War Classics

by Flora Johnston

  ‘I feel as if I ought to apologise to somebody for this country,’ said a prosaic-looking English officer uneasily, as we passed Albert. But somehow it demanded an apology to God. For another reason too, I shall not go there again. If human nature had been at its worst, it had also been at its best. Side by side with ruined Péronne, with desolate Arras, with unearthly Thiepval, there walks in my mind the perfect memory of the men we knew there; welcoming English voices, kindly act and generous thought went with us all the days while we were there, without one jarring discord. We were set about with love. And so it comes that even had I the courage to face that land again, I could not bear the strange faces and the natural indifference that I should encounter now, where once I had met perfection. Plodding down to the Lines of Communication I pictured again the open country and the wide horizons of Vimy, and was glad that the boys who came so far, had found such a lovely place to lie in. May the earth lie light – be light – under the wooden crosses.

  Yet Life is no respecter of moods – it delights in contrasts. And even as I stood waiting at the junction for Dieppe, with my thoughts far away, the last of all the RTO’s Corporals stood before me.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss,’ he was saying, ‘you’ve come from up the line, haven’t you? And I was thinking, if you wouldn’t mind, that I might give a clean to your shoes before you go to the Base.’

  ‘But I can’t take them off,’ I protested. ‘I’ve nothing else to wear.’

  ‘I’ll clean them here,’ he volunteered, and sure enough he did, with what seemed to me an entire battalion looking on with interest. It certainly filled in the time while we were waiting for the train, but I was rather sorry all the same. I should have liked the Chief to see how we had come from the Trenches.

  It was about two o’clock when the train pulled up slowly at the Base and we set out to lug our suitcases to the billet. But even then our luck held. The Ladies’ Car was just returning from its round of the huts, and it held only one lady, who beckoned us excitedly. The steadiest of all our drivers – and at the Base we had a great variety, including one who was known as ‘Sudden Death’ – gripped our luggage, and we were landed safe and sound at our billet door. In a way I was glad to be back – for here too was a Bed – I thought of it with a capital B now – and the prospect of hours and hours of sleep before me. It was without a care in the world that I laid me down one hour later. But just as it was growing dusk, I was awakened. The Chief had called – our singing class was giving an exhibition at the local theatre – he desired my presence in his box.

  Notes

  1. The floor and benches of the station waiting room were crammed with French soldiers dressed in their blue uniforms. As she looked at them, Christina was reminded of a painting by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815–91), who painted many military scenes, and was known for his small-scale detail.

  2. ‘The Virgin has fallen.’ The statue of the Virgin Mary atop Albert Cathedral became one of the icons of this stretch of the Front. From 1915 as a result of German shellfire the statue hung at a precarious angle. The legend developed among British troops that the fall of the Virgin would signify the end of the war, while German troops were said to believe that whoever brought down the statue would lose the war. In spring 1918 the British shelled the cathedral in order to prevent the Germans using the tower as a lookout, and the statue was destroyed.

  3. Arthur Rackham’s (1867–1939) illustrations for fairy tales and folklore were well known. As Christina looked out on the scarred remains of Thiepval Wood, she was reminded of his twisted and ethereal depictions of trees.

  4. Dawn broke over Thiepval Wood on 1 July 1916 and ushered in the single worst day in the history of the British Army. That first day of the Battle of the Somme cost 60,000 casualties, of whom 20,000 were killed. Today the Thiepval Memorial looms over the landscape, inscribed with the names of 72,000 men who died in this area over the course of the war and who have no known grave.

  5. Sainte-Catherine lies to the north of the town of Arras. This area lay on the front line and a series of battles was fought around the town, which was very badly damaged.

  6. The high ground of Vimy Ridge provided a natural vantage point of great military significance. In April 1917, as part of the wider Battle of Arras, the Canadian Corps succeeded in winning the Ridge from the Germans at the cost of over 10,000 casualties.

  7. In Christina’s very real fear at descending into the trenches, we see one of the apparent contradictions of her personality. Brave enough to cross the sea and take on the education of the army, brave enough to negotiate her way across the battlefields, her courage failed her at this moment – just as it had when she was asked to sleep in a house alone in the middle of the woods. One obituary, written by a colleague many years later, stated: ‘She was the most unusual mixture of courage and timidity: courage in the big things in life, timidity in its trivialities … She herself used to relate that after reading thrillers late into the night (as was her custom) she was “too frightened to cross the passage” to her bedroom.’ The inscription on her gravestone in Thurso reads ‘I am not afraid’. [St Hilda’s College Report 1962–63].

  8. As Christina looks towards St Eloi, we have a rare insight into her personal experience of loss and grief during the war years. The soldier in her thoughts is Captain Daniel Gordon Campbell of the Canadian Infantry, who had been engaged to marry her sister Louise. He had grown up near the Keith family, in Halkirk. Like them he attended the Miller Institute and Edinburgh University, where he excelled both academically and at sport, representing Scotland at the high jump. A lawyer, he had emigrated to Canada, and was serving with a Canadian regiment when he was killed at Vimy Ridge on 9 April 1917. He is buried in the cemetery at Mont St Eloi. Louise was devastated by his death, and kept detailed scrapbooks which include newspaper cuttings about the Canadian action at Vimy, letters of sympathy from friends, and information about his final resting place.

  9. Today Vimy Ridge is the site of the breathtaking Canadian National War Memorial, overlooking the landscape on which so many Canadians lost their lives. More than 11,000 names of those whose grave is unknown are inscribed on the walls of this impressive monument, which was unveiled in 1936. However, even while the war was still continuing, memorials were erected on Vimy Ridge to commemorate the devastating losses suffered by the Canadian troops. Christina and her friend were photographed at the foot of one of these memorials. Louise’s scrapbook contains a photograph sent to her of one such cross, which may be the one visited by Christina.

  10. In fact, the cathedral would be rebuilt, as would the rest of the devastated town of Arras, with buildings of historical interest reconstructed exactly as they had been before the bombing.

  11. Tunnels had been quarried out beneath the city of Arras for many centuries to provide stone for building. During the war these tunnels were extended to create an astonishing underground city where thousands of soldiers were based.

  12

  Closing down

  Spring was coming – the daffodils in the woods all around told us that. The green of the sea too, was touched with silver where the spring sun kissed it; no longer were there white lines of foam between us and England. ‘In the Spring,’ the poet tells us, ‘the young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love,’1 and no doubt with this admonition in view, the War Office belatedly bethought itself of us. It announced that by Easter, which this year fell towards the end of April, it would itself take over all Army Education in France. The decision was no surprise to us – it followed from education being established in the Army zones and in the Army of Occupation also. The document, however, conveying the decision, was a profound surprise to us. We had never realised the War Office thought so much of us: indeed, all evidence, as it drifted down pointed to the contrary. However, it was springtime and perhaps even the War Office felt it.

  Anyhow, there I was one fine morning in the Chief’s sanctum and there was he with his spectacles on his nose, reading a large o
fficial-looking document aloud to me. The War Office thanked us for conducting the Army Education with the great success we had. I opened my eyes! The Chief read stolidly on. The War Office was now going to undertake this important work itself. But it would never forget its debt to us: in fact, would the Chief give the thanks of the War Office to each member of his Staff and tell them that their ‘courage and cheerfulness in the face of unexampled difficulties and hardships had been beyond all praise’. These latter words I learned by heart afterwards and tried to think that they had once been applied to me. They would be exceedingly useful to quote in future conversations with the Army brother. The SNO too, I made up my mind, should hear them word for word.

  Meantime the Chief had taken off his spectacles and laid the document down. ‘Pretty strong, isn’t it?’ he remarked.

  ‘Strong!’ I cried. ‘They couldn’t have said more if we’d worked in the trenches.’ I was silent with awe. Then a misgiving came over me. ‘Who has signed it?’ I enquired. ‘It may be only a hoax.’

  He read out the name – unknown to me – of some general at the War Office.

  ‘I don’t suppose he has even seen anything of us,’ I said doubtfully.

  ‘I’m quite sure he hasn’t,’ the Chief agreed warmly, to my surprise. Then his eyes twinkled. ‘But it’s very nice for the papers, you know. Must make a great thing of Education if the War Office is going to tackle it itself.’

  I sighed. ‘I shall tell all the officers who come here that the War Office thinks our courage in tackling them is beyond all praise,’ I declared, as I left the room.

  The end had really come. The men were going home: so were many of the Hut Ladies: one or two Huts were already closed down: notices were up that the Garrison Church was to be given up at the end of the month. Not only so, but our own Chief on the Lines of Communication was going home in ten days’ time.

  For myself, a letter had come for me from my College in Oxford, asking how soon I could be back. Captain L. and I were making toast by the dining-room fire – a ceremony never fully understood by Marie Henriette who, like all Frenchwomen, saw nothing in toast – when I broke the news. ‘They’ve offered me the Senior Tutor’s rooms,’ I told him, ‘if I’ll go back at once.’

  Captain L. burst out laughing. ‘Senior Tutor, indeed,’ he cried. Marie Henriette, setting the table, looked benevolent but uncomprehending. ‘Mademoiselle – moi, fiancés,’ [‘Mademoiselle – I’m engaged’] said Captain L. with a wave of his toasting fork.

  Other officers, hearing the laughter, drifted in. One of them caught me, toasting fork and all, and waltzed me round the table. ‘Senior Tutor, indeed,’ they cried. ‘You’re in France now.’ For they one and all looked on my future life as worse than a convent, in that it held the added gloom of learning.

  I straightened my hair. ‘Oxford will indeed be very different from this,’ I said, looking round the eager circle, ‘but I’m going there all the same and maybe I shall like it.’

  ‘We’ll come and see you,’ volunteered one, as if he expected me to ban his visit.

  ‘Oh yes, I hope you’ll all come,’ I entreated. ‘It will be so awfully dull at first.’ But I did not realise then that Oxford would be bigger than us all, and that they could not come to me nor I to them in the different atmosphere across the Channel.

  It was a wild March morning when the Secretary and I saw the Chief off. He was to motor to Havre.: only our librarian went oncataloguing the few books we had left Nearly all had been packed up in huge crates downstairs and were waiting, their labels in block letters stamped on their lids, to be sent to Cologne. But a soldier, a librarian in civil life, catalogued afresh those that were left, though anyone with a glance at the shelves could read the titles of the dozen books or so we still had. The Chief was muffled to the throat for his long journey: someone carried his souvenirs, someone threw in his luggage – a hurried shake of the hand and the Secretary and I stood alone on the doorstep; the Area Education in our own hands.

  ‘What shall we do?’ she said disconsolately, as we returned to her room. It was piled up with cigarette boxes and flowers, the gifts of the departing officers to us both.

  A sudden thought struck me. ‘I know,’ I cried. ‘We’ll have a children’s party to end up with, like the Demob people.’

  ‘But we don’t know any children,’ she protested.

  ‘There are lots here,’ I retorted airily. ‘Some were playing at that concert. I’ll go and ask them this very afternoon.’

  It was rather an odd errand, if I had thought of it, calling at people’s houses and asking them to let their children have tea with us. I don’t suppose any English parent, except of the poorer classes, would have listened to me for a moment. But the French were well used by this time to the English love of children – our School was well known in Dieppe – and I met with no refusal at all. Unknown though I was to all of them, I was received with great politeness and the children were promised for the day I asked. Such officers as were left were delighted at the prospect – they could not all come to tea, I pointed out, as our table was not big enough, but they might all come to play games afterwards. It was the one thing needed to cheer us up in the days we were passing through.

  The children came and were not in the least shy: French children don’t seem to be. They were indeed shocked at our extravagance in giving them butter and jam together and still more amazed at what they thought the liberality of the fare provided. But the games were the really interesting part: the officers spoke little French and the children no English, but when the game had been explained in both languages, the officers shouted in the children’s French and the children in an odd word or so of English. When the party ended, the children begged to be invited back again, as with great reluctance they departed.

  Only one happening of interest took place while we had charge of the School – the War Office requested us to carry on for another month – really, as we thought, because they were not at all ready to take over themselves, but on the pretext that we did it so well and that it was not worthwhile beginning with fresh instructors. But we politely declined.

  And now in the prevailing atmosphere of farewells, I felt that the sooner I got home, the better. It would be hateful to remain until not a friend was left. So far I had still not got to Paris, but when I applied to the APM for permission to go home, I boldly added ‘via Paris’. There was great excitement to know what would be done with this clause. Permission did not come till teatime the day before I was leaving, but on the permit there were written the magic words, ‘via Paris’. In great delight I telegraphed my sister that I would be there for a few hours next day. It meant getting up at six a.m. to catch the Paris train and it meant risking the visé at Havre, as probably the British Consul would not be on duty when the evening train reached the port, and so I might be held up after all. But the alternative was most of the day alone in Havre, as the boat did not sail till night. And I was all for Paris.

  I turned down the Plage for the last time about eight o’clock at night to say goodbye at the Headquarters for France. On the way I passed the Hôtel Métropole, where a few days before the City of Dieppe had entertained the English Base to a farewell reception and where the French had looked on open-mouthed as we danced an eightsome to the pipes of the Glasgow Highlanders. At the Headquarters, which I had found such a Tower of Babel but six short months ago, I passed from room to room saying ‘Goodbye’ to one new friend after another. In one room a tall, rather handsome man in a trench coat stood talking, cigar in mouth, to a man I knew. He stared at me rather hard as I said, ‘Goodbye’, and then interrupted with, ‘Going home tomorrow, are you? But my dear child you’ll never do all that – Paris and the boat, you know.’2

  ‘Oh, I can try anyway,’ I said hopefully.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, taking the cigar out of his mouth. ‘I’ll make a bargain with you. Give up Paris and I’ll motor you through to Havre tomorrow. I’m going home myself.’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve got
a topping car,’ he said lazily. ‘Haven’t I Smith? I’ve just come straight from Cologne.’

  ‘I should love to,’ I said slowly, ‘but I do want to see Paris.’

  ‘If you go there,’ he went on, ‘you’ll have to stay in Havre, you know. There’s no manner of chance you’ll get the British visé that night.’

  ‘Sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Dead sure,’ he answered. ‘Better come with me.’

  ‘Thank you I will,’ I plunged firmly.

  ‘I’ll be round for you at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Sleep well.’

  He stared at me still till I left the room. The man I knew came with me. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he reassured me with a laugh. ‘He’s a little sudden but that’s all. But he’ll take you to London all right and put you in the train for Scotland too.’

  Truth to tell, I had had enough of facing French railway authorities, who either told me I was ‘militaire’ and so must travel by night, or said I wasn’t militaire at all and refused to give me a ticket, and the thought that I would be taken care of appealed very greatly. I could see Paris another time. A glorious motor ride to Havre in plenty of time for the boat was not to be despised. So I slept the sleep of the lazy and wired to Paris that I was not coming.3

  It was nearly noon before the car eventually turned up next day, with not only my new friend and his chauffeur on board, but two ladies as well, both, I suppose, collected as I had been. One was middle-aged and quite friendly to me. She had been a Leading Lady at the Huts all winter and with the ‘airs of a duchess’ had, I believe, a kind heart beneath them. She had remarkably little luggage, as she pointed out with pride, for so long a sojourn in France. She also was returning to England and I was rather relieved than otherwise to see her. But the second lady was a different type. A widow of uncertain age and rather youthful appearance, she was possessed of very lovely violet eyes, a mass of dark hair and a pale face. She had been out for four winters, and whatever may have been the case in the other three, her appearance now had the effect of emptying each hut she was sent to. If the soldiers were hungry enough or bold enough to remain, she wrangled with them as fiercely from behind the counter as ever I have heard fishwives do in my own country. Also she would not stand behind the counter, as we all did, but insisted on a cushioned armchair. The bête noir of the men, the siren of some of the officers, she was not over popular with the Hut Ladies. I had never actually met her before and surveyed her with apprehension. She, on the other hand, looked on the little crowd of uniforms who had come to see me off, with obvious disfavour.