water and firewood, and where So-and-so had hid the curry-comb.
Talking of cookery, the orthodox men have been rather put out by English visitors who come to the cook-houses and stare directly at the food while it is being prepared. Sensible men do not object to this, because they know that these Englishmen have no evil intention nor any evil eye; but sometimes a narrow-souled purist (toothache or liver makes a man painfully religious) will �spy strangers� and insist on the strict letter of the law, and then every one who wishes to be orthodox must agree with him - on an empty stomach, too - and wait till a fresh mess has been cooked. This is taklif - a burden - for where the intention is good and war is afoot much can and should be overlooked. Moreover, this war is not like any other war. It is a war of our Raj � �everybody’s war,� as they say in the bazaars. And that is another reason why it does not matter if an Englishman stares at one’s food. This I gathered in small pieces after watering time when the mules had filed up to the troughs in the twilight, hundreds of them, and the drivers grew discursive on the way to the lines.
The last I saw of them was in the early cold morning, all in marching order, jinking and jingling down a road through woods.
�Where are you going?�
�God knows!�
The Inn of Good-Byes
It might have been for exercise merely, or it might be down to the sea and away to the front for the battle of �Our Raj�. The quiet hotel where people sit together and talk in earnest strained pairs is well used to such 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.
�I�m none too sure,� said he, �but I think I saw– �
Here a third man cut in.
�Yon�s t� battalion, marchin� into t� park now. Roon ! Happen tha�ll 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?�
