SOUTH

IN the morning we began our long trek South. We did not know our destination, nor the time we were to spend on our journey; as company officers it was enough for us to know the length of the day's march and where we were to sleep that night. For some reason unexplained to us, we marched through the heat of the June day, and after seven months of trench warfare we found the early stages troublesome until our feet were hardened. We spent a night at Mervilie, a town of good billets, and then two nights at a village called Gonnehem, a village rescued from oblivion by two memories, one of its fine old church, the other of its womenfolk-the dirtiest slatterns we had seen in France. Then up to the hills at Auchel, a mining village, with its men in blue smocks and leather hats, a long straggling street of indeterminate beginning and end.

After so many months in the plain it was good to stand on a hill. For fourteen days we had been out of the trenches, clean and comfortable;

body and mind were quickening again, early summer in the land, and a late spring inside us. The marching in good air was leaving its mark On US all, and we were gaining a release from the humiliating burden of mud that had clogged our pores and had turned our thoughts into its own greyness. We walked with a swing, we sang on the march; men began to laugh, to argue and even to quarrel, a sure sign of recovery from the torpor of winter. We were going into a battle, true enough, from which few of us could hope to return, but at the moment we were many miles from war, and the hedges were rich with dog-rose and honeysuckle; we were seeing the old flowers in new country.

This emancipation brought with it a rekindling of our self-respect, showing itself in a more upright bearing, and in a shedding of the clod-hopping, farm labourers' shuffle of the feet, the last physical relic of the tyranny of mud. A month ago the Company was a disintegrated body of men, tired and dull, dragging the day into the night and the night into the day, with a horizon bounded on all sides by that damnable, evil-smelling and unnatural soil. Now we were above ground, welded into a free-moving unit, handling its arms with its old vigour and precision, no longer 'climbing up the rifle to the slope'. It was strangely easy to forget that this revival would be of short duration to most of us.

On our way out of Floringhem we found ourselves in a country of downs and wooded hills, small streams and high-hedged lanes-Hampshire again, and our first meeting with beauty in France. At one of our halts the officers were standing in a group in the road, smoking and talking, when the second-in-command of the battalion rode up to join us. After some desultory conversation about our last billets, he turned to me and said, 'By the way, I hear that you are going to another Brigade to be trained as a Staff Officer-many congratulations!' With this he rode away.

To me, these were words of liberation, they opened the door of my prison. Seven months of shelling, of mud, discomfort, and the deadening, un-escapable routine of trench life, months of watching other men being killed and maimed, of dry-mouthed fear and racking fatigue; a time of waiting for the end, hoping that the end might be a bruising and not a sudden drop into darkness. All this weight of disharmony ran above one never-ceasing pedal note of 'No infantry officer can survive this war unless he is happily wounded.' Until this background is etched into the mind with the acid of experience, it is not possible to understand the full Import of this message. For me, life had suddenly changed direction. Comparative safety, interesting work, a reasonable chance of survival without mutilation, and the elation that accompanied the knowledge that someone had chosen me to do something; the possibility of leave and of promotion, more pay and a richer housekeeping for my wife-this was the new country upon which I gazed through the suddenly opened door of my prison. A deep-lying thankfulness permeated the whole of my being, gaining strength from the knowledge that soon, very soon, the news would release some of the burden of anxiety that pressed down into a uniform greyness the days and nights of one whose life was linked to mine, who lived in daily dread of that baleful telegram from the War Office. A mad impulse came over me, not strange to one born in the mountains, to build a cairn on the roadside, marking the spot where I heard these words of freedom, but a whistle blew, and the battalion resumed the march down South. I was back in my Company, but with a difference.

When the mind has run riot for a few hours over the prospect of release and opportunity, there comes a certain pleasure in dwelling upon the greyer side of the picture. I was to go to another brigade as a stranger, possibly unwanted and half-suspected, to live day by day with a General, unable to conceal my ignorance, liable to be found out in a short space of time and returned to my battalion in disgrace. In a few days I would be turning my back on 'C' Company, on the men I lived with and loved, leaving them a little while before their great hour of trial, deserting them, in fact. So it was ordained, and for my betterment; I was to stand my trial, with no influence or authority over my judges, merely an infantry captain, temporary, with no relations or friends in high places, a man of no importance to powers military or civil. The reward of success was advancement in the army, and enough pay to lift me clear of the margin of anxiety here and at home; failure meant a reversion to the trenches, so there must be no tottering.

Several days passed before I received orders to go, days of some anxiety lest there should be a hitch in this fateful affair, but days of pleasant marching in country lanes, of long evenings in good billets in villages far removed from contact with the strident clash of war. The inhabitants of the cleanly kept cottages lived a life into which we could not enter. Our coming roused an excitement that died away with our going, and we never saw them at their daily struggle to prevent the army's intrusion from growing into an occupation. Farms, houses and inns undamaged by shell-fire suggested a prosperity and a strength alien to the provinces further North and East, but as we never penetrated into any intimacy with the villagers, we could not tell how they were faring.

My arrival at Brigade Headquarters created no stir. I had walked to the Château at Chelers, leaving my servant to bring my kit in the battalion cart. Never before had I entered a château, and there was a thrill in the thought of living in such magnificence. It was a newish house, standing in a small park, clean and white in the hot sunshine of June, decorated with a turret at every possible corner, and dominating the small village at its feet. It was half withdrawn from sight, yet eager not to be overlooked and ignored.

I met a soldier and asked him if this were the Brigade Headquarters, and I was somewhat taken aback when he said that it was not; it was the General's billet, and the Brigade office was in the small house near the church. I turned back, consoling myself for the loss of this magnificence by the confident hope that as the Brigade staff would be well housed, I should find myself in a good billet, even though it were not a château.

I entered the Brigade office and made myself known to an elderly Major sitting down at a table covered with papers. He said that the Brigade Major was on leave, and that he was merely deputizing for him; the Staff Captain would be in shortly and would find me a billet. When the Staff Captain arrived he extinguished all my expectations of comfort and dignity by announcing that I could sleep in a bell tent in the garden, as there was no billet to be had in the village. A little later we all walked to the château for tea, and I was introduced to the Brigadier. He said little, but whenever I looked in his direction I met his eye, and I felt that I was being assessed and valued. He was some sixty years of age, physically strong, with a hard and clear face, and the bearing of a man who has lived wisely. In the jargon of the day, he was a 'dug-out', a retired regular officer who had rejoined the army on the outbreak of war. The gossip of my old Brigade described him as a glutton for work, somewhat snappy in the early morning, sensible, and willing to listen even to a subaltern. At table he spoke as a man rank, and as my lack of horsemanship made essential if I were not to advertise my deficiencies.

I have no illusions whatever about my appearance on this occasion, but I take pride in having kept my seat. We rushed down the banks of sunken roads, and rushed up the other side, to the great danger of my nose; we jumped over trenches, and added to all my anxiety about my equilibrium was the determined effort to keep behind the General. When all was over and we reached Brigade Headquarters, the General turned to me and said, with a smile in his eyes:

'Next time I ask you whether you can do a thing, say so outright if you cannot.'

I answered timidly that, at any rate, I had not fallen off.

'No, but why you did not is more than I can say... . How much have you ridden?'

'This is the second time in my life I have ridden a horse, sir,' I replied.

'Good Lord, you might have broken your neck . . . don't do things like that again.'

When the day is divided between an attempt to conceal ignorance of the things that are common knowledge to your colleagues, and a struggle to acquire familiarity in unobtrusive fashion, dreading to make lack of learning, and the desire to learn, equally a source of embarrassment to others, the day passes quickly enough. I cannot say that I was taught to do anything, but there were ample opportunities for imitating others in what they did, and if questions were asked with a due regard for the niceties of time and place, they were answered. More than this could not be expected of men who worked hard enough, but had little gift or inducement to explain their daily tasks. With such men, all the world over, there is more to be earned from their negations than from their assertions.

To my fresh eye, the work was divisible into two categories - issuing orders, and seeing that those orders were carried out. In the nature of things, I had little to do with issuing orders, but enquiry into their fate and reminder of their existence seemed to involve a considerable running about. And here, as everywhere in the army, there was a fresh vocabulary to learn, a new craft jargon, another weapon of verbal equipment. The Staff Captain's activities were multifarious, and at first all but incomprehensible owing to my ignorance of the language. There was, and presumably still exists, a scheme of words and phrases that may be called a verbal shorthand for dealing on paper with matters as diverse as a court martial and a shortage of incinerators, an Esperanto of the army. How it arose is to me a mystery, but I can only surmise that someone once made an index, in alphabetical order, of all the commodities and occasions involved in war, and that the descriptive phrase in this index became a sacred title to be used henceforth and for ever in all writings. There is much to be said for the practice, as for a universal language, and the eye soon accustoms itself to 'Waggons, G.S.'. After a few weeks of army shopkeeping, the G.S. becomes a part of the waggon as integral as its wheels.

The British Army is, in some respects, an army of brothers, and every man above the rank of private is his brother's keeper. Every commander must know what his command is doing at the moment, and his superior officers must know what it did yesterday, and what it intends to do to-morrow. This concern, this anxiety, and interest, minute and unceasing, are as characteristic of the British Army as their non-existence is typical of other armies. It can be harassing, and it often is, but it is omnipresent throughout the hierarchy of the command and the staff. A soldier, short of some article of equipment, mental or material, is a matter of concern to many functionaries far removed from contact with him. Private Smith, in a fit of temper, may by his delinquencies set in motion a long chain of Captains, Majors, Colonels and Generals, further removed from him geographically as they rise in rank, but all in some way concerned with his destiny.