For the first time since coming to France, I felt as if I were at last treading in the footsteps of the War. Even the rapatriés had not brought it as near as this. The long wards were many of them deserted – increasing the feeling of desolation. Yet only a few short months before, the Boche had been within twenty miles, the Hospital was packed up, ready to go at a moment’s notice, and the engines in the station below were waiting with full steam up.
A group of nurses were coming towards me. ‘Which is the way to the military cemetery?’ I asked one of them as she passed.
Instantly she corrected me. ‘You want to know where the boys are?’ she said quickly, putting it in the way she knew.
They were not far away it seemed. On the edge of the little brown town was an open field, with a forest of crosses of the same brown wood. They were the first I had seen, and I am always glad that it was in such a beautiful place I saw them. Nothing but Stevenson’s winds ‘austere and pure’ and the call of the seagull flying from a land they had known, and the beat of the waves from a sea that washed England too – home sounds, all of them, to the boys who hadn’t made back home. No one at all was there as I went down the lines of crosses. The boys slept two in a grave, sharing even in death, as they had shared so magnificently in life – one cross over both, with the double name. The American Army – characteristically – did not share.
After the first moment, a glance down the lines told where our own folks were. I had no feeling that they were really dead. The military lines, the ranks, the officers lying apart – all gave the impression of an Army asleep, but an Army still. That air of solemnity and pomp that somehow rebuffs one in a home cemetery, was absent here. There was nothing that was not natural and human and common to all of us. No smallest child would have been afraid to go to this cemetery. I think it was the absence of tombstones and inscriptions that did most to produce this effect. An inscription makes a person really dead. It is as conclusive as an obituary notice. It is the last word on him. But the last word had not been said over the boys who lay here.
Here they were from all over the world, and ranks, conditions and degrees, from nearly every regiment. In this one thing only they were alike. Wounded in the Somme, they had come here to die. It seemed hard that they should get to the water’s edge and yet have no strength to cross it – that they had to die almost within sight of home. The nearness of the sea and of the land that one could almost discern beyond it – these between them made these crosses tragic. In one corner, by themselves, stood rows of other crosses – Maltese crosses – not quite so simple. Under them lay the Boche prisoners captured at the Somme – who had died here too. Boche and American and Briton side by side now.
Slowly I turned away down the long steep road from the hill. Near the foot stood the house where I was staying – it had been used during the war to put up the relatives of the dangerously wounded.2 How often they must have climbed by this same road to the Hospital – the road of the ambulances, the road of the relatives, the road of the dead. For the road of the living lay over the water. The house was run by our own people – a Hut Lady in charge and two orderlies to help her. Though the house was lower than the Hospitals, it yet overlooked the French town, and my room – a corner one with a great bow window – looked over the roof far out to sea. When the thick blue curtains were drawn at night and I lay abed by candlelight, I began to dream of all the people who had spent days of distress here. The many rooms lay empty, for of course the war was over. A faint sound, growing louder, struck my ears and I stole to the window. Down the steep hillside crept a ladder of light – twinkling headlights and canvas bodies, as the last of all the convoys slipped down to the station. It went very slowly, but I waited till the last light flickered by and the hill was black again. Black now – for always; never again would it know the grim grey trail that day and night for four years had stolen up and down. I should have been glad, I know, that it was so. It was a bad thing well done with. But I was not. It seemed as if the last friend of all was leaving the boys in the field above. As long as English voices came and went and English bugles blew, they could not be as lonely as they were going to be now. I crept back to bed and fell asleep.
‘You didn’t hear any footsteps last night, did you?’ said the Hut Lady to me cheerfully next morning, over breakfast.
‘No,’ I said with interest, ‘Was there anyone?’
‘Only a Boche prisoner trying to escape,’ she went on, buttering her toast. ‘He got into the kitchen, somehow, the orderly says, and wandered about a bit. They’re looking for him in the garden now.’
‘What!’ I cried in alarm, ‘A Boche prisoner wandering about near my bedroom?’
‘It’s all right,’ she soothed me. ‘I’ve been up some time and they’ve ringed him round now. He must be either in the garden or the field next door to it. Ah! There’s a shout – they’ve got him now, I think.’
I hoped so devoutly. While I had been mooning about at my window, watching the ambulances, a Boche had been prowling about, near my room. If I’d only had a gun, I’d have shot him – piecemeal – if I could. So I thought but probably I should have been scared to death of him had I really set eyes on him.
She went to the window. ‘He’s wounded,’ she remarked, ‘and they’re taking him to hospital.’ I lost all further interest in him.
‘Would you like,’ she suggested later, ‘to go to Tanks today? It’s a nice walk and they’ll send us back in a car.’ But I didn’t want to see officers here – that side of life went with the Base – not with the Hospital.
‘I’m looking for Scotch soldiers,’ I told her hesitatingly, ‘and I’ve only the one day. There weren’t any in that cemetery I saw, and there must be some somewhere from the Somme.’
‘Lots,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s another cemetery down the hill, next door to the French one.’3
It was older and smaller and the big Calvaire [cross] from the French cemetery towered over it. But the crosses were the same and on some graves flowers had been planted. A soldier caretaker was digging in one corner. I spoke to him. ‘You want to see Captain So and So, Miss,’ as if I would meet him face to face. ‘He is just down here, the officers are all on the outside.’ He saluted and left me.
I thought at first they were all Scotch – it seemed like a Highland Brigade – but there were some others. Here was an English Brigadier side by side with a VAD – the only woman there. And here was I, Highland born, like so many of them, standing empty-handed in their midst. Surely I might bring some message from the hills that were theirs and mine! I had no heather and no tartan but it was winter and there were snowdrops in crowds. So I laid some snowdrops by every Highland cross, and by the officers some carnations, and I hoped the turf might lie as light.
‘There is some money over,’ said the Hut Lady to me later, ‘that the relatives gave me for fruit for the wounded. There aren’t any wounded now and the money might just as well go in rose trees for your graves. Would you like that?’ So rose trees grow on Highland graves nestling down to the English Channel. I hope they’ll blossom – red, red roses – for the love that went with them.
‘I can’t make out what you did on your weekend,’ said the Secretary to me with a puzzled air on my return. ‘No officers, no RTOs, no Tanks, and the Chief sent you for a holiday. It seems to have been cemeteries all the time.’
‘They weren’t real cemeteries – not like the kind at home,’ I told her, ‘and the men in them aren’t really dead. Anybody with them will tell you that. Besides,’ I finished, ‘they were my own people and we’re neither of us Highland for nothing.’ (The Secretary is a dear, but she is only English.)
Notes
1. Christina is describing the military hospital complex at Le Tréport. The luxurious Trianon Hotel was converted into a hospital, and numerous tents and huts were erected in the surrounding grounds.
2. The provision of hostels like this was one of the most significant yet little-remembered services provided
by the YMCA during the war. Relatives of the dangerously wounded were able to visit their loved ones free of charge.
3. These directions would take Christina to the original military cemetery at Le Tréport, beside the civilian cemetery, and here she would find her ‘Scotch soldiers’. The cemetery she had visited on the previous day was Mount Huon Cemetery, which lies high on the cliff tops. It was created beside the military hospital as the original cemetery could no longer cope with the vast numbers of deaths taking place here.
1 Christina as a baby, 1889.
2 Keith family group, c. 1905. William, Louise, Barrogill and Christina are standing. Katie and Peter are seated. Patricia is leaning against her mother, while Mildred sits on the floor and Julia on a chair. Edward has not yet been born.
3 Christina’s graduation.
4 The School in Dieppe. ‘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.’ (Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham YMCA/K/8/1/112)
5 Sub-directors of Education at Dieppe, 4 February 1919. Sir Graham Balfour is seated third from the left. Henry Brooke, Christina’s ‘Chief’, is second from the right in the back row. (Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham YMCA/ACC15 F1/7/4)
6 Hotel for relatives of the wounded, Le Tréport. ‘Near the foot stood the house where I was staying – it had been used during the war to put up the relatives of the dangerously wounded.’ (Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham YMCA/K/8/1/92)
7 General Headquarters, Dieppe. ‘I was installed in a beautiful big room on the first floor, directly opposite the Education Chief himself. My room possessed two windows facing the sea and a large stove.’ (Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham YMCA/K/8/1/93)
8 Arras railway station. ‘There was not much left of Arras Station, which apparently had had a direct hit.’ (Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham YMCA/K/8/1/254)
9 Arras. ‘The houses were broken, of course – in some a wall had been torn sheer away and we looked into the privacy of every room, standing just as its owner had left it. Broken homes – but not deserted.’ (Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections, University of Birmingham YMCA/K/8/1/318)
10 Telegram informing Christina’s sister Louise of the death of Daniel Gordon Campbell. ‘My eyes had turned to the horizon again, to the heights that once were St Eloi. Someone I knew lay there, who had been a Canadian, and it was too far for me to go.’
11 Photograph of memorial to the Canadian regiments killed at Vimy, sent to Louise. ‘The great high cross, with Canada in white letters, stood high on the crest of the ridge. The Hut Lady and I sat in the shadow of the memorial and looked towards St Eloi.’
12 RAMC ambulances collect the wounded from a battlefield.
13 War graves by a railway line. ‘May the earth lie light – be light – under the wooden crosses.’
14 The ‘grim, grey, ghastly trees’ of a deserted battlefield.
15 The remains of a front-line village. ‘I could see nothing but ruins, shattered more terribly than any I had yet seen.’
16 The graves of two members of the Chinese Labour Corps. ‘A Chinese Labour Corps had just passed over this part and tidied it up.’
17 The statue of the Virgin balanced on top of Albert Cathedral, before it was finally brought down by British shelling. ‘The Virgin has fallen, you see,’ said the officer soflty beside me.’
18 British troops march into the remains of Cambrai. ‘I felt as if there were ghosts beside us, ghosts looking down on us from the gaps in the walls.’
19 Staff of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, October 1919, by Bassano. Christina is standing in the back row on the right. This photo was taken just months after her return from France. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)
20 Two sketches from the Book of the 12th Battalion Scottish Rifles by David Barrogill Keith. (By permission of Caithness Archives)
21 Postcard commemorating the Battle of Loos, sent from Barrogill to Christina, 26 December 1915. (By permission of Caithness Archives)
22 Oil painting of Stromness, Orkney by David Barrogill Keith.
9
Up the line to Amiens – the best days of all
It was the ambition of each one of us to get up the line if we could. We all had red passes, which meant that our movement was restricted and we might not leave the Area in which we were stationed. But if there had been a reason for keeping us there before, there surely was none now. I asked the Chief one day if I could not go. He looked grave. ‘You will have to get permission from the APM [Assistant Provost Marshal],’ he told me, ‘and in any case you cannot go alone. Besides, there’s no food up the line. I think you had better wait.’
In sum, that was what all the officers told me. ‘You can’t possibly do it by rail,’ they said. ‘Wait a little longer and I’ll take you up in my car.’ But the longer we waited, the less interesting it would be. I wanted to go at once. Some of our men workers had been up – into the Zone des Armées – for just a day. They had run all sorts of risks to do it. I wanted to go. But I did not know the APM. A good friend of mine, however, did. He was the man who was responsible to the APM for our good conduct.
‘Do try him!’ I begged. ‘He can only say “No” at any rate and he won’t be angry with you for asking.’
‘Give me your red pass,’ he said briefly, ‘and I’ll see what I can do.’
A few days later he drew me aside. ‘I’ve got a permit for two of you,’ he announced, ‘as far as Amiens. After that you’ll have to wangle it. And, as you’re the first to get it, you’ll have to be jolly quiet about it.’
Overjoyed I dashed off to the Chief. ‘You will have to take a Hut Lady with you,’ he said sternly, ‘a serious and sensible one too. No! My Secretary won’t do.’ (In any case she preferred to wait for the promised car. ‘I don’t believe you’ll ever see anything going by rail,’ she told me, ‘and so uncomfortable too.’)
But the officers were good sports. It appeared that the APM’s permit did not cover railway travelling. ‘He only says you may go there,’ explained the RTO over a German lesson. ‘He doesn’t say how. And I can hold you up on the train. He’s got nothing to do with that.’
‘Oh, but you wouldn’t,’ I cried in dismay. ‘Do give me that bit of paper that lets me go – you know what it is. Please do let me go.’ It was too cruel to be stopped like this.
‘You don’t know what you’re going to,’ he said gruffly.
‘No,’ I coaxed, ‘but I’ll tell you all about it when I come back. And the most English of all the Hut Ladies is coming with me – you should see her – nothing could happen to me with her.’
‘I wish I were going with you,’ he laughed.
‘So do I,’ I sighed. ‘I should see everything then.’
The AMLO [Assistant Military Landing Officer] was discouraging. ‘I can’t imagine what you want to see,’ he said, in tones of the utmost surprise, ‘and in any case you won’t see it.’ It sounded final enough.
The Hut Lady was delighted to go, but she impressed on me that I was to do all the wangling. She took no responsibility at all – washed her hands of the whole affair – but she would do as she was told – exactly as she was told. I began to feel frightened, which was rather awkward, seeing I was still determined to go.
‘Do you think I’ll manage?’ I asked the Chief anxiously.
‘What about the trains?’ he enquired.
‘I’ve got six movement orders from the RTO,’ I replied eagerly. ‘He said I could fill them in for wherever I want. That’s all right isn’t it?’
The Chief roared. ‘Very much all right,’ he laughed. ‘With those,’ he went on, ‘and the APM’s permit, I think you should just bring it off. I’d trust you as soon as anyone I know, to wangle it.’ This was
the only comfort I got and I hung on to it.
At my billet, Madame packed stores of bread and chocolate, tins of bully beef and a few eggs, as we could not reckon on getting any food to buy up the line and of course we would not have our rations. Such hotels, it appears, as were open in Amiens, were crowded to the door with the returning French. At this news, the Hut Lady took pillowslips, as we were prepared now to sleep on our suitcases on the station platform.
The first train we had to catch left at 5 a.m. – it was not prompt, though we were, and I was quarter of an hour at the guichet before the ticket office would consent to giving me tickets at all. ‘Pas militaire,’ the man kept repeating. ‘Impossible, Mlle, pas militaire [not military].’
But I had not got as far as that to be stopped by a French ticket clerk. The Hut Lady stood impassive by the suitcases. I had an idea. ‘Deux billets pour Eu – militaire,’ [‘Two tickets for Eu – military,’] I demanded, mentioning the first place where I knew we would have to change and at the same time slipping a couple of francs into his hand. It was the only bribe I ever needed to give in France. He gave me the tickets to Eu, and we climbed into the train. Though Eu was only twelve miles off as the crow flies, it was a good three hours’ run by the French train, which works on the plan of calling everywhere else first, in the vain hope of eluding its destination if at all possible. Before we got to Eu, I had to think of some plan to persuade the railway authorities that we were ‘militaire’ and so make them willing to accept the RTO’s order.
War Classics Page 12
