departures. The officers of a whole Division - the raw cuts of their tent-circles lie still unhealed on the links - dined there by scores; mothers and relatives came down from the uttermost parts of Scotland for a last look at their boys, and found beds goodness knows where: very quiet little weddings, too, set out from its doors to the church opposite. The Division went away a century of weeks ago by the road that the mule-battery took. Many of the civilians who pocketed the wills signed and witnessed in the smoking-room are full-blown executors now; some of the brides are widows.
And it is not nice to remember that when the hotel was so filled that not even another pleading mother could be given a place in which to lie down and have her cry out - not at all nice to remember that it never occurred to any of the comfortable people in the large but sparsely inhabited houses around that they might have offered a night’s lodging, even to an unintroduced stranger.
Greatheart and Christiana
There were hospitals up the road preparing and being prepared for the Indian wounded. In one of these lay a man of, say, a Biluch regiment, sorely hit. Word had come from his colonel in France to the colonel’s wife in England that she should seek till she found that very man and got news from his very mouth - news to send to his family and village. She found him at last, and he was very bewildered to see her there, because he had left her and her child on the verandah of the bungalow, long and long ago, when he and his colonel and the regiment went down to take ship for the war. How had she come? Who had guarded her during her train-journey of so many days? And, above all, how had the baba endured that sea which caused strong men to collapse? Not till all these matters had been cleared up in fullest detail did Greatheart on his cot permit his colonel’s wife to waste one word on his own insignificant concerns. And that she should have wept filled him with real trouble. Truly, this is the war of Our Raj!
VI. Territorial Battalions
To excuse oneself to oneself is human:
but to excuse oneself to one’s children is Hell.
Arabic Proverb.
Billeted troops are difficult to get at, There are thousands of them in a little old town by the side of an even older park up the London Road, but to find a particular battalion is like ferreting unstopped burrows.
The Umpty-Umpth, were you looking for? said a private in charge of a side-car, We’re the Eenty-Eenth. Only came in last week, I’ve never seen this place before. It’s pretty. Hold on! There’s a postman. He’ll know.
He, too, was in khaki, bowed between mail- bags, and his accent was of a far and coaly county. Im none too sure, said he, but I think I saw–Here a third man cut in. Yons t battalion, marchin into t park now. Roon ! Happen thall catch em.
They turned out to be Territorials with a history behind them; but that I didn’t know till later; and their band and cyclists. Very polite were those rear-rank cyclists - who pushed their loaded machines with one vast hand apiece.
They were strangers, they said. They had only come here a few days ago. But they knew the South well. They had been in Gloucestershire, which was a very nice southern place.
Then their battalion, I hazarded, was of northern extraction ?
They admitted that I might go as far as that; their speech betraying their native town at every rich word.
Huddersfield, of course? said, to make them out with it.
Bolton, said one at last. Being in uniform the pitman could not destroy the impertinent civilian.
Ah, Bolton! I returned. All cotton, aren’t you?
Some coal, he answered gravely. There is notorious rivalry twixt coal and cotton in Bolton, but I wanted to see him practise the self-control that the Army is always teaching.
As I have said, he and his companion were most polite, but the total of their information, boiled and peeled, was that they had just come from Bolton way; might at any moment be sent somewhere else, and they liked Gloucestershire in the south. A spy could not have learned much less.
The battalion halted, and moved off by com- panies for further evolutions. One could see they were more than used to drill and arms; a hardened, thick-necked, thin-flanked, deep-chested lot, dealt with quite faithfully by their sergeants, and alto- gether abreast of their work. Why, then, this reticence? What had they to be ashamed of, these big Bolton folk without an address? Where was their orderly-room?
There were manyorderly-rooms in the little old town, most of them in bye-lanes less than one car wide. I found what I wanted, and this was north- country all over - a private who volunteered to steer me to headquarters through the tricky southern streets. He was communicative, and told me a good deal about typhoid-inoculation and musketry practice, which accounted for only six companies being on parade. But surely they could not have been ashamed of that.
Guarding a Railway
I unearthed their skeleton at last in a peaceful, gracious five-hundred-year-old house that looked on to lawns and cut hedges bounded by age-old red brick walls - such a perfumed and dreaming place as one would choose for the setting of some even-pulsed English love-tale of the days before the war.
Officers were billeted in the low-ceiled, shiny- floored rooms full of books and flowers.
And now, I asked, when I had told the tale of the uncommunicative cyclist, what is the matter with your battalion?
They laughed cruelly at me. Matter! said they. We’re just off three months of guarding railways. After that a man wouldnt trust his own mother. You dont mean to say our cyclists let you know where we’ve come from last?
No, they didn’t, I replied. That was what worried me. I assumed you’d all committed murders, and had been sent here to live it down.
Then they told me what guarding a line really means. How men wake and walk, with only express troop-trains to keep them company, all the night long on windy embankments or under still more windy bridges; how they sleep behind three sleepers up-ended or a bit of tin, or, if they are lucky, in a platelayer’s hut; how their food comes to them slopping across the square-headed ties that lie in wait to twist a man’s ankle after dark; how they stand in blown coal-dust of goods-yards trying to watch five lines of trucks at once; how fools of all classes pester the lonely pickets, whose orders are to hold up motors for inquiry, and then write silly letters to the War Office about it. How nothing ever happens through the long weeks but infallibly would if the patrols were taken off. And they had one refreshing story of a workman who at six in the morning, which is no auspicious hour to jest with Lancashire, took a short cut to his work by ducking under some goods-wagons, and when challenged by the sentry replied, posturing on all fours, Boo, Im a German! Whereat the upright sentry fired, unfortunately missed him, and then gave him the butt across his ass’s head, so that his humour, and very nearly his life, terminated. After which the sentry was seldom seen to smile, but frequently heard to murmur, Ah should hev slipped t’ baggonet into him.
Pride and Prejudice:
So you see, said the officers in conclusion, you mustn’t be surprised that our men wouldn’t tell you much.
I begin to see, I said. How many of you are coal and how many cotton?
