War Classics

by Flora Johnston

  It did indeed. ‘I’ll ask the officer from Amiens,’ I replied, ‘the next time he comes up.’

  ‘Oh, so you are going on to Cambrai,’ he remarked, in tones of pleasure as he greeted us at the next stop. ‘I’m going there too. I’ll see you at the station.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed hesitatingly, looking round at what I suppose must be called the surrounding country, though it bore not the faintest resemblance to any country I had ever known. ‘D’you think,’ I began diplomatically after a silence, ‘that perhaps we could get out and walk a bit?’

  He stared at me. ‘Here do you mean?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good Lord, no!’ came the swift reply. ‘I do not think so.’

  I retired, rebuffed, and he went back to his carriage.

  But our languid friends were waking up. One of them summoned up courage to address me. ‘Are you travelling all by yourselves?’ he enquired.

  It was my turn to be amazed. ‘Why, yes,’ I answered, blankly enough.

  ‘Oh, we thought you were with those people who got out at Roisel,’ he explained, as an explanation seemed expected.

  ‘Oh, d’you mean because they sat with their arms all round us?’ I asked amiably. ‘Because I don’t even know their names.’

  He flushed a little – perhaps not unwarrantably – and the Hut Lady hastily broke in. Her unassailable propriety must have reassured him; and presently they were talking to us in quite friendly fashion, pointing out this landmark and that in the wilderness outside the window. As we drew nearer Cambrai, leaving Gouzeaucourt behind us, every inch almost seemed to have its story to tell. But it was the constant sight of gaping shell holes choked with filthy water, of abandoned tanks, of wrecked lorries and of pitted ground that remained most clearly with me. After the moment, it mattered little to me that this or that had happened at a particular spot. Yet one thing stands out in my memory. Just before we came to Cambrai, one of the officers pointed out what seemed like a deep smudge on the horizon. ‘That is Bourlon Wood,’ he said briefly. ‘You have probably heard of that.’ Even now I can see its grim blackness flickering in the distance. Will the day ever come, I wonder, when I shall walk in Bourlon Wood?5

  It was about one o’clock when we reached Cambrai. We had just grasped our parcels to leave the carriage when the officer who had first spoken to us invited us, in rather embarrassed fashion, to lunch with them at the Officers’ Leave Club. We explained we had brought food with us, but our excuses, half-hearted anyway, were soon overruled. Just then the Amiens officer dashed up with the same invitation and I had regretfully to tell him we were already dining there. Once our two new friends had taken us up, they proved themselves most perfect hosts. If ever their eyes should light on this, I hope they will see the record of our best and sincerest thanks. One of them – fair-haired and shy – explained that at the club there was nowhere we could wash our hands. The station had been shelled, but if we would wait, he would go and see whether any vestige of a ladies’ waiting room remained. We waited, devoutly hoping there would be; just for the moment the thought of England flitted across my mind. Every rule of ‘les convenances’ (propriety) was being broken and yet I thought we were all behaving extraordinarily nicely.

  It appeared there were the ruins of a waiting room. When we got there, there was no door, only sacking and little enough of that. Of course all the ordinary paraphernalia of a waiting room had long since gone, but the original label ‘Dames’, strangely enough, had remained through all the vicissitudes that time had brought. We made our way over the debris of stone and lime on the floor. At least we were not overlooked and we were alone.

  ‘This is very nice, Tiny,’ said the Hut Lady, with a sigh of content, seating herself on her trench coat over a heap of metal, and extracting a powder puff and a tiny mirror.

  ‘Very,’ I agreed and meant it, but I just wished there was a mirror somewhere that I could see my hair in. The Hut Lady’s was the size of a postage stamp – and only revealed the tip of her nose. However, we made ourselves as presentable as might be, and returned to our friends.

  A French porter was examining the passes and the tickets. He let the officers through and the Hut Lady, without a murmur, but round me he immediately drew a cordon and penned me in with, it seemed, the entire station staff. It was a detail that I carried the Hut Lady’s ticket and pass – she was free to go as she pleased. Like a swarm of bees, the officials surrounded me, all speaking at once. Over their heads I saw the cool figures of the Hut Lady and the officers, steadily waiting for me outside the ‘pen’. It appeared that our passes were only to Roisel – that was a slight point, but our tickets were only to there too. It was suspicious, indeed most suspicious, I was told.

  ‘How much extra is it to Cambrai?’ I enquired quietly. The question seemed to take them aback. What they had expected me to say I do not know, but my explanation that we wanted to see more and so had come further up the line, seemed to them highly unsatisfactory. They grunted and they growled. The Hut Lady looked more and more perturbed, but the officers stood rigid. They intended me to get free. With the British Army in the support trenches, I felt I would not have turned a hair had the entire staff of the Chemin-de-fer du Nord sought to poind [impound] me. At last a sum was named, which I paid, and stepped once more into freedom. Than the French minor railway servant, I can conceive no greater tyrant and no shiftier official.

  Now free in Cambrai, we made our way to the Club. It had been the German Officers’ Leave Club right through the war until almost the end, and as Cambrai itself had been held by the Boche, very little damage had been done to the town, and none at all to the Club. Our promise to the French to spare their towns wherever possible had profited Cambrai much. The cathedral, true, was damaged in the fighting at the end of the War and was now out of bounds, as the Royal Engineers had not yet inspected the damage done; the chief square seemed to have been battered, but compared with Péronne, and we were told Arras, Cambrai had suffered relatively little.

  The first thing I noticed was the direction posts still in German. ‘Nach Bapaume’, ‘Nach Arras’, and further instructions how to get to the principal places in the town. ‘There is electric light here,’ I said in amazement, as we picked our way down one of the streets, and thinking of the candlelight at Amiens.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said my companion quickly. ‘The Boche put all that in, you know. Very methodical is the Boche, and we’ve just taken it over.’ Yet for all that, the town had a deserted, scared look. Many of the houses were standing empty and abandoned – windows were broken, great gaps yawned here and there. The ring of our footsteps on the pavé seemed to be an intrusion on the silence. I felt as if there were ghosts beside us, ghosts looking down on us from the gaps in the walls.

  Suddenly, I stopped with a cry. ‘Oh, here is a real glass in a window! Now I can see to do my hair.’ It was a relief just to say something trivial. A fair-sized glass was actually standing in an abandoned shop in this practically deserted street, and there and then in the roadway, with the officers gravely criticising and the Hut Lady looking somewhat amusedly on, I did my hair. But I was in dead earnest. ‘Now,’ I said, when I had finished, and giving a last look to the whole, ‘now I can face the RTO. We’ve got to get our passes back to Amiens, you know.’

  The officers stared at me. ‘D’you mean to say,’ one asked, ‘you haven’t got your passes back to Amiens?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. They would only give us the passes away from Amiens. We’ve got to trust to luck to get back again.’

  ‘Well, upon my word,’ said the officer, taking a deep breath, ‘you are an optimist. We’d better go and see the RTO at once.’

  ‘Oh, Tiny,’ interrupted the Hut Lady, ‘need you see the RTO just now? We were going to have lunch, I thought. You’re always seeing the RTO,’ she ended.

  ‘If I don’t see him now, we’re stuck here, you know, and things may be very unpleasant too. I’ll go and see him now. It won’t take long.’

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sp; They came with me to his little box and I knocked. Up the shutter ran, and the bewildered face of a Corporal looked out and found – me. He started. ‘Yes, Miss, certainly, you shall ’ave a pass,’ – in fact he would give me some sort of military order which would send me straight back to Amiens without a ticket. It does not sound complimentary, but it was just what we wanted. With my little bit of paper, I went light-heartedly back to the Club for lunch.

  For a moment, as we entered the dining room, I felt that Péronne and the wilderness and Cambrai itself must all have been a bad dream and that I was really back in England. White-apronned, white-capped waitresses moved about the little tables set with their spotless linen and shining cutlery; pretty chintz curtains hung from the windows and from behind some palms in a corner, came the subdued strains of a band. Outside were the broken streets, the shelled cathedral, the deserted houses. But here we were at home.

  The fair-haired officer noticed my look of astonishment. ‘Good, isn’t it?’ he said appreciatively. ‘But the credit is mostly the Boche’s. We did the curtains, of course, and rigged out the waitresses. They look English, anyway, though they don’t understand a word of it. But we stepped into all the rest when the Boche stepped out. He did himself well, you know.’ After the slatternly checked aprons, and the familiar manner of the French servants, I could not take my eyes off the trim black and white, and the military precision of these pseudo-parlourmaids. Even to the menu cards they handed me, it might have been Piccadilly.

  The meal they served was simple – rations, with all the will in the world, can hardly be disguised – but the serving itself was admirable. We talked freely and easily, the officers, the Hut Lady and I – just as if it had been Piccadilly and we had all been introduced in the way that England likes. Neither by word or by sign did any of us show that we did not know the other’s name – and that was very English too! Would we not like to go to Arras by road – the fair-haired one asked us – he would find out if there was a car going. It would have been delightful, but there was only a luggage car, piled to the top. There was no room for us. With a sigh we made for the station to catch our train again.

  But the French railway officials recognised me. If it was suspicious to come to Cambrai, it was still more suspicious to leave it so soon. They formed a cordon round me. The train puffed slowly at the platform. If I could by this time look helpless and solitary when I wanted, I had also learned the art of rather stupid repetition. ‘Je vous assure, monsieur,’ I protested earnestly, voice and gesture aiding me, ‘mais, je vous assure’ (‘I assure you, monsieur ... but, I assure you.’) The Hut Lady, unimpeachable even to a French eye, had swept past – ticketless though she was – to her calm seat in the train. The fair-haired officer stood by me, in the offing.

  ‘C’est la même dame qui est venue la matin,’ [‘It is the same woman who came this morning,’] confided one porter to his neighbour.

  ‘Mais oui,’ I took him up in a pained voice, ‘naturellement je suis la meme.’ And then bethinking me, I pointed to the pass the Corporal had given me. ‘Regardez, monsieur, c’est écrit ici.’ [‘Yes … of course I’m the same woman … Look, monsieur, it’s written here.’]

  It was a good move. No French railway official wants to read. At last the cordon parted and I was free. ‘And a jolly good wangle too,’ whispered the fair-haired Englishman as we ran for the train. And so we left Cambrai – amid the friendly smiles and salutes of the British Army on the platform.

  Notes

  1. In the spring of 1918, during the German offensive, the proximity of Villers Bretonneux to the city of Amiens gave it a particular significance. The Australians recaptured the village from the Germans on 25 April at the cost of many lives. The date which Christina here mentions, 8 August, was the first day of the Battle of Amiens, in which the Allied forces launched a fierce surprise offensive which would ultimately lead to the end of the war. The military cemetery at Villers Bretonneux includes many Australian graves, and the Australian National War Memorial for France is nearby.

  2. The Chinese Labour Corps played an important role during the First World War. Around 100,000 Chinese men were recruited by the British Army, particularly from Shandong Province, for non-combat roles in support of the troops. When the war was over many of these were employed in clearing the battlefields.

  3. A startling comparison between the empty Caithness moorlands and the devastated battlefield wastelands!

  4. The officer is repeating one of the most notorious examples of atrocity propaganda perpetrated by the British press during the First World War. Neither he nor Christina appears to question the truth of the rumour, although in a letter from 1918 Barrogill also refers to this ‘yarn’ as something of which the British should be ashamed. Reports of a German factory which boiled down the corpses of its own soldiers for fat appeared in Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers The Times and the Daily Mail in April 1917, apparently based on an article in a Belgian newspaper. The story was widely believed and repeated both at home and among soldiers in the trenches. A complete repudiation was issued by the British government in 1925, but by this time it had contributed significantly to post-war attitudes to Germany. Realisation that the story had been completely untrue also may have contributed to reluctance to believe initial reports of the Holocaust. [‘Media and Propaganda: The Northcliffe Press and the Corpse Factory Story of World War 1’, Neander & Marlin, Global Media Journal, vol. 3, 2010]

  5. The Allied attack and German counter-attack which took place in the Cambrai area in November and December 1917 cost tens of thousands of lives on both sides. The 51st Highland Division were among those involved in the desperate battle for Bourlon Wood between 23 and 28 November.

  11

  To Albert, Arras and Vimy

  Our adventures were not at an end. At Gouzeaucourt, a large golden-haired lady in the fascinating uniform of the French nurse, was shown into our compartment by an obsequious English officer. She carried a small brown bag. After a few minutes she began to speak. In peacetime, it appeared, she was a modiste [milliner] in Paris – would we like her card? – but of course during the war one could not be that, so she had gone to Amiens to nurse. At this point I must have looked interested – for she was the first French nurse I had met. Did she find the training hard? She stared at me. Train! Ah yes, of course, I was English; but no French lady would go inside a hospital to do what an English nurse did. It was not the same at all in France. I must understand. She saw the wounded, of course, in her hospital at Amiens. Being a nurse, of course, she was allowed to do that when other people weren’t. And mon Dieu! Was it not horrible! And the laundry bills! That was really why she was going back to Amiens now, to settle up with that accursed laundry. One needed a fresh blouse every day and her lingerie was, bien entendu [of course], of the most elegant – really the laundry drove her to despair during the war.

  A propos of lingerie, she opened her small brown bag. I glanced out at the country we were moving through and then at the small brown bag. It contained a beautiful silver-grey gown of stockinette – a material then new – Parisian to its last stitch – and a rose-coloured jumper of the same. These were models. Their prices ran into hundreds of francs. We could see for ourselves, Madame pointed out, that they did not crush in travelling. We could be oh so élégantes! even on a battlefield.

  The train slowed down – the women of Péronne came slowly out from their dugouts – the women of Péronne! Madame folded away her exquisite garments with a sigh, into the small brown bag. I looked out to see if there was anything that could have been a house once at Péronne.

  And so we got back to Amiens and the Officers’ Leave Club. Over the map in the big sitting room I traced out our route for the next day to its terminus at Arras. The Australian officer, who had returned, studied it with me. ‘You will have to get out at Longueau,’ he said abruptly. ‘The return train does not stop at Amiens.’

  ‘Oh,’ I gasped, ‘and how shall I get from there?’

  �
�By another train,’ he answered sensibly enough. ‘There is only one,’ he added, ‘and if you don’t come by that, I’ll come out to Longueau and fetch you myself.’ That was friendly, and I felt more reassured. ‘That’s all right,’ he went on, ‘if you don’t come back by 8 o’clock, I’ll come for you.’ It was with these words ringing in my ears that I fell asleep soon after.

  ‘Now then, now then, it’s 3 o’clock struck – 3 o’clock,’ the voice went on, more emphatically, the rhythmic knocks on the door, beating themselves into my head. This time, once awake, I rose gladly. It was to be the most exciting day of all. In the deep darkness the Hut Lady and I stole down to the station. There was no fear this time of losing our way. At the ticket office, a tall burly officer with fur collar pulled almost over his face, stood directly behind me. His enquiries about his luggage – in a French that was not only idiomatic, but that in accent and tone alike bore the cachet of Paris – his enquiries, fluent and prolonged, overbore the ticket man so effectively that with comparatively little difficulty I got my passes. ‘Belgian,’ I said disgustedly to myself, looking at his khaki uniform, as I rejoined the Hut Lady and we proceeded through the salle d’attente (waiting room) to the platform.

  The station was pitch dark, but in the salle d’attente itself a few faint lights burned. In the flickering darkness I made out the horizon bleu of the poilu, as in all manner of odd shapes, it carpeted the floor. I lifted my eyes. The benches were filled with them, the tables, the floor. A steady murmur of sound filled the salle d’attente. I caught my breath. My thoughts flew back to a picture I had once seen in Luxemburg, The Eve of Battle by Meissonier. Just so did the men all lie on the ground, in utter weariness and exhaustion and dream of the conflict on the morrow.1

  Wearily we picked our way through the sleeping host and came to the utter blackness of a platform. I discerned a train. Slowly we moved from carriage to carriage – more poilus asleep, some French civilians – also asleep. At last we found a forlorn-looking carriage quite empty. In a few moments a French peasant woman, reeking of the soil, stumbled up to share it with us. The Hut Lady looked uncomfortable. I realised that from her it was hardly likely we should hear anything about the landscape through which we were to pass. And it would be country well known to our troops – nearly all of it. ‘Pass Albert – with her?’ I said to myself. ‘I’ll go down the train again and see if I can’t find someone English,’ I told the Hut Lady as I got out.