War Classics

by Flora Johnston

  It was still dark when we left the Rest Club – the Hut Lady with the bread under her arm, I with the rest of our provisions in a parcel. We also carried our trench coats, in case we had to sleep in them. Not a soul seemed to be astir. Through the many by-streets we found our way easily enough to the cathedral, but which of the many streets from there led to the station, puzzled us. With the aid of a candle and match, we endeavoured to read the names of the streets, so as to find one familiar. It was in vain. The candlelight would not reach to the name. The candle flickered and went out. Eventually we chose one and after many minutes, came upon a solitary pedestrian – rather like a nightbird. ‘Oh, but we were much out of the way! Back, back!’ he waved us. ‘Back to the cathedral.’ And he vanished down an alley. Anxiously we retraced our steps until the vast form of the cathedral loomed again before us. I looked at my watch. It was very nearly half past seven and our train – the only one – left at eight. We had been warned to be there early.

  Round and round the cathedral we went, looking for landmarks or a guide. Neither was forthcoming. As last, down one of the side streets, I spied a man and woman hurrying along, the man carrying a suitcase. I called to them, but they either did not hear, or at any rate did not answer. In a moment they would be out of sight.

  ‘Come along,’ I said to the Hut Lady, ‘let’s run after them.’

  ‘Heavens! What on earth for?’ she enquired naturally enough, but I was already running and she followed. Presently we were within shouting distance. They were rapidly threading their way round corner after corner, avoiding the main streets and chattering rapidly and anxiously to each other. It appeared to concern them little or nothing that they were being hotly pursued by a pair of shouting foreigners, for they never once turned their heads in our direction.

  At last I gasped out, ‘S’il vous plâit, monsieur, où est la gare?’ [‘Please, monsieur, where is the station?’]

  ‘Suivez, suivez toujours,’ [‘Follow, keep following’] he called out hurriedly, without turning round, and resumed his conversation with his companion. Anyone watching us would assuredly have considered – and small blame to him – that here were a band of fugitives making their way with all possible speed from the clutches of justice. At last we suddenly turned the corner, and the man in front for the first time turned his head, beckoned with a sweep of the wrist in the opposite direction and then vanished quickly with his companion behind a large block of buildings. The direction of his hand took us to an open square and there beneath us lay the station.

  But there was still the dragon at the guichet to be braved. I presented the RTO’s pass and in a firm voice asked for ‘deux premiers militaires à Roisel, s’il vous plâit, monsieur’. [‘two first-class military tickets to Roisel, please, monsieur’.]

  Monsieur, from behind the wicket, growled out, ‘Pas militaires – civils.’ [‘Not military – civilians.’]

  ‘Non, non,’ I retorted sweetly, ‘militaires, monsieur. Monsier le RTO l’a dit.’ [‘No, no, … military, monsiuer. The Railway Transport Officer said so.’]

  Monsieur was disposed to argue. The Hut Lady, who had now regained her breath and was standing behind me, called out, ‘Oh, never mind the tickets, Tiny. We’ve only three minutes to catch the train. Come away.’ But I am not Scotch for nothing, and I was not going to pay anybody four times as much as I need – which represented the difference between the civil and military ticket. So I whipped out my passport, with its magical ‘permis rouge’ enclosed.

  ‘Regardez, monsieur,’ I began affably, ‘nous n’avons que trois minutes pour attraper le train. Mais regardez, c’est écrit ici que nous devons aller.’ [‘Look, monsieur, … we have only three minutes to catch the train. And look, it’s written here that we must go.’] This was sheer bluff and it was also my last card. He had only to look at the very official-looking ‘permis rouge’ to see that nothing of the sort was written there. I suppose I ought to have been ashamed of this statement – as of many another thing I did in France, but then and now I was unable to feel any shame for it. The French ‘did’ us so thoroughly in most things that I felt quite justified in getting a little of my own back. Also, if the RTO said we were ‘militaires’ it was for no petty French official to say we were not. This time he just glanced at the ‘permis rouge’, banged out the tickets, and we dashed for the platform.

  It was a military train and the guard had already signalled for it to depart. But an English officer was still standing on the platform, with his carriage door open, though the train had begun to move. We were flying past him, when he suddenly caught me by the arm. ‘Going up the line aren’t you?’ he said amicably. ‘We thought you were going to lose your train. Here are your seats.’

  Almost head first we entered what seemed an already crowded carriage. Someone took my parcel from me, someone else my trench coat, and I realised that my hair was falling in vast confusion over my shoulders. My face must have been peach coloured and my breath was coming in short, quick gasps. I never am any good at running. The Hut Lady opposite me sat immaculate but breathless. My friend who had pushed me into the carriage, was seated beside me – in leisurely fashion inspecting me. Four other officers were doing the same, two languidly and with some amusement in the far corner of the carriage; the two others with more matter-of-fact attention. I had given up apologising for abrupt entrances into railway carriages since I came to France. Nothing else seemed to have been my fate since the days when the Corporal at Rouen had flung me into the Dieppe train. So I endured the stares until my breath came back and then, because I must, took off my hat. The Hut Lady engaged two of the officers in conversation while I hastily, but quite composedly, did my hair.

  In a minute the man sitting next to me began to talk; he was an Australian, going to Villers Bretonneux to search for the graves of some of his comrades who had been killed there on 8 August.1 In my ignorance I had never heard of that special push, when the Boche got his nearest to Amiens. But now – thanks to the slowness of the French train – the details of the battle were pointed out to me at first hand by one who had taken part in it.

  At first the land was not so much scarred – this house had been So-and-so’s headquarters; here had been a CCS – these trenches were where the Americans, who had been holding part of the line, had let the Australians down and the Boche through.

  ‘The Americans?’ I queried with interest. I had met none of them yet. ‘Weren’t they any good?’

  ‘No damn good at all,’ came the answer, curt and deep. ‘No discipline and all talk. After they broke here, they had to ask us to lend our officers to stiffen their men. Now they say they’ve won the war,’ he added bitterly. I made a mental note to watch any Americans I might come across to see if this were true. He seemed a fair-minded man, and the man who was talking to the Hut Lady corroborated his statement. By now the houses had begun to get fewer; there was no longer any building that could have served – even temporarily – as a Headquarters. The land was cut across with trenches and strewn with debris of a massive kind, derelict tanks and wagons. There was no smaller debris – at any rate to be seen from the railway carriage – as a Chinese Labour Corps had just passed over this part and tidied it up.2 I strained my eyes and memory to just where the Australian lines had been, just where the Americans had let them down, just how far the Boche had got – so that on our way back I might readily recognise them.

  Far as the eye could see, the land was desolate – no smoke from any house, no house itself – but so far it did not look unnatural. I was used to barren, bleak spaces bereft of human habitation, and this looked only as if it had been recently used and then suddenly abandoned.3

  Even the French trains must arrive some time, and this one at last drew up at Villers Bretonneux and the Australian got out. He purposed marching over the battlefield with his map and compass and returning by the evening train. As soon as he was gone, the officer next to me moved up in friendly conversation. I was now seated by the window and he, as it were
, sat all round me – completely screening me from the languid officers who conversed in a low tone at the other end of the carriage. I was not embarrassed. Whatever one did seemed natural nowadays in France.

  But the landscape was changing now – we were moving slowly towards Péronne. The railway cutting itself had been used as a means of defence or offence – I did not know which. Its cream, chalky sides were honeycombed with dugouts, and with dugouts that seemed to have been abandoned in headlong flight. The first blue-grey overcoat that I saw lying carelessly at the mouth of a dugout, made me start. But it was only one of a series. Overcoats, crumpled dust-grey caps with their red edges, empty shell cases, rifles – all these lined our path. The Boche had left in a hurry and the Chinese Labour Corps had not yet reached so far to tidy up the battlefield. We had passed the Chinese, indeed, soon after Villers Bret, placidly and matter-of-factly clearing up the mess. Their faces were as expressionless as if they were scavenging a High Street.

  Now, beyond the railway cutting, there were masses of barbed wire, heaps of ragged green stuff that we were told was ‘camouflage’ for the artillery, now and then the muzzle of a gun sticking out of the battered grey ground. An occasional heap of stones marked where I suppose a house had once stood, an occasional stump recalled a tree. Sometimes, in the middle distance, often nearer at hand, the eye lighted gratefully on a few irregular crosses in little groups together. Now and then a solitary one – simple or Maltese – stood by the cutting itself.

  It was with a shock of surprise that I came gradually to recognise how the eye did lighten with relief as it fell upon these crosses. At the Base, where they stood in rows and looked across the sea to England, nothing had seemed sadder, nothing more poignant. And here they were up the Line itself, coming to the eye like something normal, the one normal thing in this strange world. It was as if weary with looking on earth that was no earth, on grass that was blasted beyond recognition, on ruins that were uncanny in their desolation, on trees that were stark, on silence that was like the depths of a pit, weary of all this, one turned with thankfulness to the only thing that one could recognise, the only thing that was normal or peaceful here. For it was both, in a supreme degree. Never again will I think of Death as frightening or terrific. The panoply he wears in England, the ghastly hearse, the solemn black, the slow music, the portentous train of mourners – these would menace and cow the lightest heart. But Death is not like that. Down ‘where the boys are’ at Le Tréport, I guessed it was not so: up the line I knew it. Where everything was unnatural and abnormal, the sign of Death alone was simple and kindly. Not even the youngest child would have been afraid of these crosses. It was a strange effect; and yet, when one has lost one’s bearings in an uncharted world, it was possibly an effect to be expected.

  The officer chattered on by my side – this had happened here, that there. Did I notice the shell holes? That smudge over there had been a hamlet. I listened and I looked – I looked and I listened, but there was nothing here in focus. The Hut Lady on the other side was hearing much the same from her officer. ‘Look, Tiny,’ she said to me suddenly, ‘isn’t the sky nice and blue?’ It was an odd remark to come from such a prosaic person, but she had obviously been feeling the same oppressiveness as myself. The sky and the crosses were relieving points.

  I do not believe the officers beside us felt anything of the sort. They were used to this country. ‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ said one of them indifferently; but long months – perhaps years – of it had made their minds blank to it. Yet even on them it produced a certain effect. It had softened them curiously to even the humblest forms of ordinary life. There were no flowers anywhere, of course, at the moment, and no birds at all, but they spoke without repulsion and even with fondness of rats and cats, while their anxiety to meet us, to do us any service in their power was only, on a higher plane, an instance of the same feeling. I recognised even then dimly that it was not the same as the eagerness of the men at the Base to flirt with us. Later I was to see it still more clearly.

  They were talking at the moment of how far we should go in this train. ‘If you get out at Roisel with us,’ said one, ‘and there’s a car handy, we could take you right down the Hindenburg Line. You could see the Kadaverfabrik where the old Boche burnt down his dead for fat, you know. It’s just thereabouts. Of course, if you did the thing properly, you’d have to stay all night.’4

  ‘Sleep in the Hindenburg Line?’ queried the Hut Lady excitedly.

  ‘There’s a hut we’re just putting up, that you could have,’ he went on musingly. ‘But you’d have to sleep on the floor.’

  Now after the prospect of the station floor at Amiens and the extreme delight of actually getting a bed instead, I was all for bed, so I’m afraid I did not look encouraging. But the Hut Lady was enraptured. ‘Oh, Tiny, shall we not stay?’ she turned to me. ‘I should so love to write home that I’d slept in the Hindenburg Line. Think how romantic it would be – alone on the Battlefield all night.’

  I shuddered. ‘I should not like it at all,’ I said firmly. ‘Just think of the morning; no place to wash, no mirror to do your hair and everybody staring at you when you knew you looked a fright. Besides,’ I pointed out, ‘if you can’t sleep without sheets, you certainly couldn’t sleep on the floor.’

  ‘I shouldn’t mind for one night,’ she retorted valiantly, and I don’t believe she would have. She has much more spirit and courage in adventure than I have. There were other difficulties also that I foresaw if we remained all night at Roisel – not difficulties of propriety, I hasten to say, for those never worried me in France, but difficulties of personal comfort, which, I felt sure, would worry our hosts as much as ourselves. But we must get back to Amiens by night.

  And now very slowly the train crept into Péronne. It was a military train, but it carried a few refugees with their pitiful bundles making their way home. It appeared that already at Péronne some families had come back and were living in the dugouts by the station. On the platform, indeed, there was one child. My eyes travelled past it idly – quite an ordinary French child of about seven or so – when I was roused by a succession of cries from the train itself. ‘Oh, I say!’ remarked the man beside me excitedly, ‘Look! There’s a kid. A kid at Péronne.’

  The whole train was saying it too. I put my head out of the window. At every carriage my compatriots were doing the same, welcoming, beckoning, shouting – joy and surprise depicted on their usually unemotional features. The refugees embraced one another, chattered and cried and laughed. The child laughed too, in quite a friendly fashion, and waved his hand to the officers.

  ‘Hullo,’ said a voice suddenly at my elbow. It was the officer who had breakfasted with us at Amiens. ‘D’you see there’s a child, there – a child - in Péronne?’

  As if I could have helped noticing with all this fuss! ‘Yes, I have seen it,’ I remarked meekly, but the intended sarcasm passed over his head.

  ‘Looks like old times – war over and all that,’ he went on vaguely, ‘with a child at Péronne.’

  I said nothing. Things were indeed out of focus in this world if the sight of one small French child could bring a whole trainload of war-hardened English soldiers into a state of wild excitement. And yet not one of them seemed to find it in the least extraordinary that this should be so.

  ‘Where are you going to?’ the officer went on abruptly.

  ‘We thought of Roisel,’ I replied, ‘and if there’s a car, to go to the Hindenburg Line.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if there’s not a car, you won’t see anything. You had much better go to Cambrai. If you want devastation,’ he continued, ‘and I take it you do, you’ll get it full blast between Roisel and Cambrai. Nobody’s been there yet at all to clear up – not even a Boche prisoner. I’d go to Cambrai if I were you,’ and he vanished back to his carriage.

  ‘Tiny, what is happening out there?’ queried the Hut Lady petulantly. ‘Why don’t we get on?’

  ‘We will, in a minute,’ I
replied soothingly, ‘when the Army has got over seeing this child. There are several women and even one child now in Péronne.’

  She accepted the explanation in silence and resumed her discussion about Roisel and its possibilities. ‘Of course if the car is not at Roisel,’ my officer agreed, ‘there’s nothing much that you can see just there, especially if you want to go back that night.’

  ‘I think we’d better,’ I said anxiously looking at the Hut Lady. ‘It’s awfully good of you to ask us to stay, but we’ve only got two or three days.’

  ‘All right.’ The Hut Lady gave in reluctantly. ‘I’d love to say I’d slept on a battlefield, with the soldiers there too, and I’ll never have such a chance again. Still, you’re running this show and if you say Cambrai, Cambrai it is.’ Nobody ever looked less like one who aspired to sleep with soldiers on a battlefield than our immaculate Hut Lady, but human nature, I had learned, is an incongruous thing.

  The train drew near to Roisel and the two officers got out. They said ‘Goodbye’ as warmly and reluctantly as if we had known them a lifetime. Our train moved on, and only the two languid officers, just back from home leave, were left with us. They looked at us rather suspiciously and talked – as they had done all along – in low voices to one another. But the Hut Lady and I were quite relieved to have each other to talk to at last. I pulled out my notebook and jotted down a few things I had seen, and began a letter home, heading it, ‘After Roisel’. Yet I wrote but a few words, as every now and then we jumped up to look at something on one or other side of the train.

  The desolation here was complete and the destruction absolute. Through the open window not a sound broke the silence; there was not a sign of any kind of life anywhere. ‘Hell must be like this,’ I thought to myself. ‘I am sure it must be like this.’ And still I had not seen the worst yet.

  ‘I suppose we ought to go as far as Cambrai,’ ventured the Hut Lady doubtfully. ‘This looks as good desolation as we’ll get anywhere.’