Part 8 (1/2)
XI
AT G.H.Q.[8]
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Billet de Logement.
Mme. Bonnard, 131 rue Robert le Frisson, logera les sous-dits,
savoir: un officier, un sous officier, deux hommes; fournira le lit,
place au feu et a la chandelle, conformement a loi du 3 juillet, 1877.
Delivre a la Mairie,
le 31me Janvier, 1915.
Le Maire ----
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The Camp Commandant, who is a keeper of lodging-houses and an Inspector of Nuisances, had given me a slip of paper on which was inscribed the address No. 131 rue Robert le Frisson and a printed injunction to the occupier to know that by these presents she was enjoined to provide me with bed, fire, and lights. Armed with this billeting-paper and accompanied by my servant, a private in the Suffolks, who was carrying my kit, I knocked at the door of No. 131, affecting an indifference to my reception which I did not feel. It seemed to me that a rate-collector, presenting a demand note, could have boasted a more graceful errand. The door opened and an old lady in a black silk gown inquired, ”Qu'est-ce que vous voulez, M'sieu'?” I presented my billeting-paper with a bow. Her waist was girt with a kind of bombardier's girdle from which hung a small armoury of steel implements and leather scabbards: scissors, spectacle case, a bunch of keys, a b.u.t.ton-hook, and other more or less intimidating things. ”Jeanne,” she called in a quavering voice, and as the _bonne_ appeared, tying her ap.r.o.n-strings, they read the billeting-paper together, the one looking over the shoulder of the other, Madame reading the words as a child reads, and as though she were speaking to herself. The paper shook in her tremulous hands, and I could see that she was very old. It was obvious that my appearance in that quiet household was as agitating as it was unexpected. ”Et votre ordonnance?” she asked, with a glance at my servant. ”Non, il dort dans la caserne.” ”Bien!” she said, and with a smile made me welcome.
It was soon evident that, my credentials being once established, I was to be regarded as a member of the household, and nothing would satisfy Madame but that I should be a.s.sured of this. Having shown me my bedroom, with its pompous bed draped with a tent of curtains, she took me on a tour of her _menage_. I was conducted into the kitchen, bright with copper pans and the _marmite_--it was as sweet and clean as a dairy; the resources of the still-room were displayed to me, and the confitures and spices were not more remarkable than the domestic pharmacy in which the herbs of the field had been distilled by Madame's own hands to yield their peculiar virtues, rue for liver, calamint for cholera, plantain for the kidneys, fennel for indigestion, elderberry for sore throat, and dandelion for affections of the blood. Then I was shown the oak presses full of linen white as snow and laid up in lavender. This inventory being concluded, I was presented with a key of the front door to mark my admission into the freedom of the house, and invited to take a gla.s.s of Burgundy while Sykes was unpacking my kit upstairs.
Madame, it seemed, was a widow of eighty-five years of age, without issue, and if her eyes were dim and her natural force abated, her teeth, as she proudly told me, were her own. She obviously belonged to that _rentier_ cla.s.s who spend the evening of their days in the quiet town which serves as G.H.Q.--a town which has a kind of faded gentility, and which, behind its inscrutable house-fronts, conceals a good deal of quiet opulence in the matter of old china, silver, and oak. In her youth Madame had kept a _pension_ and had had English demoiselles among her charges. She had never been to England but she had heard of ”Hyde Park.”
Did I know it? She received my a.s.surance with obvious gratification as though it established a personal intimacy between us. ”Avez-vous tue des Allemands?” My negative answer left her disappointed but hopeful.
”La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?” interjected the _bonne_, who, I afterwards found, had a husband at the war. Those interrogatories were to become very familiar to me. Every evening, when I returned from my visits to Divisional and Brigade Headquarters, mistress and servant always put me through the same catechism:
”Avez-vous tue des Allemands?”
”La guerre, quand finira-t-elle?”
The immense seriousness, not to say solicitude, with which these inquiries were addressed to me eventually led me into the most enterprising mendacities. I killed a German every day, greatly to Madame's satisfaction, and my total bag when I came away was sufficiently remarkable to be worth a place in an official _communique_.
I think it gave Madame a feeling of security, and I hoped Jeanne might consider that it appreciably accelerated the end of the war. But ”Guillaume,” as she always called him, was the princ.i.p.al object of Madame's aversion, and she never mentioned the name of the All-Highest without a lethal gesture as she drew her tremulous hand across her throat and uttered the menacing words: ”Couper la gorge.” She often uttered these maledictions to Sykes in the kitchen, as she watched him making the toast for my breakfast, and I have no doubt that the ”Oui, Madame,” with which he invariably a.s.sented, gave her great satisfaction.
Doubtless it made her feel that the heart of the British Army was sound.
Sykes used to study furtively a small book called _French, and how to speak it_, but he was very chary of speaking it, and seemed to prefer a deaf-and-dumb language of his own. But he was naturally a man of few words, and phlegmatic. He described the first battle of Ypres, in which he had been ”wownded,” in exactly twenty-four words, and I could never get any more out of him, though he became comparatively voluble on the subject of his wife at Norwich and the twins. He was an East Anglian, and made four vowels do duty for five, his e's being always p.r.o.nounced as a's; he had done his seven years' ”sarvice” with the colours, and was a reservist; he was an admirable servant--steady, cool, and honest. I imagine he had never acted as servant to any of his regimental officers, for on the first occasion when he brought up my breakfast I was not a little amused to observe that the top of the egg had been carefully removed, the rolls sliced and b.u.t.tered, and the bread and b.u.t.ter cut into slender ”fingers,” presumably for me to dip into the ochreous interior of the egg; it reminded me of my nursery days. Perhaps he was in the habit of doing it for the twins. I gently weaned him from this tender habit. He performed all his duties, such as making my bed, or handing me a letter, with quick automatic movements as though he were presenting arms. Also his face, which was usually expressionless as though his mind were ”at ease,” had a way of suddenly coming to ”attention” when you spoke to him. He had a curious and recondite knowledge of the folk-lore of the British Army, and entertained me at times with stories of ”Kruger's Own,” ”The White s.h.i.+rts,” ”The Dirty Twelfth,” ”The Holy Boys,” ”The Saucy Seventh,” having names for the regiments which you will never find in the _Army List_. In short, he was a survival and in a way a tragic survival. For how many of the old Army are left? I fear very few, and many traditions may have perished with them.
In his solicitude for me Sykes had jealous rivals in Madame and Jeanne.
Madame reserved to herself as her peculiar prerogative the deposit of a hot-water ”bottle” in my bed every night, such a hot-water bottle as I have never seen elsewhere. It reminded me of nothing so much as the barrel of one of the newer machine-guns, being a long fluted cylinder of black steel. This was always borne by Madame every night in ritualistic procession, Jeanne following with a silver candlestick and a night-light. The ceremony concluded with a bow and ”good-night,” two words of which Madame was inordinately proud. She never attained ”good-morning,” but she more than supplied the deficiency of English speech by the grace of her French manners, always entering my room at 8 A.M. as I lay in bed, with the greeting, ”Bon matin, M'sieu', avez-vous bien dormi?” Perhaps I looked, as I felt, embarra.s.sed on the first occasion, for she quickly added in French, ”I am old enough to be your mother”--as indeed she was. She had at once the resignation in repose and the agitation in action of extreme old age. I have seen her dozing in her chair in the salon, as I pa.s.sed through the hall, with her gnarled hands extended on her knees in just that att.i.tude of quiet waiting which one a.s.sociates with the well-known engraving in which Death is figured as the coming of a friend. But when she was on her feet she moved about with a kind of aimless activity, opening drawers and shutting them and reopening them and speaking to herself the while, until Jeanne, catching my puzzled expression, would whisper loudly in my ear with a tolerant smile, ”Elle est tres VIEILLE.” Jeanne had acquired a habit of raising her voice, owing to Madame's deafness, which resulted in her whispers partaking of the phonetic quality of those stage asides which, by a curious convention, while audible at the very back of the dress circle, are quite inaudible to the other characters on the stage. Whether Madame ever overheard these auricular confidences I know not. If she did, I doubt if she regarded them, for she was under the illusion, common to very old people who live in the society of a younger generation and were mature adults when their companions were merely adolescent, that Jeanne, who had entered her service as a child, had never grown up. If Madame seemed ”tres vieille” to Jeanne, it was indisputable that Jeanne continued ”tres jeune” to Madame. She was, indeed, firmly convinced that she was looking after Jeanne, whereas in truth it was Jeanne who looked after her. For Jeanne was at least thirty-five, with a husband at the war, in virtue of whom she enjoyed a separation allowance of one franc a day, and a boy for whom she received ten sous. Her husband, a _pompier_, got nothing. It never occurred to her to regard this provision as inadequate. And she was as capable as she was contented, and sang at her work.
It was often difficult to believe that this quiet backwater was within an hour or two of the trenches. G.H.Q. was indeed situated well back behind ”the Front,” which, however precise the maps in the newspapers may affect to make it, is, like the Equator of our school-books, a more or less ”imaginary line drawn across the earth's surface.” Imaginary because if a line be, as we were taught with painful reiteration, length without breadth, then ”the Front” is not a line at all, much less a straight line in the sense of the shortest distance between two points.
It is not straight, for it curves and sags and has its salients and re-entrant angles; and it is not a line, for it has breadth as well as length. Broadly speaking, the Front extends back to the H.Q. of the armies (to say nothing of the H.Q. of corps, divisions, and brigades), and thence to G.H.Q. itself, which may be regarded as being ”the Back of the Front,” to vary a cla.s.sical expression of _Punch_. The Front is, indeed, to be visualised not as a straight line but as a fully opened fan, the periphery of which is the fire-trenches, the ribs the lines of communication, and the k.n.o.b or knuckle is General Headquarters. When we extend our Front southwards and take over the French trenches we just expand our fan a little more. When we come to make a general advance all along the periphery, the whole fan will be thrust forward, and the knuckle with it, for the relative distances of General Headquarters, and minor Headquarters, from this periphery and from one another are a more or less constant quant.i.ty, being determined by such fixed considerations as the range of modern guns and the mobility of transport.
From G.H.Q., the brain of the Army, the volitional centre of the whole organism, radiate the sensory and motor nerves by which impressions at the Front are registered and plans for action transmitted. It is the home of the Staff, not of the Armies, and contains more ”bra.s.s hats”
than all the other Headquarters put together. Beyond the ”details” in the barracks it contains few of the rank and file, and its big square betrays little of the crowded animation of the towns nearer the fighting line, with their great parks of armoured cars, motor lorries, and ammunition waggons, their filter-carts, and their little cl.u.s.ters and eddies of men resting in billets. The Military Police on point-duty have a comparatively quiet time, although despatch-riders are, of course, for ever whizzing to and fro with messages from and to the Front. It is as full of departmental offices as Whitehall itself--some 153 of them to be exact--each one indicated by a combination of initial letters, for staff officers are men of few words and cogent, and it saves time to say ”O.”
when you mean Operations, ”I.” for Intelligence, ”A.G.” for Adjutant-General; a fas.h.i.+on which is faithfully followed at the other H.Q., for D.A.A.Q.M.G. saves an enormous number of polysyllables.
Hence the proximity of hostilities has left but little outward and visible sign upon the ancient town. The tradesmen have, it is true, made some concessions to our presence, and one remarks the inviting legends ”Top-hole Tea” in the windows of a _patisserie_ and ”High life” over the shop of a tailor. Four of us made a private arrangement with a buxom housewife, whereby, in return for four francs per head a day and the pooling of our rations, she undertook to provide us with lunch and dinner, thereby establis.h.i.+ng a ”Mess” of our own. Many such fraternities there were in the absence of a regular regimental mess. But these arrangements were more private than military, the only obligation on the ordinary householder being the furnis.h.i.+ng of billets. Occasionally the cobbled streets became the scene of an unwonted animation when young French recruits celebrated their call to the colours by marching down the streets arm-in-arm singing ribald songs, or a squad of sullen German prisoners were marched up them on their way to the prison, within which they vanished amid the imprecations of the crowd. One such squad I saw arriving in a motor lorry, from the tailboard of which they jumped down to enter the gates, and one of them, a clumsy fellow of about thirteen stones, landed heavily in his ammunition boots from a height of about five feet on the foot of a British soldier on guard. The latter winced and hastily drew back his foot, but beyond that gave no sign; I wondered whether, had the positions been reversed and the scene laid across the Rhine, a German guard would have exhibited a similar tolerance. I doubt it.