, and to read Infantry Training 1914 for a few minutes might be an almost stimulating experience. Though banished to the backs of our minds, those automatic utterances can still be recalled; but who can restore Clitherland Camp and its counterparts all over the country? Most of them were constructed on waste land; and to waste land they have relapsed. I cannot imagine any ex-soldier revisiting Clitherland in pensive pilgrimage. Apart from its deadening associations, it was in an unattractive neighborhood. The district was industrial. Half a mile away were the chimneys of Bryant’s Match Factory. Considerably closer was a hissing and throbbing inferno, which incessantly concocted the form of high explosive known as T.N.T.; when the wind was in the east the Camp got the benefit of the fumes, which caused everyone to cough. Adjoining the Camp, on the other side, was a large Roman Catholic cemetery. Frequent funeral processions cheered up the troops. The surrounding country, with its stunted dwelling-houses, dingy trees, disconsolate canal, and flat rootfields, was correspondingly unlikable. + 

Unrolling my valise in a comfortless hut on that first afternoon, I was completely cut off from anything I had done before. Not a soul in the Camp had ever set eyes on me until today. And I was totally ignorant of all that I had to learn before I was fit to go to the Front. Fixing up my folding bed, in which I managed to pinch my finger, I listened to what this new world had to tell me. A bugle call was blown⁠—rather out of tune⁠—but what event it signalized I couldn’t say. An officer’s servant was whistling cheerfully, probably to a pair of brown shoes. A door banged and his army boots thumped hastily along the passage. Then a sedate tread passed along on the boards, evidently some senior officer. Silence filled a gap, and then I heard a dusty rhythm of marching feet; the troops were returning from the drill-field up the road. Finally, from the open space behind the officers’ quarters, a manly young voice shouted, “At the halt on the left form close column of platoons.” Clitherland Camp had got through another afternoon parade. I was in a soldier manufactory, although I did not see it in that way at the time. + 

The cell-like room was already occupied by one other officer. He transpired as an unobtrusive ex-civil engineer⁠—a married man, and expecting to go to France with the next draft of officers. He was friendly but uncommunicative; in the evenings, after mess, he used to sit on his bed playing patience with a pack of small cards. It must not be assumed that I found life in the Camp at all grim and unpleasant. Everything was as aggressively cheerful and alert as the ginger-haired sergeant-major who taught the new officers how to form fours and slope arms, and so on, until they could drill a company of recruits with rigid assurance. In May 1915 the recruits were men who had voluntarily joined up, the average age of the second lieutenants was twenty-one, and “war-weariness” had not yet been heard of. I was twenty-eight myself, but I was five years younger in looks, and in a few days I was one of this outwardly lighthearted assortment, whose only purpose was to “get sent out” as soon as possible. + 

The significant aspects of Clitherland as it was then can now be seen clearly, and they are, I think, worth reviving. It was a community (if anything could be called a community under such convulsive conditions) which contained contrasted elements. There were the ostensibly permanent senior officers of the prewar Special Reserve Battalion (several of whom had South African War ribbons to make them more impressive); and there were the young men whose salutes they received and for whose future efficiency at the Front they were, supposedly, responsible. For these younger men there was the contrast between the Camp and Clitherland (in the bright summer weather of that year) and the places they were booked for (such as the Battle of Loos and the Dardanelles). It was, roughly speaking, the difference between the presence of life (with battalion cricket matches and good dinners at the hotel de luxe in Liverpool) and the prospect of death: (next winter in the trenches, anyhow). A minor (social) contrast was provided by the increasingly numerous batches of Service Battalion officers, whose arrival to some extent clashed with the more carefully selected Special Reserve commissions (like my own) and the public-school boys who came from the Royal Military College. I mention this “feeling” because the “temporary gentlemen” (disgusting phrase), whose manners and accents were liable to criticism by the Adjutant, usually turned out to be first-rate officers when they got to the trenches. In justice to the Adjutant it must be remembered that he was there to try and make them conform to the Regular “officer and gentleman” pattern which he exemplified. And so, while improvised officers came and went, Clitherland Camp was a sort of raft on which they waited for the moment of embarkation which landed them as reinforcements to the still more precarious communities on the other side of the Channel. + 

Those who were fortunate enough to return, a year or two later, would find among a crowd of fresh faces, the same easygoing Militia majors enjoying their port placidly at the top of the table. For, to put it plainly, they weren’t mobile men, although they had been mobilized for the Great War. They were the products of peace, and war had wrenched them away from their favourite nooks and niches. The Commanding Officer was a worthy (but somewhat fussy) Breconshire landowner. He now found himself in charge of 3,000 men and about 100 officers, and was inundated with documents from the War Office. His second-in-command was a tall Irishman, who was fond of snipe shooting. Nature had endowed him with an impressive military appearance; but he was in reality the mildest of men. This kind and courteous gentleman found himself obliged to exist in a hut on the outskirts of Liverpool for an indefinite period. + 

There were several more majors; three of them had been to the Front, but had remained there only a few weeks, the difference between a club window and a dugout had been too much for them. Anyhow, here they were, and there was the War, and to this day I don’t see how things could have been differently arranged. They appeared to be unimaginative men, and the Colonel probably took it as all in the day’s work when he toddled out after mess on some night when a draft was “proceeding to the Front.” Out on the Square he would find, perhaps, 150 men drawn up; discipline would be none too strict, since most of them had been fortifying themselves in the canteen. He would make his stuttering little farewell speech about being a credit to the regiment; going out to the Big Push which will end the War; and so on. And then the local clergyman would exhort them to trust in their Saviour, to an accompaniment of asides and witticisms in Welsh. + 

“And now God go with you,” he would conclude, adding, “I will go with you as far as the station.⁠ ⁠…” + 

And they would march away in the dark singing to the beat of drums. It wasn’t impressive, but what else could the Colonel and the clergyman have said or done?⁠ ⁠… + 

Young officers were trained by efficient N.C.O.’s; the senior officers were responsible for company accounts, kit inspections, and other camp routine, and the spirit of the regiment, presumably, presided over us all. I have reason to believe that Clitherland was one of the most competently managed camps in the country; high authorities looked upon it as exemplary. + 

Needless to say, I felt awestruck by my surroundings as I edged my way shyly into mess on my first evening. The cheerful crowd of junior officers sat at two long tables which culminated in the one across the top, which was occupied by the impressive permanencies of whom I have been writing. Old soldiers with South African, China, and even Ashanti medal ribbons bustled in and out with plates. + 

Outside in the evening light among the subalterns who waited for the Olympians to emerge from the anteroom, I had spoken to no one. Next to me now was a young man who talked too much and seemed anxious to air his social eligibility. From the first I felt that there was something amiss with him. And he was, indeed, one of the most complete failures I ever came across in the War. G. Vivian-Simpson had joined the battalion two or three months before, and for a time he was regarded as smart and promising. A bit of a bounder, perhaps, but thoroughly keen and likely to become competent. He was known among the young officers as “Pardon-me,” which was his characteristic utterance. Little by little poor “Pardon-me” was found out by everyone. His social pretensions were unmasked. (He had been an obscure bank clerk in Liverpool.) His hyphenated name became an object of ridicule. His whole spurious edifice fell to bits. He got into trouble with the Adjutant for cutting parades and failing to pass in musketry. In fact, he was found to be altogether unreliable and a complete cad. For two and a half years he remained ignominiously at the Camp. Fresh officers arrived, were fully trained, and passed away to the trenches. In the meantime guards had to be provided for for the docks along the Mersey, and “Pardon-me” was usually in command of one of these perfunctory little expeditions. He must have spent some dreary days at the docks, but it was rumoured that he consoled himself with amorous adventures. Then, when he least expected it, he was actually sent to the Front. Luck was against him; he was introduced to the Ypres salient at its worst. His end was described to me as follows: “Poor old ‘Pardon-me’! He was in charge of some Lewis gunners in an advance post. He crawled back to Company headquarters to get his breakfast. You remember what a greedy devil he was! Well, about an hour after he’d gone back to his shell-hole, he decided to chance his arm for another lot of eggs and bacon. A sniper got him while he was on his way, and so he never got his second breakfast!” + 

It was a sad story, but I make no apology for dragging it from its decent oblivion. All squalid, abject, and inglorious elements in war should be remembered. The intimate mental history of any man who went to the War would make unheroic reading. I have half a mind to write my own. + 

In the meantime there is nothing more to be said about my first night in mess, and the next morning I began to acquire the alphabet of infantry training. Mansfield picked it up twice as quick as I did. For he was a competent man, in spite of his New Army style of dress. And his “word of command” had fire and ferocity; whereas mine was much as might have been expected (in spite of my having acquired a passable “view holloa” during my foxhunting life). Learning how to be a second lieutenant was a relief to my mind. It made the War seem further away. I hadn’t time to think about it, and by the end of each day I was too healthily tired to worry about anything. + 

Life in the officers’ mess was outwardly lighthearted. Only when news came from our two battalions in France were we vividly reminded of the future. Then for a brief while the War came quite close; mitigated by our experience of what it was like, it laid a wiry finger on the heart. There was the battle of Festubert in the middle of May. That made us think a bit. The first battalion had been in it and had lost many officers. Those who were due for the next draft were slightly more cheerful than was natural. The next thing I knew about them was that they had gone⁠—half a dozen of them. I went on afternoon parade, and when I returned to the hut my fellow occupant had vanished with all his tackle. But my turn was months away yet.⁠ ⁠… + 

The following day was a Sunday, and I was detailed to take a party to church. They were Baptists and there were seven of them. I marched them to the Baptist Chapel in Bootle, wondering what on earth to do when I got them to the door. Ought I to say, “Up the aisle; quick march?” As far as I can remember we reverted to civilian methods and shuffled into the Chapel in our own time. At the end of the service the bearded minister came and conversed with me very cordially and I concealed the fact that it was my first experience of his religion. Sunday morning in the Baptist Chapel made the trenches seem very remote. What possible connection was there? + 

Next day some new officers arrived, and one of them took the place of the silent civil engineer in my room. We had the use of the local cricket ground; I came in that evening feeling peaceful after batting and bowling at the nets for an hour. It seemed something to be grateful for⁠—that the War hadn’t killed cricket yet, and already it was a relief to be in flannels and out of uniform. Coming cheerfully into the hut I saw my new companion for the first time. He had unpacked and arranged his belongings, and was sitting on his camp-bed polishing a perfectly new pipe. He looked up at me. Twilight was falling and there was only one small window, but even in the half-light his face surprised me by its candour and freshness. He had the obvious good looks which go with fair hair and firm features, but it was the radiant integrity of his expression which astonished me. While I was getting ready for dinner we exchanged a few remarks. His tone of voice was simple and reassuring, like his appearance. How does he manage to look like that? I thought; and for the moment I felt all my age, though the world had taught me little enough, as I knew then, and know even better now. His was the bright countenance of truth; ignorant and undoubting; incapable of concealment but strong in reticence and modesty. In fact, he was as good as gold, and everyone knew it as soon as they knew him. + 

Such was Dick Tiltwood, who had left school six months before and had since passed through Sandhurst. He was the son of a parson with a good family living. Generations of upright country gentlemen had made Dick Tiltwood what he was, and he had arrived at manhood in the nick of time to serve his country in what he naturally assumed to be a just and glorious war. Everyone told him so; and when he came to Clitherland Camp he was a shining epitome of his unembittered generation which gladly gave itself to the German shells and machine-guns⁠—more gladly, perhaps, than the generation which knew how much (or how little, some would say) it had to lose. Dick made all the difference to my life at Clitherland. Apart from his cheerful companionship, which was like perpetual fine weather, his Sandhurst training enabled him to help me in mine. Patiently he heard me while I went through my repetitions of the mechanism of the rifle. And in company drill, which I was slow in learning, he was equally helpful. + 

In return for this I talked to him about foxhunting, which never failed to interest him. He had hunted very little, but he regarded it as immensely important and much of the material of these memoirs became familiar to him through our conversations in the hut: I used to read him Stephen’s letters from the Front, which were long and full of amusing references to the sport that for him symbolized everything enjoyable which the War had interrupted and put an end to. His references to the War were facetious. “An eight-inch landed and duly expanded this morning twenty yards from our mess, which was half-filled with earth. However, the fourth footman soon cleared it and my sausage wasn’t even cracked, so I had quite a good breakfast.” But he admitted that he was looking forward to “the outbreak of peace,” and in one letter went so far as to say that he was “just about as bucked as I should be if I was booked for a week with the Pytchley and it froze the whole time.” Dick got to know Stephen quite well, although he had never seen him, except in a little photograph I had with me. So we defied the boredom of life in the Camp, and while the summer went past us our only fear was that we might be separated when our turn came to go abroad. He gave me a sense of security, for his smooth head was no more perplexed with problems than a robin redbreast’s; he wound up his watch, brushed his hair, and said his prayers morning and evening. + 

September arrived, and we were both expecting to get a week’s leave. (It was known as “last leave.”) One morning Dick came in to the hut with a telegram which he handed me. It happened that I was orderly officer that day. Being orderly officer meant a day of dull perfunctory duties, such as turning out the guard, inspecting the prisoners in the guardroom, the cookhouses, the canteen, and everything else in the Camp. When I opened my telegram the orderly sergeant was waiting outside for me; we were due for a tour of the men’s huts while they were having their midday meal. The telegram was signed “Colwood”; it informed me that Stephen had been killed in action. But the orderly sergeant was waiting, and away we went walking briskly, over the grit and gravel. At each hut he opened the door and shouted “Shun!” The clatter and chatter ceased and all I had to ask was “Any complaints?” There were no complaints, and off we went to the next hut. It was queer to be doing it, with that dazed feeling and the telegram in my pocket.⁠ ⁠… I showed Dick the telegram when I returned. I had seen Stephen when he was on leave in the spring, and he had written to me only a week ago. Reading the Roll of Honour in the daily paper wasn’t the same thing as this. Looking at Dick’s blank face I became aware that he would never see Stephen now, and the meaning of the telegram became clear to me. + 