War Classics

by Flora Johnston

  Set free at last, I discovered that all my French had deserted me. ‘There’s nobody here like me,’ I said forlornly to a beautiful RTO [Railway Transport Officer] behind a red wicket window.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he replied briskly – taking me for a motor driver, ‘there’s one.’

  A remarkably capable khaki damsel advanced upon me. ‘Sorry I can’t take you in my car,’ she remarked. ‘I’m full up. Where’s your luggage?’

  ‘In the boat,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Pierre,’ she called, and a fat blue-bloused person dived foremost into the hold. If they’d stowed my luggage as far down as they’d stowed me, he might be hours I felt. ‘There’s a tram here will take you to the station,’ she went on, ‘and you’ll just catch the Paris express. Oh! That’s right Pierre.’ The tram lady grabbed me by the shoulder, my luggage landed after me with a resounding thump, and alone of the Vera’s passengers, I was off. So much for looking helpless and solitary.

  ‘J’ignore tout,’ I said in distress to the conductress – it was all the French I could muster.

  ‘Mais oui,’ came the sympathetic reply, ‘C’est comme tous les anglais; c’est toujours comme ça.’

  [‘I don’t know anything’ … ‘Well, yes’ … ‘Like all the English; it’s always like that.’]

  It was well meant, of course, but not, I felt, complimentary to the country I was leaving. However, it made her all the more attentive to me. ‘My three brothers I have lost,’ her voice came placidly, ‘My husband he fight. I work, you work – it is like that.’ She seemed like the spirit of France as she stood there stoically tinkling her bell and carrying on and viewing with compassionate amusement such amateurs as me. I left her with a kind smile in her eyes, as an army of small boys surrounded me and my luggage at the station. Providentially I knew where I was going and they managed the rest. Except for proffering my bread card to the ticket collector, I made no more mistakes and found myself aboard the Paris express with orders to change at Rouen. It was like France to have the white lace still on the carriages and how comfortable and roomy the carriages were! No crowding and strap-hanging as we had in England! Normandy looked fair and peaceful – the farms well-tilled, the orchards rosy in the crisp, clear air.

  All too soon we were at Rouen and in some trepidation, I descended.

  My own countrymen, in masses, banked up the platform, and in smiling, welcoming masses too. I spoke to an air corporal near me. ‘Your train will be that one over there, miss,’ pointing to an engine steaming and puffing on one of the side lines outside the station. ‘Better jump in before it comes to the platform.’

  I stared at it aghast. A whole vista of railway lines lay between me and it. Trains were entering and leaving everywhere. ‘But I can’t cross these lines,’ I stammered, thinking of our orthodox English Railways and their views on the matter.

  ‘You’d better,’ he returned inflexibly.

  I had an inspiration. ‘You come with me,’ I suggested, though how that would make the proceeding safer, I did not reason out. It certainly took him by surprise, but in a moment he was down on the rails and I was with him. I thought of nothing but him as we crossed miles of rails. ‘You get in here,’ he commanded. It was impossibly high, but he was not to be baffled now. With one hand he opened the door and with the other he swung me up and in – head foremost – amidst a group of respectable English ladies en route for Dieppe. Collecting myself, I waved a farewell to him from the window, and turned to survey my companions. They had levelled a frozen stare at me of some moments’ duration, but the stare, I found, was not caused by the manner of my entrance – which apparently was quite an ordinary one in France – but was due rather to my now dishevelled appearance. I was left to think mournfully of the Sergeant’s parting advice always to appear neat and tidily dressed, as the train gradually approached Dieppe. I was very excited at the arrival. Beyond the stare, the English ladies had betrayed no sort of interest in me. Who would meet me? Nobody did, but the passport official took charge of me. He commandeered the English ladies to their surprise and told them where to set me down. The sea was breaking in clear, green waves – the clearest green you ever saw – as we drew up facing it, at the door of the Headquarters. I turned to look at it – the only thing I knew – before I went in to my work.

  5

  Life at a base – who wants to learn?

  My first thought was – how pretty the Base is! – my second, how far away from the line, where I longed to be. Headquarters made me feel as if I had plunged into the ocean itself off the deep end, as the Army brother would say. A babel of tongues went on all around me – Australian loudest of all, and most of the speakers greeted one another by their Christian names – across the whole distance of the room. ‘Nobody expected you by this train,’ my guide said in a temporary lull. ‘I don’t know how you could have caught the connection at Rouen. Nobody has ever done it before.’ They had not met my Corporal then, I reflected. ‘You don’t really belong here,’ she confided again presently. ‘This,’ – with an air of dramatic importance – ‘is the Headquarters for France. You go to the local Headquarters. Somebody will take you there directly after lunch.’

  I felt remarkably cheered. College-bred as I was, I did not quite see how I could ever fit in with this menagerie. However, it’s a habit one easily acquired in the Army.

  ‘I’m going to Paris this afternoon,’ said my other neighbour, helping himself loudly to coffee, ‘looks like peace in the Daily Mail. I’m for Place de la Concorde on Peace night.’

  ‘Take me! Me too!’ came in chorus from all quarters of the room.

  ‘I should love to go to Paris,’ I said quickly.

  My guide looked coldly at me. ‘You can’t get there without a special military permit – you can’t get anywhere in fact.’

  ‘How do you get, old boy?’ queried one more quietly than the rest.

  ‘White pass – on business,’ came the curt reply, with a wink to help it out.

  ‘He is one of the chiefs,’ concluded my guide. ‘His car can go anywhere.’ I made a mental note that it was desirable to cultivate chiefs with white passes, if I wanted to see life. This one paid not the slightest attention to me – next-door neighbour and newcomer though I was – so I gave him up.

  In a few minutes I was on my way along the sea front to the lesser glory of the local headquarters, my new home. In happier days an artist from Paris had built it for himself, with its wide windows looking far across the English Channel and its red roof snugly sheltered by warm wooden gables. He had left his tapestries and his old Norman china for us, plus the minimum of furniture and that of a highly artistic and rather uncomfortable kind.1 We called it ‘The School’ out of compliment to the work we did in it and our motto was ‘We live and learn.’ Never was a truer device for the next – all too short – six months we had the luck to stay in it. What a merry life it was and what a gay one, and what strange wisdom we learned in the ‘best school of all’.

  The Chief, tall, dark with twinkling brown eyes, awaited me in his study.2 ‘So glad you have come,’ he remarked to me over a litter of papers on his desk. ‘You are the star turn allotted to this area. I understand you are capable of teaching up to the Greats standard in Oxford. I shall put it in Base Routine Orders straight away. English and French I suppose, up to any standard you like.’

  By this time the 24-hours’ journey, the cross-questionings and the lunch were beginning to take effect on me, and I wanted nothing but sleep, and up to now nobody had ever mentioned where I was going to do that. Perhaps it was like London, I reflected, and it hadn’t occurred to anyone I would need to. Anyway, the recital of my qualifications now ‘put the lid on!’ I conjured up a vision of rows and rows of troops, all athirst for knowledge and finding out what a fraud I was. But the Chief was finishing. ‘Miss Mordaunt will take you now to the Coq d’Or. I have engaged a room for you there.’

  The Lady of the Lovely Hair – for so we always called her – was before me. Show
ers and showers of golden hair neatly tucked away, keen blue eyes, and capability in every inch of her figure, characterised Miss Mordaunt. Ability to get what she wanted under every possible circumstance, was one of her lesser charms. The landlady of the Coq d’Or was firm and uncompromising. ‘Pas d’eau chaude. Que voulez-vous? C’est la guerre.’ [‘There’s no hot water. What do you want? There’s a war on.’]

  I began to think we should be beaten. But not so Miss Mordaunt. ‘Get into bed,’ she said. ‘I have a Tommy cooker and we’ll get a hot-water bottle straight away.’3 I needed no second bidding and, grimy, tired, travel worn, anything but a star turn, I fell sound asleep with Miss Mordaunt’s hot-water bottle clasped in my arms. Time and again since then it has been her fate to find me ‘down and out’ as on that first day and to send me straight to bed. Across the world as she is today, I doubt it never can happen again.

  And then work began in real earnest. At least, it would have, if within a week the Armistice had not stepped in. I knew it first by the bonne bursting into my bedroom with the shrill cry ‘1870 is avenged!’ The tumult in the street outside was an echo of her words. A statue of France with a broken sword stood there down in the public square below me, in memory of 1870, and round it all day long surged cheering crowds.4 The statue itself was smothered in flowers, November though it was. Only the figure of France could be seen standing breast high in a sea of roses. ‘Les voilà, Mlle,’ went on Germaine. ‘Even the English officers are dancing.’ They were singing and marching too in serried rows down the Grande Rue.

  We saw no poilus but French marines, with that odd red hackle in their caps, walked arm in arm with Belgian troops. From the pavement stolid groups of Chinese, cabbage in hand, surveyed them curiously. A dark French Senegalese soldier from the Military Hospital on the Plage jogged past a Portuguese – worst behaved of all the Allies and sent here to be shipped home as soon as ever occasion afforded.5

  ‘Aux armes, citoyens,’ they played over and over again and I had hardly got over the marvel of the ‘Marseillaise’ being played for ‘peace’ when, faint and halting at first, but more confidently as it went on, the strains of ‘Tipperary’ rose to my ears. They had not played it much since 1914, but it was the first thing they thought of today. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary, it’s a long way to go.’ The Band went on – a French band – playing ‘Tipperary’. But it was useless. If the ‘Marseillaise’ failed to suggest peace, ‘Tipperary’ called up only 1914 – the August days of it. All day long the surging crowds cheered round the statue. 1870 was avenged.

  At the School alone, there was quietness. The roll call of the classes fell away by one half on Armistice night and hardly ever afterwards recovered. Late in the afternoon I went into the huts to see the men and how they took it. The Base Commandant had sent round word to close the canteens if we wished, as the men might be drunk. But we did not wish. On that night of all nights every man, drunk or sober, was to find a welcome there.

  When I went in, they were still sober and the hut was packed to the door. Most of them were singing and some few laughing and talking. Would you like to know what they sang? No ‘Rule Britannia’ or ‘God Save The King’ – English soldiers rarely sing either unless they are bidden. No – it was a chorus we were to hear every day for the next six months, with varying emphasis – ‘When do we go home?’, each word punctuated by thumps of mugs on tables, and the last word raised the roof.

  At night they were many of them drunk, and the sober ones, with thoughts of the punctilious WAACs [Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps] with whom they were dancing, were for turning the drunks out.6 ‘No, no,’ said the Hut leader firmly, ‘let the drunks dance by themselves in this corner.’ So, sometimes three together, sometimes the orthodox two, sometimes one, the drunks danced merrily in their corner; whenever one, well meaning but nothing more, lurched out to grab a WAAC, he was hastily but tenderly shepherded back by a stronger comrade.

  Outside bells blared; flags flew; bands played; at every window in the Grande Rue faces looked out, laughing, crying. In the distance the ‘Marseillaise’ came rolling down and its echo ‘It’s – a – long – way – to – go.’

  I stole into the Cathedral. Over the altar hung our flags, quiet and still. There was no need to wave them now. Utter quietness here and one spot of light only. In the chapel at my side lay the empty tomb and the marble watchers beside it. The figure of the risen Christ was outlined and ringed with light. Never have I seen so many candles ablaze together. Beneath Him in the darkness knelt clusters of black-robed women. Peace had come.

  Down by the shore the water was quiet. If only there had been a destroyer on that clear green sea, I could have believed that peace had come. But having lived for four years beside the Grand Fleet, I found it hard to believe that anything great could happen and the Navy not be there. It was Hamlet without the Prince.

  Still, here we were at Peace, and the Army had to be taught until it went home. More than ever now as its proper work was done. But the Army wanted home straight away and sooner if possible. We held a council of war. At present we had only Base Troops and when Demobilisation came, these would soon have their hands full. Also, their heads were none of the best, at any time, or they would not have been at the Base. So our thoughts flew ahead. Would we get our chance with the fighting troops in the Forward Armies? They were the goal of all our hopes – night after night I went to bed and dreamt I had really met them. Well, meet them I did eventually – but not to teach. To flirt with, yes, for whirlwind weekends, and nobody in the world ever flirted quite so well as they did, and then, standing on the pier with unresponsive France in the background, I waved them off to Blighty. Sic transit Gloria Mundi.

  In the meantime, whom could we teach? No one was forced to come to us except from a few camps in the area, where the Commanding Officers, possessed by a zeal for education, thought it desirable to send their men down in lorries to classes as a parade. From reasons hardly the same as those of their Commanders, the men too thought this a capital plan! First of all it exempted them – which was in itself a benefit – from a severe Physical Exercise Parade; secondly it gave them an enjoyable motor excursion from the desolation of the mud-flat that was their camp to the bliss of a real live Base; and thirdly it gave them a whole hour at their own sweet wills in that Base. It was true that for one hour, too, they had to sit on benches before an Instructor at ‘School’ and profess a desire to be taught something, but even that was not without its entertaining moments.

  Well do I remember being sent to find out what one set wanted to learn. ‘I wants to write a letter, Miss,’ began Private Nobbs, a middle-aged man of disapproving aspect.

  ‘But surely you can do that already?’ I returned in surprise.

  ‘No, Miss – that ’ere little writin’ I means – same as likes of you puts and ’ard to read like – not them big letters same as mine.’

  This somewhat daunted me, it being the only compliment my handwriting has ever extracted, but outwardly I preserved a business-like calm. ‘Writing class,’ I jotted down. ‘Report to the Chief at the end of the hour.’ Alas for my compliment! At the end of the hour Private Nobbs, seeing the Chief’s handwriting – even more illegible than my own – decided he would prefer to model himself on that. I tremble to think what stage of development his calligraphy may now have reached, for he went for the writing lessons as, had he only been younger, he would have gone for the Boche.

  Private Wooley, his neighbour, was a very superior person. ‘I wants English literature,’ he said haughtily.

  I took a deep breath. ‘Yes?’ I said enquiringly, balancing my pencil in my fingers.

  ‘For to be a reporter-like to them newspapers,’ he went on.

  I thought of Lord Northcliffe and waited expectantly.7

  ‘I wants to write police reports – can make a good bit o’ money that way.’ News of the World – I made a note. I had no experience of writing police reports myself – it not being included by the University of Ed
inburgh in their curriculum of English literature – but I knew the kind of thing this man wanted.

  ‘Write an account of a drowning accident for me,’ I said promptly and passed on to the next.

  He was an old soldier – served his time in the regular Army long years before the War and was really too old to have been sent even to a Base. Still he was there. He began the conversation. ‘You be the fourth young lady we’ve ’ad, Miss,’ he said encouragingly, ‘and all of ’em larning their job.’ This was somewhat dismaying, but I reflected that all troops learned French as a matter of course and that was probably how he had had four of us.

  ‘And which of them do you like best?’ I questioned, ignoring the second half of his remark.

  But he was not to be caught. Quick as a shot came the answer, ‘We allus likes the last ’un best, Miss,’ which, I think, under the circumstances, could not have been bettered.

  ‘And what do you want to learn?’ I pursued.

  ‘Not partickler, Miss,’ he replied amiably, ‘anythink you likes.’ Being of the old Army he, like his superiors, did not hold with Education, but it gave him an hour at the Base, so he came.

  A bespectacled youth, converted by the war, wanted to learn the Greek Testament although he could not even ask for it grammatically; a good many wanted shorthand – one man quite genuinely asked for sewing – but the general demand was for anything that would pay after the war. As we styled it in our official communications, the demand was ‘vocational’.

  One night the corporal in charge of one of these lorries came to me in great distress. I gathered that he had arrived duly at ‘School’ at the appointed hour; it was a dark night and he was sitting beside the driver. When he got out to disembark his men, not one of them was there. ‘Started with me, Miss, they did, all of ’em. An’ to go a-wastin’ of your time like this,’ – he was speechless with indignation – ‘an’ givin’ me the slip too,’ he added sorrowfully. ‘I’ll dish ’em – I will, when I gets ’em back.’