War Classics (14 page)

At the Base I saw even more striking testimony of our troops’ love of children. The
rapatriés
were coming back – they had been four years at Lille, Douai and such places under Boche occupation and were now being shipped back to France from Rotterdam. I was on the pier many times to see their boat come in. Wild-eyed, miserable, ill-clad, with a world of patience – and of horror – in their eyes – they came slowly ashore and some of them kissed the ground as they landed. For it was the ground of France. Some looked old men of eighty, some very old women, and there were middle-aged, and children of all ages.

The
rapatriés
had to walk about half a mile along the sea front to the Casino, where the French Government sheltered and tended them. The boat arrived at all sorts of odd hours. Yet it never arrived once without English soldiers – somehow by chance – being there to meet it and carry up the children from the pier to the Casino. It never seemed to occur to Frenchmen to do anything of the sort. One day, as I was going with a wee French baby in my arms in the procession, we met a lorry load of Boche prisoners going back to their camp. The
rapatriés
were afoot, dispirited, dog-tired – as despairing as human beings can be. The Boche prisoners were well fed, in good condition, in the prime of life. And their lorry went superbly well. But if it had been a Rolls Royce itself it would not have got past the
rapatriés
. For the first time I realised what I had often heard from our officers, ‘These French aren’t much to look at, but they fight like the devil himself.’ The
rapatriés
threw down their bundles, swarmed up on the lorry and in a moment were at the throats of the Boches. A low growl of hate – more like the growl of an animal than of a human being – ran along their lines. It was in vain that the driver of the lorry tried to move, or the French soldiers to protect their prisoners. Stones hurled through the air, curses fell thick and fast, yet the
rapatriés
by and large were long past fighting age – mere human skeletons. The Boches cowered in the lorry and sought in vain for an escape. It was an ugly moment, and if it had not been for our own soldiers, coaxing here, diverting there, I don’t know what might have happened. Care was taken that a Boche lorry never again happened to meet
rapatriés
.

And our own men, what of them? How did they strike an Englishwoman, working among them? Base Troops, Demobbing Troops, Remounts, Highlanders, even the Guards – if there is a word in English that describes them better than the Sergeant’s ‘top-hole’, that word they must have. It is universal testimony, but age cannot wither it, nor custom stale! I have heard an officer swear in my presence in France – more than once – but I have never heard a private soldier swear, nor have I ever met the woman who had. I have seen private soldiers drunk and mud-stained and battered after a fight, but I have never seen one rude to a woman.

I sometimes went to serve at a little canteen for dockyard workers – Grangemouth navvies in civil life – in the worst part of the Base at Luneray. The road to it was so bad that for the last half mile no car could get through the mud. Naturally there were no lights, and the road ran past a Chinese labour camp. The district was unsavoury to begin with and, as one stumbled along, to flash the torch on a yellow face almost on one’s shoulder, was eerie – and not over safe. After nightfall, no one but the dockers and the Chinese used the road, and only one lady at a time ever went to the canteen. No more could be spared. But nothing untoward ever happened to the Hut Lady going there.

The canteen itself was primitive in the extreme. It was lit only by a few candles as any lamps would be stolen; it served tea in billycans only, as no mugs would remain; its money box was many times ransacked and the thief never discovered; the dockers were filthy, uncouth, often repulsive or even fearsome to look at. But the Hut Lady who went there loved them and refused to leave them, even for a demob camp, and they presented her with the loveliest bouquet of flowers in the Base on Christmas morning. Now and again I took on the canteen for her, and when the time came for me to go down the lonely road – though I left an open counter and a crowded Hut – I never went unnoticed. A docker would slouch up beside me, ‘I’ll take yer past them Chinks, Miss.’ And murderer though he might be in civil life, as I trudged along in the mud beside him, I was as safe as the Bank of England and I knew it.

‘Weren’t you afraid?’ the Chief questioned me once on my return.

‘With the British Army all round me?’ I rallied him laughingly. ‘How could I be safer?’ I had learned something from my visits to Luneray.

At the canteen counter, too, I made many friends. ‘Goin’ on leave tomorrow, Miss,’ said one as I gave him a mug of tea. ‘Thinkin’ o’ getting married, Miss, I am,’ he volunteered next.

‘And a very good thing too,’ I agreed warmly.

‘Well, I dunno, Miss,’ he pondered, ‘You see, it’s this way. Me and my ole mother lives together rare and comferable-like, we do. An’ the chaps do say as ’ow yer wife never tikes the same care o’ yer as wot yer ole mother does.’

‘An’ that’s no more than the truth, Bill, no more it ain’t. Two teas, Miss, if you please,’ interrupted a neighbour, coming up.

The prospective bridegroom looked disturbed. ‘But yer carn’t ’ave yer ole mother with yer always,’ he protested, not unnaturally.

‘Then yer best by yerself, Bill: wives is no good nohow,’ returned the misogynist, taking a deep draught of tea.

I intervened. ‘But the wife might learn from your mother,’ I suggested rashly. The despairing one finished his tea.

‘Yer dunno, Miss,’ he said, putting the mug down with a thump. ‘Yer means well, but yer dunno’ – which, indeed, was true. ‘Wives never learns,’ he added gloomily. But a queue was waiting and they drifted from the counter.

As for ourselves, if the officers were mixed, so were we, and no one was quicker than the soldier to pick out the real from the sham in the lady behind the counter. It was disconcerting how soon he knew, and how ill at ease he felt with the sham. But if he liked you, he took you into his confidence about his inmost domestic life. There were the photographs of course. He always showed you these, producing them from his pay book with pride and reverence. There is a sameness in photographs so shown, but I rapidly chose one child from each group and concentrated on that. ‘This is the one I like best,’ I said diplomatically, knowing I could not remember them all. ‘How old is he?’

At School I saw them in a different light. I think it was their patience in sticking to work they had chosen that I admired most. It was in English only that they had any criterion of dullness or the reverse. In other subjects nothing daunted them.

‘Don’t you find this boring?’ I said to a man who never could get past the first declension in Greek.

He stared at me. ‘Oh no, Miss,’ he said in wonderment.

I came to the conclusion that one of two things was the reason. Either they expected very little from a foreign language or they had been doing so many dull things within the last four years that their sense of interest was blunted. But if they had inexhaustible patience, they were also many of them incredibly stupid. I hate to use the word ‘stupid’ for it implies a reproach, and that is the last thing I wish to convey. I mean that they found learning immeasurably hard. And finding it so, they stuck to it. I’m afraid that at home I have no use for the stupid child or the stupid student, but in France the stupidity was so unfathomable and the patience so amazing that I grew fascinated. Had I found Greek as hard as they did, I should never in this world have learnt it. In the end, the stupidest people from all the classes were handed over to me. There was a military policeman who was trying to learn French. Despite many months’ teaching, he could not master the form of the French imperfect. He was a policeman in civil life too, with a most Olympian air, and never have I felt so like a criminal, as when I sat down beside him to explain the imperfect. He was huge and I was small – I felt we could have sat for
Dignity and Impudence
’.
6
But his mind was quite impenetrable and he never knew when he was beaten. To my amazement he actually signed on for another year in France ‘to perfect his French’. He thought he was improving. Some day I shall meet him at a London crossing and I’ll ask him the third singular of a French imperfect verb and he will answer wrong.

If the men were stupid, the officers were not much better. I had a Cambridge man for German once. The Secretary was in the room during the lesson and she said to me afterwards, ‘He’s not clever, is he?’

‘No,’ I returned. ‘Stupid as they make them.’

‘I thought that,’ she heaved a sigh of relief. ‘But he was at Cambridge?’

‘Ah well, he’s been in the Army since.’

But he wanted a German lesson every single day and he wanted it all by himself. Most of the officers did that. It never was convenient for two of them to come together even if they were at the same stage and worked at the same books. I had a regular court of RTOs from all the Area for German, and all came separately. Most useful friends they were. One time a very ungainly, red-headed Corporal on a motor bicycle presented himself and asked me for a German lesson. Thinking he was the usual type, I took him in and set out the books. But there was a twinkle in his eye.

‘You were up for the last May week, weren’t you?’ he said quietly – not at all as he had spoken before.

I jumped. ‘May week?’ I stammered.

‘I was at Queens’ myself – I knew you by sight at Newnham.’

He was clever, was the red-headed Corporal, and our German lessons were a joy. But they sent him up to Cologne – too soon.

What did the men think of it all – of England and of France? I asked them once to write an essay on what they thought of England. These were mostly men who, at home, spend half their lives threatening to strike. But the essays, though ill-expressed, sounded one note with the utmost clearness. There was no country in the world like England. It was not her villages or her Government or the white cliffs of Dover that they wrote of – not they. And they put no superlatives at all. But they chose out two points, in the main, on which she was unquestionably and indubitably ahead of all other nations and most particularly of France. These were – not what you might have thought – her railways and her sanitation. Of the first they appeared to think that French people travelled either in lace-upholstered carriages or in cattle trucks – both bad for different reasons – and that in either case, they put by preference a goods train on in front to keep down the speed. And they one and all objected to ‘E-tatt’, as they called it, being written everywhere. Why couldn’t they have something sensible, like L&NW?

As for sanitation, they stated briefly, France had none.

‘France is, was, and always will be a second-rate country,’ began one essay, with downright emphasis, and it was what they all thought. There was one thing they mentioned as particularly bad in France – not a thing that a Frenchman would think of – France’s cruelty to animals. Scarcely one essay left that out.

But if, in most cases, the men were stupid in learning, they were thoughtful beyond measure in their care of us. If, on a dark night, I was later than usual in leaving School, I need not be alarmed. If an officer was not escorting me, one or two of the men who had just left, would slip out of the darkness to take me safely home. They had been waiting to see that I did not go alone.

Of all the troops I ever taught, the Scotch troops were the cleverest. I was proud of my Glasgow Highlanders and of their volleys of questions. But I was not alone in my pride. The Chief of another Base came to see me one day. He was an Englishman too. ‘I wish you would come through and see us,’ he said to me. ‘We have the Argyll & Sutherlands with us. There isn’t a battalion in France to touch them for Education.’ One up for Scotland.

And again, if I was visiting a camp, however rough, no matter when I went, early or late, they never failed to present me with a cup of tea. When they knew I was coming, the tea was nicely served and biscuits with it, but I have drunk tea out of a tin mug in a little Hut kitchen with nothing in it but wooden boxes. However raw the troops, they always thought of tea.

One more story and I have done. It was one Sunday morning at Varengeville, a hamlet on the very fringe of our Area. I had walked there with some French people and we went into the only inn in the place for our midday meal. No English troops were camping there, but I heard English voices as I went in. One was raised in song – cheerful but uproarious. In the parlour of the inn stood
Monsieur
and
Madame
, their children, the
bonne
and several of their neighbours, laughing at and trying to eject a very drunk soldier who was endeavouring to persuade them to dance, and incidentally to give himself more wine. A comrade, less drunk, supported his endeavours. It was some minutes after my entrance before they caught sight of me. My French friends, amused too, sat down on the wooden bench beside me. At length, in the rather scornful hilarity, the drunk soldier realised that fresh company had come in. He turned and saw – my uniform. In a moment his song ceased. His face, I saw, was cut and bruised, as if he had been fighting or fallen. But he wore the Mons Star ribbon. There was a general hush of expectancy to see what he would do next. He swayed unsteadily on his feet, but his eyes were steady enough on my uniform. He stumbled up to me. The eyes of all the room were on us now – curious, half-contemptuous eyes. He saluted.

‘Beg pardon, Miss – I didn’ see as ’ow you were there.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said cheerily getting up. ‘You were at Mons weren’t you?’

He paused. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. At last he got it out. ‘Will yer shake ’ands, Miss?’ He proffered a very dirty hand.

‘Shake hands, rather,’ I said quickly, ‘with a Mons man.’

‘I’m not quite myself just now, Miss – ’ad a drop too much, I’ve ’ad, but I’ll go out and not be a’disturbin’ of you, Miss.’