Part 21 (2/2)
Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine.
Other loves I have, men rough, but men who stir More grief, more joy, than love of thee and mine.
Faces cheerful, full of whimsical mirth, Lined by the wind, burned by the sun; Bodies enraptured by the abounding earth, As whose children we are brethren: one.
And any moment may descend hot death To shatter limbs! pulp, tear, blast Beloved soldiers, who love rough life and breath Not less for dying faithful to the last.
O the fading eyes, the grimed face turned bony, Open mouth gus.h.i.+ng, fallen head, Lessening pressure of a hand shrunk, clammed, and stony O sudden spasm, release of the dead!
Was there love once? I have forgotten her.
Was there grief once? Grief yet is mine.
O loved, living, dying, heroic soldier All, all, my joy, my grief, my love are thine!
CHAPTER XIX
AFTER TWO YEARS
My dream of going out to work again with the F.A.N.Y.s was never realised. Something always seemed to be going wrong with the leg; but I was determined to try and pay them a visit before they were demobilised.
On these occasions the word ”impossible” must be cut out of one's vocabulary (_vide_ Napoleon), and off I set one fine morning. Everything seemed strangely unaltered, the same old train down to Folkestone, the same porters there, the same old s.h.i.+p and lifebelts; and when I got to Boulogne nearly all the same old faces on the quay to meet the boat! I rubbed my eyes. Had I really been away two years or was it only a sort of lengthy nightmare? I walked down the gangway and there was the same old rogue of a porter in his blue smocking. Yet the town seemed strangely quiet without the incessant marching of feet as the troops came and went. ”We never thought to see _you_ out here again, Miss,”
said the same man in the transport department at the Hotel Christol!
I went straight up to the convoy at St. Omer, and had tea in the camp from which they had been sh.e.l.led only a year before. This convoy of F.A.N.Y.s, to which many of my old friends had been transferred, was attached to the 2nd army, and had as its divisional sign a red herring.
The explanation being that one day a certain general visited the camp, and on leaving said: ”Oh, by the way, are you people 'army'?”
”No,” replied the F.A.N.Y., ”not exactly.”
”Red Cross then?”
”Well, not exactly. It's like this,” she explained: ”We work for the Red Cross and the cars are theirs, but we are attached to the second army; we draw our rations from the army and we're called F.A.N.Y.S.”
”'Pon my soul,” he cried, ”you're neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, but you're thundering good red herrings!”
It was a foregone conclusion that a red herring should become their sign after that!
The next day I was taken over the battlefields through Arcques, where the famous ”Belle” still manipulates the bridge, and along by the Nieppe Forest. We could still see the trenches and dug-outs used in the fierce fighting there last year. A cemetery in a little clearing by the side of the road, the graves surmounted by plain wooden crosses, was the first of many we were to pa.s.s. Vieux Berquin, a once pretty little village, was reduced to ruins and the road we followed was pitted with sh.e.l.l holes.
It was pathetic to see an old man and his wife, bent almost double with age and rheumatism, poking about among the ruins of their one-time home, in the hope of finding something undestroyed. They were living temporarily in a miserable little shanty roofed in by pieces of corrugated iron, the remains of former Nissen huts and dug-outs.
In Neuf Berquin several families were living in new wooden huts the size of Armstrongs with cheerful red-tiled roofs, that seemed if possible to intensify the utter desolation of the surroundings.
l.u.s.ty youths, still in the _bleu horizon_ of the French Army, were busy tilling the ground, which they had cleared of bricks and mortar, to make vegetable gardens.
My chief impression was that France, now that the war was over, had made up her mind to set to and get going again just as fast as she possibly could. There was not an idle person to be seen, even the children were collecting bricks and slates.
I wondered how these families got supplies and, as if in answer to my unspoken question, a baker's cart full of fresh brown loaves came b.u.mping and jolting down the uneven village street.
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