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Title: The New Army in Training

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Release date: November 12, 2016 [eBook #53507]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEW ARMY IN TRAINING ***

                        THE NEW ARMY IN TRAINING


                                   BY

                            RUDYARD KIPLING


                       MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
                      ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
                                  1915

PRICE SIXPENCE NET




                                   I

                            THE MEN AT WORK

    The ore, the furnace and the hammer are all that is needed for a
    sword.—_Native proverb._


This was a cantonment one had never seen before, and the grey-haired
military policeman could give no help.

‘My experience,’ he spoke detachedly, ‘is that you’ll find everything
everywhere. Is it any particular corps you’re looking for?’

‘Not in the least,’ I said.

‘Then you’re all right. You can’t miss getting something.’ He pointed
generally to the North Camp. ‘It’s like floods in a town, isn’t it?’

He had hit the just word. All known marks in the place were submerged by
troops. Parade-grounds to their utmost limits were crowded with them;
rises and sky-lines were furred with them, and the length of the roads
heaved and rippled like bicycle-chains with blocks of men on the move.

The voice of a sergeant in the torment reserved for sergeants at
roll-call boomed across a bunker. He was calling over recruits to a
specialist corps.

‘But I’ve called you once!’ he snapped at a man in leggings.

‘But I’m Clarke Two,’ was the virtuous reply.

‘Oh, you are, are you?’ He pencilled the correction with a scornful
mouth, out of one corner of which he added, ‘“Sloppy” Clarke! You’re all
Clarkes or Watsons to-day. You don’t know your own names. You don’t know
what corps you’re in. (This was bitterly unjust, for they were squinting
up at a biplane.) You don’t know anything.’

‘Mm!’ said the military policeman. ‘The more a man has in his head, the
harder it is for him to manage his carcass—at first. I’m glad I never
was a sergeant. Listen to the instructors! Like rooks, ain’t it?’

There was a mile of sergeants and instructors, varied by company
officers, all at work on the ready material under their hands. They
grunted, barked, yapped, expostulated, and, in rare cases, purred, as
the lines broke and formed and wheeled over the vast maidan. When
companies numbered off one could hear the tone and accent of every walk
in life, and maybe half the counties of England, from the deep-throated
‘Woon’ of the north to the sharp, half-whistled Devonshire ‘Tu.’ And as
the instructors laboured, so did the men, with a passion to learn as
passionately as they were taught.

Presently, in the drift of the foot-traffic down the road, there came
another grey-haired man, one foot in a bright slipper, which showed he
was an old soldier cherishing a sore toe. He drew alongside and
considered these zealous myriads.

‘Good?’ said I, deferentially.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Very good’—then, half to himself: ‘Quite different,
though.’ A pivot-man near us had shifted a little, instead of marking
time, on the wheel. His face clouded, his lips moved. Obviously he was
cursing his own clumsiness.

‘That’s what I meant,’ said the veteran. ‘Innocent! Innocent! Mark you,
they ain’t doin’ it to be done with it and get off. They’re doin’ it
because—because they want to do it.’

‘Wake up! Wake _up_ there, Isherwood!’ This was a young subaltern’s
reminder flung at a back which straightened itself. That one human name
coming up out of all that maze of impersonal manœuvring stuck in the
memory like wreckage on the ocean.

‘An’ it wasn’t ‘ardly even necessary to caution Mister Isherwood,’ my
companion commented. ‘Prob’ly he’s bitterly ashamed of ‘imself.’

I asked a leading question because the old soldier told me that when his
toe was sound, he, too, was a military policeman.

‘Crime? Crime?’ said he. ‘They don’t know what crime is—that lot
don’t—none of ‘em!’ He mourned over them like a benevolent old Satan
looking into a busy Eden, and his last word was ‘Innocent!’

The car worked her way through miles of men—men route-marching, going to
dig or build bridges, or wrestle with stores and transport—four or five
miles of men, and every man with eager eyes. There was no music—not even
drums and fifes. I heard nothing but a distant skirl of the pipes. Trust
a Scot to get his national weapon as long as there is a chief in the
North! Admitting that war is a serious business, specially to the man
who is being fought for, and that it may be right to carry a long face
and contribute to relief funds which should be laid on the National
Debt, it surely could do no harm to cheer the men with a few bands. Half
the money that has been spent in treating, for example....


                           THE NORTH IN BLUE

There was a moor among woods with a pond in a hollow, the centre of a
world of tents whose population was North-Country. One heard it from far
off.

‘Yo’ mun trail t’ pick an’ t’ rifle at t’ same time. Try again,’ said
the instructor.

An isolated company tried again with set seriousness, and yet again.
They were used to the pick—won their living by it, in fact—and so,
favoured it more than the rifle; but miners don’t carry picks at the
trail by instinct, though they can twiddle their rifles as one twiddles
walking-sticks.

They were clad in a blue garb that disguised all contours; yet their
shoulders, backs, and loins could not altogether be disguised, and these
were excellent. Another company, at physical drill in shirt and
trousers, showed what superb material had offered itself to be worked
upon, and how much poise and directed strength had been added to that
material in the past few months. When the New Army gets all its new
uniform, it will gaze at itself like a new Narcissus. But the present
kit is indescribable. That is why, English fashion, it has been made
honourable by its wearers; and our world in the years to come will look
back with reverence as well as affection on those blue slops and that
epileptic cap. One farseeing commandant who had special facilities has
possessed himself of brass buttons, thousands of ‘em, which he has added
to his men’s outfit for the moral effect of (_a_) having something to
clean, and (_b_) of keeping it so. It has paid. The smartest regiment in
the Service could not do itself justice in such garments, but I managed
to get a view of a battalion, coming in from a walk, at a distance which
more or less subdued the—er—uniform, and they moved with the elastic
swing and little quick ripple that means so much. A miner is not
supposed to be as good a marcher as a townsman, but when he gets set to
time and pace and learns due economy of effort, his developed back and
shoulder muscles take him along very handsomely. Another battalion fell
in for parade while I watched, again at a distance. They came to hand
quietly and collectedly enough, and with only that amount of pressing
which is caused by fear of being late. A platoon—or whatever they call
it—was giving the whole of its attention to its signalling instructors,
with the air of men resolved on getting the last flicker of the last
cinema-film for their money. Crime in the military sense they do not
know any more than their fellow-innocents up the road. It is hopeless to
pretend to be other than what one is, because one’s soul in this life is
as exposed as one’s body. It is futile to tell civilian lies—there are
no civilians to listen—and they have not yet learned to tell Service
ones without being detected. It is useless to sulk at any external
condition of affairs, because the rest of the world with which a man is
concerned is facing those identical conditions. There is neither poverty
nor riches, nor any possibility of pride, except in so far as one may do
one’s task a little better than one’s mate.


                        DUTIES AND DEVELOPMENTS

In the point of food they are extremely well looked after, quality and
quantity, wet canteen and dry. Drafts come in all round the clock, and
they have to be fed; late guards and sentries want something hot at odd
times, and the big marquee-canteen is the world’s gathering-place, where
food, life’s first interest to man in hard work, is thoroughly
discussed. They can get outside of a vast o’ vittles. Thus, a contractor
who delivers ten thousand rations a day stands, by deputy at least, in
the presence of just that number of rather fit, long, deep men. They are
what is called ‘independent’—a civilian weakness which they will learn
to blush over in a few months, and to discourage among later recruits;
but they are also very quick to pick up dodges and tricks that make a
man more comfortable in camp life, and their domestic routine runs on
wheels. It must have been hard at first for civilians to see the
necessity for that continuous, apparently persnickety, house-maiding and
‘following-up’ which is vital to the comfort of large bodies of men in
confined quarters. In civil life men leave these things to their
womenfolk, but where women are not, officers, inspecting tents, feet,
and such-like, develop a she-side to their head, and evidently make
their non-commissioned officers and men develop it too. A good soldier
is always a bit of an old maid. But, as I heard a private say to a
sergeant in the matter of some kit chucked into a corner: ‘Yo’ canna
keep owt redd up ony proper gate on a sand-hill.’ To whom his superior
officer: ‘Ah know yo’ canna’, but yo’ mun try, Billy.’

And Heaven knows they are trying hard enough—men, n.c.o.’s, and
officers—with all the masked and undervoiced effort of our peoples when
we are really at work. They stand at the very beginning of things;
creating out of chaos, meeting emergencies as they arise; handicapped in
every direction, and overcoming every handicap by simple goodwill,
humour, self-sacrifice, common-sense, and such trumpery virtues. I
watched their faces in the camp, and at lunch looked down a line of some
twenty men in the mess-tent, wondering how many would survive to see the
full splendour and significance of the work here so nobly begun. But
they were not interested in the future beyond their next immediate job.
They ate quickly and went out to it, and by the time I drove away again
I was overtaking their battalions on the road. Not unrelated units
lugged together for foot-slogging, but real battalions, of a spirit in
themselves which defied even the blue slops—wave after wave of proper
men, with undistracted eyes, who never talked a word about any war. But
not a note of music—and they North-countrymen!




                                   II

                            IRON INTO STEEL

    _Thanda lohā garam lohe ko marta hai_ (Cold iron will cut hot
    iron).


AT the next halt I fell into Scotland—blocks and blocks of it—a world of
precise-spoken, thin-lipped men, with keen eyes. They gave me directions
which led by friendly stages to the heart of another work of creation
and a huge drill-shed where the miniature rifles were busy. Few things
are duller than Morris-tube practice in the shed, unless it be judging
triangles of error against blank-walls. I thought of the military
policeman with the sore toe; for these ‘innocents’ were visibly enjoying
both games. They sighted over the sand-bags with the gravity of
surveyors, while the instructors hurled knowledge at them like
sling-stones.

‘Man, d’ye see your error? Step here, man, and I’ll show ye.’ Teacher
and taught glared at each other like theologians in full debate; for
this is the Scot’s way of giving and getting knowledge.

At the miniature targets squad after squad rose from beside their
deadly-earnest instructors, gathered up their target-cards, and
whisperingly compared them, five heads together under a window.

‘Aye, that was where I loosed too soon.’ ‘I misdoubt I took too much o’
the foresight.’ Not a word of hope and comfort in their achievements.
Nothing but calvinistic self-criticism.

These men ran a little smaller than the North-country folk down the
road, but in depth of chest, girth of fore-arm, biceps, and
neck-measurement they were beautifully level and well up; and the squads
at bayonet-practice had their balance, drive, and recover already. As
the light failed one noticed the whites of their eyes turning towards
their instructors. It reminded one that there is always a touch of the
cateran in the most docile Scot, even as the wolf persists in every dog.

‘And what about crime?’ I demanded.

There was none. They had not joined to play the fool. Occasionally a few
unstable souls who have mistaken their vocation try to return to civil
life by way of dishonourable discharge, and think it ‘funny’ to pile up
offences. The New Army has no use for those people either, and attends
to them on what may be called ‘democratic lines,’ which is all the same
as the old barrack-room court-martial. Nor does it suffer fools gladly.
There is no time to instruct them. They go to other spheres.

There was, or rather is, a man who intends to join a certain battalion.
He joined it once, scraped past the local doctor, and was drafted into
the corps, only to be hove out for varicose veins. He went back to his
accommodating doctor, repeated the process, and was again rejected. They
are waiting for him now in his third incarnation; both sides are equally
determined. And there was another Scot who joined, served awhile, and
left, as he might have left a pit or a factory. Somehow it occurred to
him that explanations were required, so he wrote to his commanding
officer from his home address and asked him what he recommended him to
do. The C.O., to his infinite credit, wrote back: ‘Suppose you rejoin,’
which the man did, and no more said. His punishment, of course, will
come to him when he realises what he has done. If he does not then
perish in his self-contempt (he has a good conceit of himself) he will
make one first-rate non-commissioned officer.


                           WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

I had the luck to meet a Sergeant-Major, who was the Sergeant-Major of
one’s dreams. He had just had sure information that the kilts for his
battalion were coming in a few days, so, after three months’ hard work,
life smiled upon him. From kilts one naturally went on to the pipes. The
battalion had its pipes—a very good set. How did it get them? Well,
there was, of course, the Duke. They began with him. And there was a
Scots lord concerned with the regiment. And there was a leddy of a
certain clan connected with the battalion. Hence the pipes. Could
anything be simpler or more logical? And when the kilts came the men
would be different creatures. Were they good men, I asked. ‘Yes. Verra
good. Wha’s to mislead ‘em?’ said he.

‘Old soldiers,’ I suggested, meanly enough. ‘Rejoined privates of long
ago.’

‘Ay, there might have been a few such in the beginning, but they’d be
more useful in the Special Reserve Battalions. Our boys are good boys,
but, ye’ll understand, they’ve to be handled—just handled a little.’
Then a subaltern came in, loaded with regimental forms, and visibly
leaning on the Sergeant-Major, who explained, clarified, and referred
them on the proper quarters.

‘Does the work come back to you?’ I asked, for he had been long in
pleasant civil employ.

‘Ay. It does that. It just does that.’ And he addressed the fluttering
papers, lists, and notes, with the certainty of an old golfer on a
well-known green.

Squads were at bayonet practice in the square. (They like bayonet
practice, especially after looking at pictures in the illustrated
dailies.) A new draft was being introduced to its rifles. The rest were
getting ready for evening parade. They were all in khaki, so one could
see how they had come on in the last ten weeks. It was a result the
meekest might have been proud of, but the New Army does not cultivate
useless emotions. Their officers and their instructors worked over them
patiently and coldly and repeatedly, with their souls in the job: and
with their soul, mind, and body in the same job the men took—soaked
up—the instruction. And that seems to be the note of the New Army.


                     WHAT THE ARMY DOES AND THINKS

They have joined for good reason. For that reason they sleep
uncomplainingly double thick on barrack floors, or lie like herrings in
the tents and sing hymns and other things when they are flooded out.
They walk and dig half the day or all the night as required; they
wear—though they will not eat—anything that is issued to them; they make
themselves an organised and kindly life out of a few acres of dirt and a
little canvas; they keep their edge and anneal their discipline under
conditions that would depress a fox-terrier and disorganise a champion
football team. They ask nothing in return save work and equipment. And
being what they are, they thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoy what they are
doing; and they purpose to do much more.

But they also think. They think it vile that so many unmarried young men
who are not likely to be affected by Government allowances should be so
shy about sharing their life. They discuss these young men and their
womenfolk by name, and imagine rude punishments for them, suited to
their known characters. They discuss, too, their elders who in time past
warned them of the sin of soldiering. These men, who live honourably and
simply under the triple vow of Obedience, Temperance, and Poverty,
recall, not without envy, the sort of life which well-kept moralists
lead in the unpicketed, un-sentried towns; and it galls them that such
folk should continue in comfort and volubility at the expense of good
men’s lives, or should profit greasily at the end of it all. They stare
hard, even in their blue slops, at white-collared, bowler-hatted young
men, who, by the way, are just learning to drop their eyes under that
gaze. In the third-class railway carriages they hint that they would
like explanations from the casual ‘nut,’ and they explain to him wherein
his explanations are unconvincing. And when they are home on leave, the
slack-jawed son of the local shop-keeper, and the rising nephew of the
big banker, and the dumb but cunning carter’s lad receive instruction or
encouragement suited to their needs and the nation’s. The older men and
the officers will tell you that if the allowances are made more liberal
we shall get all the men we want. But the younger men of the New Army do
not worry about allowances—or, for that matter, make ‘em!

There is a gulf already opening between those who have joined and those
who have not; but we shall not know the width and the depth of that gulf
till the war is over. The wise youth is he who jumps it now and lands in
safety among the trained and armed men.




                                  III

                            GUNS AND SUPPLY

    Under all and after all the Wheel carries everything.—_Proverb._


One had known the place for years as a picturesque old house, standing
in a peaceful park; had watched the growth of certain young oaks along a
new-laid avenue, and applauded the owner’s enterprise in turning a
stretch of pasture to plough. There are scores of such estates in
England which the motorist, through passing so often, comes to look upon
almost as his own. In a single day the brackened turf between the oaks
and the iron road-fence blossomed into tents, and the drives were all
cut up with hoofs and wheels. A little later, one’s car sweeping home of
warm September nights was stopped by sentries, who asked her name and
business; for the owner of that retired house and discreetly wooded park
had gone elsewhere in haste, and his estate was taken over by the
military.

Later still, one met men and horses arguing with each other for miles
about that countryside; or the car would be flung on her brakes by
artillery issuing from cross-lanes—clean batteries jingling off to their
work on the Downs, and hungry ones coming back to meals. Every day
brought the men and the horses and the weights behind them to a better
understanding, till in a little while the car could pass a quarter of a
mile of them without having to hoot more than once.

‘Why are you so virtuous?’ she asked of a section encountered at a blind
and brambly corner. ‘Why do you obtrude your personality less than an
average tax-cart?’

‘Because,’ said a driver, his arm flung up to keep the untrimmed hedge
from sweeping his cap off, ‘because those are our blessed orders. We
don’t do it for love.’

No one accuses the Gunner of maudlin affection for anything except his
beasts and his weapons. He hasn’t the time. He serves at least three
jealous gods—his horse and all its saddlery and harness; his gun, whose
least detail of efficiency is more important than men’s lives; and, when
these have been attended to, the never-ending mystery of his art
commands him.

It was a wettish, windy day when I visited the so-long-known house and
park. Cock pheasants ducked in and out of trim rhododendron clumps, neat
gates opened into sacredly preserved vegetable gardens, the
many-coloured leaves of specimen trees pasted themselves stickily
against sodden tent walls, and there was a mixture of circus smells from
the horse-lines and the faint, civilised breath of chrysanthemums in the
potting sheds. The main drive was being relaid with a foot of flint; the
other approaches were churned and pitted under the gun wheels and heavy
supply wagons. Great breadths of what had been well-kept turf between
unbrowsed trees were blanks of slippery brown wetness, dotted with
picketed horses and field-kitchens. It was a crazy mixture of stark
necessity and manicured luxury, all cheek by jowl, in the
undiscriminating rain.


                           SERVICE CONDITIONS

The cook-houses, store-rooms, forges, and workshops were collections of
tilts, poles, rick-cloths, and odd lumber, beavered together as on
service. The officers’ mess was a thin, soaked marquee.

Less than a hundred yards away were dozens of vacant, well-furnished
rooms in the big brick house, of which the Staff furtively occupied one
corner. There was accommodation for very many men in its stables and
out-houses alone; or the whole building might have been gutted and
rearranged for barracks twice over in the last three months.

Scattered among the tents were rows of half-built tin sheds, the
ready-prepared lumber and the corrugated iron lying beside them, waiting
to be pieced together like children’s toys. But there were no workmen. I
was told that they had come that morning, but had knocked off because it
was wet.

‘I see. And where are the batteries?’ I demanded.

‘Out at work, of course. They’ve been out since seven.’

‘How shocking! In this dreadful weather, too!’

‘They took some bread and cheese with them. They’ll be back about
dinner-time if you care to wait. Here’s one of our field-kitchens.’

Batteries look after their own stomachs, and are not catered for by
contractors. The cook-house was a wagon-tilt. The wood, being damp,
smoked a good deal. One thought of the wide, adequate kitchen ranges and
the concrete passages of the service quarters in the big house just
behind. One even dared to think Teutonically of the perfectly good
panelling and the thick hard-wood floors that could——

‘Service conditions, you see,’ said my guide, as the cook inspected the
baked meats and the men inside the wagon-tilt grated the carrots and
prepared the onions. It was old work to them after all these months—done
swiftly, with the clean economy of effort that camp life teaches.

‘What are these lads when they’re at home?’ I inquired.

‘Londoners chiefly—all sorts and conditions.’

The cook in shirt sleeves made another investigation, and sniffed
judicially. He might have been cooking since the Peninsular. He looked
at his watch and across towards the park gates. He was responsible for
one hundred and sixty rations, and a battery has the habit of saying
quite all that it thinks of its food.

‘How often do the batteries go out?’ I continued.

‘’Bout five days a week. You see, we’re being worked up a little.’

‘And have they got plenty of ground to work over?’

‘Oh—yes-s.’

‘What’s the difficulty this time? Birds?’

‘No; but we got orders the other day not to go over a golf-course. That
rather knocks the bottom out of tactical schemes.’

Perfect shamelessness, like perfect virtue, is impregnable; and, after
all, the lightnings of this war, which have brought out so much resolve
and self-sacrifice, must show up equally certain souls and institutions
that are irredeemable.

The weather took off a little before noon. The carpenters could have put
in a good half-day’s work on the sheds, and even if they had been rained
upon they had roofs with fires awaiting their return. The batteries had
none of these things.


                           THE GUNNER AT HOME

They came in at last far down the park, heralded by that unmistakable
half-grumble, half-grunt of guns on the move. The picketed horses heard
it first, and one of them neighed long and loud, which proved that he
had abandoned civilian habits. Horses in stables and mews seldom do more
than snicker, even when they are halves of separated pairs. But these
gentlemen had a corporate life of their own now, and knew what ‘pulling
together’ means.

When a battery comes into camp it ‘parks’ all six guns at the appointed
place, side by side in one mathematically straight line, and the
accuracy of the alignment is, like ceremonial-drill with the Foot, a
fair test of its attainments. The ground was no treat for parking.
Specimen trees and draining ditches had to be avoided and circumvented.
The gunners, their reins, the guns, the ground, were equally wet, and
the slob dropped away like gruel from the brake-shoes. And they were
Londoners—clerks, mechanics, shop assistants, and delivery men—anything
and everything that you please. But they were all home and at home in
their saddles and seats. They said nothing; their officers said little
enough to them. They came in across what had once been turf; wheeled
with tight traces; halted, unhooked; the wise teams stumped off to their
pickets, and, behold, the six guns were left precisely where they should
have been left to the fraction of an inch. You could see the wind
blowing the last few drops of wet from each leather muzzle-cover at
exactly the same angle. It was all old known evolutions, taken
unconsciously in the course of their day’s work by men well abreast of
it.

‘Our men have one advantage,’ said a voice. ‘As Territorials they were
introduced to unmade horses once a year at training. So they’ve never
been accustomed to made horses.’

‘And what do the horses say about it all?’ I asked, remembering what I
had seen on the road in the early days.

‘They said a good deal at first, but our chaps could make allowances for
‘em. They know now.’

Allah never intended the Gunner to talk. His own arm does that for him.
The batteries offsaddled in silence, though one noticed on all sides
little quiet caresses between man and beast—affectionate nuzzlings and
nose-slappings. Surely the Gunner’s relation to his horse is more
intimate even than the cavalryman’s; for a lost horse only turns cavalry
into infantry, but trouble in a gun team may mean death all round. And
this is the Gunner’s war. The young wet officers said so joyously as
they passed to and fro picking up scandal about breast-straps and
breechings, examining the collars of ammunition-wagon teams, and
listening to remarks on shoes. Local blacksmiths, assisted by the
battery itself, do the shoeing. There are master smiths and important
farriers, who have cheerfully thrown up good wages to help the game, and
their horses reward them by keeping fit. A fair proportion of the horses
are aged—there was never a Gunner yet satisfied with his team or its
rations till he had left the battery—but they do their work as
steadfastly and wholeheartedly as the men. I am persuaded the horses
like being in society and working out their daily problems of draught
and direction. The English, and Londoners particularly, are the kindest
and most reasonable of folk with animals. If it were not our business
strictly to underrate ourselves for the next few years, one would say
that the Territorial batteries had already done wonders. But perhaps it
is better to let it all go with the grudging admission wrung out of a
wringing wet bombardier, ‘Well, it isn’t so dam’ bad—considerin’.’

I left them taking their dinner in mess tins to their tents, with a
strenuous afternoon’s cleaning-up ahead of them. The big park held some
thousands of men. I had seen no more than a few hundreds, and had missed
the howitzer-batteries after all.

A cock pheasant chaperoned me down the drive, complaining loudly that
where he was used to walk with his ladies under the beech trees, some
unsporting people had built a miniature landscape with tiny villages,
churches, and factories, and came there daily to point cannon at it.

‘Keep away from that place,’ said I, ‘or you’ll find yourself in a
field-kitchen.’

‘Not me!’ he crowed. ‘I’m as sacred as golf-courses.’


                        MECHANISM AND MECHANICS

There was a little town a couple of miles down the road where one used
to lunch in the old days, and had the hotel to oneself. Now there are
six ever-changing officers in billet there, and the astonished houses
quiver all day to traction engines and high-piled lorries. A unit of the
Army Service Corps and some mechanical transport lived near the station,
and fed the troops for twenty miles around.

‘Are your people easy to find?’ I asked of a wandering private, with the
hands of a sweep, the head of a Christian among lions, and suicide in
his eye.

‘Well, the A.S.C. are in the Territorial Drill Hall for one thing; and
for another you’re likely to hear _us_! There’s some motors come in from
Bulford.’ He snorted and passed on, smelling of petrol.

The drill-shed was peace and comfort. The A.S.C. were getting ready
there for pay-day and for a concert that evening. Outside in the wind
and the occasional rain-spurts, life was different. The Bulford motors
and some other crocks sat on a side-road between what had been the local
garage and a newly-erected workshop of creaking scaffold-poles and
bellying slatting rick-cloths, where a forge glowed and general repairs
were being effected. Beneath the motors men lay on their backs and
called their friends to pass them spanners, or, for pity’s sake, to
shove another sack under their mud-wreathed heads.

A corporal, who had been nine years a fitter and seven in a city garage,
briefly and briskly outlined the more virulent diseases that develop in
Government rolling-stock. (I heard quite a lot about Bulford.) Hollow
voices from beneath eviscerated gear-boxes confirmed him. We withdrew to
the shelter of the rick-cloth workshop—that corporal; the sergeant who
had been a carpenter, with a business of his own, and, incidentally, had
served through the Boer War; another sergeant who was a member of the
Master Builders’ Association; and a private who had also been fitter,
chauffeur, and a few other things. The third sergeant, who kept a
poultry-farm in Surrey, had some duty elsewhere.

A man at a carpenter’s bench was finishing a spoke for a newly-painted
cart. He squinted along it.

‘That’s funny,’ said the master builder. ‘Of course in his own business
he’d chuck his job sooner than do wood-work. But it’s _all_ funny.’

‘What I grudge,’ a sergeant struck in, ‘is havin’ to put mechanics to
loading and unloading beef. That’s where modified conscription for the
beauties that won’t roll up ‘ld be useful to _us_. We want hewers of
wood, we do. And I’d hew ‘em!’

‘_I_ want that file.’ This was a private in a hurry, come from beneath
an unspeakable Bulford. Some one asked him musically if he ‘would tell
his wife in the morning who he was with to-night.’

‘You’ll find it in the tool-chest,’ said the sergeant. It was his own
sacred tool-chest which he had contributed to the common stock.

‘And what sort of men have you got in this unit?’ I asked.

‘Every sort you can think of. There isn’t a thing you couldn’t have made
here if you wanted to. But’—the corporal, who had been a fitter, spoke
with fervour—‘you can’t expect us to make big-ends, can you? That
five-ton Bulford lorry out there in the wet——’

‘And she isn’t the worst,’ said the master builder. ‘But it’s all part
of the game. _And_ so funny when you come to think of it. Me painting
carts, and certificated plumbers loading frozen beef!’

‘What about the discipline?’ I asked.

The corporal turned a fitter’s eye on me. ‘The mechanism is the
discipline,’ said he, with most profound truth, ‘Jockeyin’ a sick car on
the road is discipline, too. _What_ about the discipline?’ He turned to
the sergeant with the carpenter’s chest. There was one sergeant of
Regulars, with twenty years’ service behind him and a knowledge of human
nature. He struck in.

‘_You_ ought to know. You’ve just been made corporal,’ said that
sergeant of Regulars.

‘Well, there’s so much which everybody knows has got to be done
that—that—why, we all turn in and do it,’ quoth the corporal, ‘_I_ don’t
have any trouble with my lot.’

‘Yes; that’s how the case stands,’ said the sergeant of Regulars. ‘Come
and see our stores.’

They were beautifully arranged in a shed which felt like a monastery
after the windy, clashing world without; and the young private who acted
as checker—he came from some railway office—had the thin, keen face of
the cleric.

‘We’re in billets in the town,’ said the sergeant who had been a
carpenter. ‘But I’m a married man. I shouldn’t care to have men billeted
on us at home, an’ I don’t want to inconvenience other people. So I’ve
knocked up a bunk for myself on the premises. It’s handier to the
stores, too.’


                           ‘THE HUMOUR OF IT’

We entered what had been the local garage. The mechanical transport were
in full possession, tinkering the gizzards of more cars. We discussed
chewed-up gears (samples to hand), and the civil population’s old-time
views of the military. The corporal told a tale of a clergyman in a
Midland town who, only a year ago, on the occasion of some manœuvres,
preached a sermon warning his flock to guard their womenfolk against the
soldiers.

‘And when you think—when you _know_,’ said the corporal, ‘what life in
those little towns really is!’ He whistled.

‘See that old landau,’ said he, opening the door of an ancient wreck
jammed against a wall. ‘That’s two of our chaps’ dressing-room. They
don’t care to be billeted, so they sleep ‘tween the landau and the wall.
It’s handier for their work, too. Work comes in at all hours. I wish I
was cavalry. There’s some use in cursing a horse.’

Truly, it’s an awful thing to belong to a service where speech brings no
alleviation.

‘_You!_’ A private with callipers turned from the bench by the window.
‘You’d die outside of a garage. But what you said about civilians and
soldiers is all out of date now.’

The sergeant of Regulars permitted himself a small, hidden smile. The
private with the callipers had been some twelve weeks a soldier.

‘I don’t say it isn’t,’ said the corporal ‘I’m saying what it used to
be.’

‘We-ell,’ the private screwed up the callipers, ‘didn’t you feel a
little bit that way yourself—when you were a civilian?’

‘I—I don’t think I did.’ The corporal was taken aback. ‘I don’t think I
ever thought about it.’

‘Ah! _There_ you are!’ said the private, very drily.

Some one laughed in the shadow of the landau dressing-room. ‘Anyhow,
we’re all in it now, Private Percy,’ said a voice.

There must be a good many thousand conversations of this kind being held
all over England nowadays. Our breed does not warble much about
patriotism or Fatherland, but it has a wonderful sense of justice, even
when its own shortcomings are concerned.

We went over to the drill-shed to see the men paid.

The first man I ran across there was a sergeant who had served in the
Mounted Infantry in the South African picnic that we used to call a war.
He had been a private chauffeur for some years—long enough to catch the
professional look, but was joyously reverting to service type again.

The men lined up, were called out, saluted emphatically at the
pay-table, and fell back with their emoluments. They smiled at each
other.

‘An’ it’s _all_ so funny,’ murmured the master builder in my ear. ‘About
a quarter—no, less than a quarter—of what one ‘ud be making on one’s
own!’

‘Fifty bob a week, cottage, and all found, I was. An’ only two cars to
look after,’ said a voice behind. ‘An’ if I’d been asked—simply
_asked_—to lie down in the mud all the afternoon——!’ The speaker looked
at his wages with awe. Some one wanted to know, _sotto voce_, if ‘that
was union rates,’ and the grin spread among the uniformed experts. The
joke, you will observe, lay in situations thrown up, businesses
abandoned, and pleasant prospects cut short at the nod of duty.

‘Thank Heaven!’ said one of them at last, ‘it’s too dark to work on
those blessed Bulfords any more to-day. We’ll get ready for the
concert.’

But it was not too dark, half an hour later, for my car to meet a big
lorry storming back in the wind and the wet from the northern camps. She
gave me London allowance—half one inch between hub and hub—swung her
corner like a Brooklands professional, changed gear for the uphill with
a sweet click, and charged away. For aught I knew, she was driven by an
ex-‘fifty-bob-a-week-a-cottage-and-all-found-‘er, who next month might
be dodging shells with her and thinking it ‘_all_ so funny.’

Horse, Foot, even the Guns may sometimes get a little rest, but so long
as men eat thrice a day there is no rest for the Army Service Corps.
They carry the campaign on their all-sustaining backs.




                                   IV

                           CANADIANS IN CAMP

    Before you hit the buffalo, find out where the rest of the herd
    is.—_Proverb._


This particular fold of downs behind Salisbury might have been a hump of
prairie near Winnipeg. The team that came over the rise, widely spaced
between pole-bar and whiffletrees, were certainly children of the
prairie. They shied at the car. Their driver asked them dispassionately
what they thought they were doing, anyway. They put their wise heads
together, and did nothing at all. Yes. Oh, yes! said the driver. They
were Western horses. They weighed better than twelve hundred apiece. He
himself was from Edmonton way. The Camp? Why, the camp was right ahead
along up this road. No chance to miss it, and, ‘Sa-ay! Look out for our
lorries!’

A fleet of them hove in sight going at the rate of knots, and keeping
their left with a conscientiousness only learned when you come out of a
country where nearly all the Provinces (except British Columbia) keep to
the right. Every line of them, from steering-wheel to brake-shoes,
proclaimed their nationality. Three perfectly efficient young men who
were sprinkling a golf-green with sifted earth ceased their duties to
stare at them. Two riding-boys (also efficient) on racehorses, their
knees under their chins and their saddles between their horses’ ears,
cantered past on the turf. The rattle of the motors upset their
catsmeat, so one could compare their style of riding with that of an
officer loping along to overtake a string of buck-wagons that were
trotting towards the horizon. The riding-boys have to endure sore
hardship nowadays. One gentleman has already complained that his
‘private gallops’ are being cut up by gun-wheels and ‘irremediably
ruined.’

Then more lorries, contractors’ wagons, and increasing vileness of the
battered road-bed, till one slid through a rude gate into a new world,
of canvas as far as the eye could reach, and beyond that outlying clouds
of tents. It is not a contingent that Canada has sent, but an
army—horse, foot, guns, engineers, and all details, fully equipped.
Taking that army’s strength at thirty-three thousand, and the Dominion’s
population at eight million, the camp is Canada on the scale of one to
two hundred and forty—an entire nation unrolled across a few square
miles of turf and tents and huts.

Here I could study at close hand ‘a Colony’ yearning to shake off ‘the
British yoke.’ For, beyond question, they yearned—the rank and file
unreservedly, the officers with more restraint but equal fervour—and the
things they said about the Yoke were simply lamentable.

From Nova Scotia to Victoria, and every city, township,
distributing-centre, and divisional point between; from sub-tropical
White River and sultry Jackfish to the ultimate north that lies up
beside Alaska; from Kootenay, and Nelson of the fruit-farms, to Prince
Edward Island, where motors are not allowed; they yearned to shake it
off, with the dust of England from their feet, ‘at once and some time
before that.’

I had been warned that when Armageddon came the ‘Colonies’ would ‘revolt
against the Mother Country as one man’; but I had no notion I should
ever see the dread spectacle with my own eyes—or the ‘one man’ so tall!

Joking apart, the Canadian Army wants to get to work. It admits that
London is ‘some city,’ but says it did not take the trip to visit London
only. Armageddon, which so many people in Europe knew was bound to come,
has struck Canada out of the blue, like a noonday murder in a small
town. How will they feel when they actually view some of the destruction
in France, these men who are used to making and owning their homes? And
what effect will it have on their land’s outlook and development for the
next few generations? Older countries may possibly slip back into some
sort of toleration. New peoples, in their first serious war, like girls
in their first real love-affair, neither forget nor forgive. That is why
it pays to keep friends with the young.

And such young! They ran inches above all normal standards, not in a few
companies or battalions, but through the whole corps; and it was not
easy to pick out foolish or even dull faces among them. Details going
about their business through the camp’s much mud; defaulters on fatigue;
orderlies, foot and mounted; the procession of lorry-drivers; companies
falling in for inspection; battalions parading; brigades moving off for
manœuvres; batteries clanking in from the ranges; they were all supple,
free, and intelligent; and moved with a lift and a drive that made one
sing for joy.


                              CAMP GOSSIP

Only a few months ago that entire collection poured into Valcartier camp
in pink shirts and straw hats, desperately afraid they might not be in
time. Since then they have been taught several things. Notably, that the
more independent the individual soldier, the more does he need
forethought and endless care when he is in bulk.

‘Just because we were all used to looking after ourselves in civil
life,’ said an officer, ‘we used to send parties out without rations.
And the parties used to go, too! And we expected the boys to look after
their own feet. But we’re wiser now.’

‘They’re learning the same thing in the New Army,’ I said. ‘Company
officers have to be taught to be mothers and housekeepers and sanitary
inspectors. Where do your men come from?’

‘Tell me some place that they don’t come from,’ said he, and I could
not. The men had rolled up from everywhere between the Arctic circle and
the border, and I was told that those who could not get into the first
contingent were moving heaven and earth and local politicians to get
into the second.

‘There’s some use in politics now,’ that officer reflected. ‘But it’s
going to thin the voting-lists at home.’

A good many of the old South African crowd (the rest are coming) were
present and awfully correct. Men last met as privates between De Aar and
Belmont were captains and majors now, while one lad who, to the best of
his ability, had painted Cape Town pink in those fresh years, was a grim
non-commissioned officer worth his disciplined weight in dollars.

‘_I_ didn’t remind Dan of old times when he turned up at Valcartier
disguised as a respectable citizen,’ said my informant. ‘I just roped
him in for my crowd. He’s a father to ‘em. _He_ knows.’

‘And have you many cheery souls coming on?’ I asked.

‘Not many; but it’s always the same with a first contingent. You take
everything that offers and weed the bravoes out later.’

‘_We_ don’t weed,’ said an officer of artillery. ‘Any one who has had
his passage paid for by the Canadian Government stays with us till he
eats out of our hand. _And_ he does. They make the best men in the long
run,’ he added. I thought of a friend of mine who is now disabusing two
or three ‘old soldiers’ in a Service corps of the idea that they can run
the battalion, and I laughed. The Gunner was right. ‘Old soldiers,’
after a little loving care, become valuable and virtuous.

A company of Foot was drawn up under the lee of a fir plantation behind
us. They were a miniature of their army as their army was of their
people, and one could feel the impact of strong personality almost like
a blow.

‘If you’d believe it,’ said a cavalryman, ‘we’re forbidden to cut into
that little wood-lot, yonder! Not one stick of it may we have! We could
make shelters for our horses in a day out of that stuff.’

‘But it’s timber!’ I gasped. ‘Sacred, tame trees!’

‘Oh, we know what wood is! They issue it to us by the pound. Wood to
burn—by the pound! What’s wood for, anyway?’

‘And when do you think we shall be allowed to go?’ some one asked, not
for the first time.

‘By and by,’ said I. ‘And then you’ll have to detail half your army to
see that your equipment isn’t stolen from you.’

‘What!’ cried an old Strathcona Horse. He looked anxiously towards the
horse-lines.

‘I was thinking of your mechanical transport and your travelling
workshops and a few other things that you’ve got.’

I got away from those large men on their windy hill-top, and slid
through mud and past mechanical transport and troops untold towards Lark
Hill. On the way I passed three fresh-cut pine sticks, laid and notched
one atop of the other to shore up a caving bank. Trust a Canadian or a
beaver within gunshot of standing timber!


                        ENGINEERS AND APPLIANCES

Lark Hill is where the Canadian Engineers live, in the midst of a
profligate abundance of tools and carts, pontoon wagons, field
telephones, and other mouth-watering gear. Hundreds of tin huts are
being built there, but quite leisurely, by contract. I noticed three
workmen, at eleven o’clock of that Monday forenoon, as drunk as Davy’s
sow, reeling and shouting across the landscape. So far as I could
ascertain, the workmen do not work extra shifts, nor even, but I hope
this is incorrect, on Saturday afternoons; and I think they take their
full hour at noon these short days.

Every camp throws up men one has met at the other end of the earth; so,
of course, the Engineer C.O. was an ex-South African Canadian.

‘Some of our boys are digging a trench over yonder,’ he said. ‘I’d like
you to look at ‘em.’

The boys seemed to average five feet ten inches, with thirty-seven inch
chests. The soil was unaccommodating chalk.

‘What are you?’ I asked of the first pickaxe.

‘Private.’

‘Yes, but before that?’

‘McGill (University understood). Nineteen twelve.’

‘And that boy with the shovel?’

‘Queen’s, I think. No; he’s Toronto.’

And thus the class in applied geology went on half up the trench, under
supervision of a Corporal-Bachelor-of-Science with a most scientific
biceps. They were young; they were beautifully fit, and they were all
truly thankful that they lived in these high days.

Sappers, like sergeants, take care to make themselves comfortable. The
corps were dealing with all sorts of little domestic matters in the way
of arrangements for baths, which are cruelly needed, and an apparatus
for depopulating shirts, which is even more wanted. Healthy but unwashen
men sleeping on the ground are bound to develop certain things which at
first disgust them, but later are accepted as an unlovely part of the
game. It would be quite easy to make bakehouses and super-heated steam
fittings to deal with the trouble. The huts themselves stand on brick
piers, from one to three feet above ground. The board floors are not
grooved or tongued, so there is ample ventilation from beneath; but they
have installed decent cooking ranges and gas, and the men have already
made themselves all sorts of handy little laboursaving gadgets. They
would do this if they were in the real desert. Incidentally, I came
across a delightful bit of racial instinct. A man had been told to knock
up a desk out of broken packing-cases. There is only one type of desk in
Canada—the roller-top, with three shelves each side the knee-hole,
characteristic sloping sides, raised back, and long shelf in front of
the writer. He reproduced it faithfully, barring, of course, the
roller-top; and the thing leaped to the eye out of its English office
surroundings. The Engineers do not suffer for lack of talents. Their
senior officers appear to have been the heads, and their juniors the
assistants, in big concerns that wrestle with unharnessed nature. (There
is a tale of the building of a bridge in Valcartier Camp which is not
bad hearing.) The rank and file include miners; road, trestle, and
bridge men; iron construction men who, among other things, are
steeplejacks; whole castes of such as deal in high explosives for a
living; loco-drivers, superintendents, too, for aught I know, and a
solid packing of selected machinists, mechanics, and electricians.
Unluckily, they were all a foot or so too tall for me to tell them that,
even if their equipment escaped at the front, they would infallibly be
raided for their men.


                        AN UNRELATED DETACHMENT

I left McGill, Queen’s, and Toronto still digging in their trench, which
another undergraduate, mounted and leading a horse, went out of his way
to jump standing. My last glimpse was of a little detachment, with five
or six South African ribbons among them, who were being looked over by
an officer. No one thought it strange that they should have embodied
themselves and crossed the salt seas independently as ‘So-and-So’s
Horse.’ (It is best to travel with a title these days.) Once arrived,
they were not at all particular, except that they meant to join the
Army, and the lonely batch was stating its qualifications as Engineers.

‘They get over any way and every way,’ said my companion. ‘Swimming, I
believe.’

‘But who was the So-and-So that they were christened after?’ I asked.

‘I guess he was the man who financed ‘em or grub-staked ‘em while they
were waiting. He may be one of ‘em in that crowd now; or he may be a
provincial magnate at home getting another bunch together.’


                        THE VANGUARD OF A NATION

Then I went back to the main camp for a last look at that wonderful
army, where the tin-roofed messes take French conversation lessons with
the keen-faced French-Canadian officers, and where one sees
esprit-de-corps in the making. Nowhere is local sentiment stronger than
in Canada. East and West, lake and maritime provinces, prairie and
mountain, fruit district and timber lands—they each thrill to it. The
West keeps one cold blue open-air eye on the townful East. Winnipeg sits
between, posing alternately as sophisticated metropolis and simple
prairie. Alberta, of the thousand horses, looks down from her
high-peaked saddle on all who walk on their feet; and British Columbia
thanks God for an equable climate, and that she is not like Ottawa, full
of politicians and frozen sludge. Quebec, unassailable in her years and
experience, smiles tolerantly on the Nova Scotian, for he has a history
too, and asks Montreal if any good thing can come out of Brandon, Moose
Jaw, or Regina. They discuss each other outrageously, as they know each
other intimately, over four thousand miles of longitude—their fathers,
their families, and all the connections. Which is useful when it comes
to sizing up the merits of a newly-promoted non-commissioned officer or
the capacities of a quarter-master.

As their Army does and suffers, and its record begins to blaze, fierce
pride of regiment will be added to local love and the national pride
that backs and envelops all. But that pride is held in very severe check
now; for they are neither provinces nor tribes but a welded people
fighting in the War of Liberty. They permit themselves to hope that the
physique of their next contingent will not be worse than that of the
present. They believe that their country can send forward a certain
number of men and a certain number behind that, all equipped to a
certain scale. Of discomforts endured, of the long learning and
relearning and waiting on, they say nothing. They do not hint what they
will do when their hour strikes, though they more than hint their
longing for that hour. In all their talk I caught no phrase that could
be twisted into the shadow of a boast or any claim to superiority, even
in respect to their kit and outfit; no word or implication of
self-praise for any sacrifice made or intended. It was their rigid
humility that impressed one as most significant—and, perhaps, most
menacing for such as may have to deal with this vanguard of an armed
Nation.




                                   V

                             INDIAN TROOPS

    _Larai meṅ laddu nahiṅ batte_ (War is not sugar-plums).—_Hindi
    Proverb._


Working from the East to the West of England, through a countryside
alive with troops of all arms, the car came at dusk into a cathedral
town entirely inhabited by one type of regiment. The telegraph-office
was an orderly jam of solid, large, made men, with years of discipline
behind them and the tan of Indian suns on their faces—Englishmen still
so fresh from the troopships that one of them asked me, ‘What’s the day
o’ the month?’ They were advising friends of their arrival in England,
or when they might be expected on short leave at the week’s end; and the
fresh-faced telegraph girls behind the grilles worked with six pairs of
hands apiece and all the goodwill and patience in the world to back
them. That same young woman who, with nothing to do, makes you wait ten
minutes for a penny stamp while she finishes a talk with a lady-friend,
will, at a crisis, go on till she drops, and keep her temper throughout.
‘Well, _if_ that’s her village,’ I heard one of the girls say to an
anxious soul, ‘I tell _you_ that that will be her telegraph-office. You
leave it to me. _She’ll_ get it all right.’

He backed out, and a dozen more quietly took his place. Their regiments
hailed from all the old known stations of the East and beyond that into
the Far East again. They cursed their cool barrack accommodation; they
rejoiced in the keen autumn smells, and paraded the long street all
filled with ‘Europe shops’; while their officers and their officers’
wives, and, I think, mothers who had come down to snatch a glimpse of
their boys, crowded the hotels, and the little unastonished Anglo-Indian
children circulated round the knees of big friends they had made
aboard-ship and asked, ‘Where are you going now?’

One caught scraps of our old gipsy talk—names of boarding-houses,
agents’ addresses: ‘Milly stays with mother, of course.’ ‘I’m taking
Jack down to school to-morrow. It’s past half-term, but that doesn’t
matter nowadays’; and cheery farewells between men and calm-eyed women.
Except for the frocks, it might have been an evening assembly at any
station bandstand in India.

Outside, on the surging pavements, a small boy cried: ‘Paper! Evenin’
paper!’ Then seductively: _’Kargus!_’

‘What?’ I said, thinking my ears had cheated me.

‘_Dekko! Kargus!_’ said he. (’Look here! Paper!’)

‘Why on earth d’you say that?’

‘Because the men like it,’ he replied, and slapped an evening paper (no
change for a penny) into the hand of a man in a helmet.

Who shall say that the English are not adaptable?

The car swam bonnet-deep through a mile of troops; and a mile up the
road one could hear the deep hum of all those crowded streets that the
cathedral bells were chiming over. It was only one small block of
Anglo-India getting ready to take its place in the all-devouring Line.


                               SCREW-GUNS

An hour later at —— (Shall we ever be able to name people and places
outright again?) the wind brought up one whiff—one unmistakable whiff—of
_ghi_. Somewhere among the English pines that, for the moment, pretended
to be the lower slopes of the Dun, there were native troops. A mule
squealed in the dark and set off half-a-dozen others. It was
screw-guns—batteries of them, waiting their turn also at the game.
Morning showed them in their immaculate lines as though they had just
marched in from Jutogh—little, low guns with their ammunition; very big
English gunners in disengaged attitudes which, nevertheless, did not
encourage stray civilians to poke and peer into things; and the native
drivers all busied over their charges. True, the wind was bitter, and
many of the drivers had tied up their heads, but so one does at Quetta
in the cold weather—not to mention Peshawur—and, said a naik of drivers:
‘It is not the cold for which we have no liking. It is the wet. The
English air is good, but water falls at all seasons. Yet
notwithstanding, we of this battery (and, oh, the pride men can throw
into a mere number!) have not lost one mule. Neither at sea nor on land
have we _one_ lost. That can be shown, sahib.’

Then one heard the deep racking tobacco-cough in the lee of a tent where
four or five men—Kangra folk by the look of them—were drinking tobacco
out of a cow’s horn. Their own country’s tobacco, be sure, for English
tobacco.... But there was no need to explain. Who would have dreamed to
smell bazar-tobacco on a south country golf links?

A large proportion of the men are, of course, Sikhs, to whom tobacco is
forbidden; the Havildar Major himself was a Sikh of the Sikhs. He spoke,
of all things in this strange world, of the late Mr. M. McAuliffe’s
monumental book on the Sikh religion, saying, not without warrant, that
McAuliffe Sahib had translated into English much of the Holy Book—the
great Grunth Sahib that lives at Amritzar. He enlarged, too, on the
ancient prophecy among the Sikhs—that a hatted race should some day come
out of the sea and lead them to victory all the earth over. So spoke Bir
Singh, erect and enormous beneath the grey English skies. He hailed from
a certain place called Banalu, near Patiala, where many years ago two
Sikh soldiers executed a striking but perfectly just vengeance on
certain villagers who had oppressed their young brother, a cultivator.
They had gone to the extreme limits of abasement and conciliation. This
failing, they took leave for a week-end and slew the whole tribe of
their enemies. The story is buried in old Government reports, but when
Bir Singh implied that he and his folk were orthodox I had no doubt of
it. And behind him stood another giant, who knew, for his village was
but a few miles up the Shalimar road, every foot of Lahore city. He
brought word that there had been great floods at home, so that the risen
Ravi river had touched the very walls of Runjit Singh’s Fort. And that
was only last rains—and, behold!—here he was now in England waiting
orders to go to this fight which, he understood, was not at all a small
fight, but a fight of fights, in which all the world and ‘our Raj’ was
engaged. The trouble in India was that all the young men—the mere
_jiwans_—wanted to come out at once, which, he said, was manifestly
unjust to older men, who had waited so long. However, merit and patience
had secured their reward, and the battery was here, and it would do the
hot _jiwans_ no harm to stay at home, and be zealous at drill until
orders came for them in their turn. ‘Young men think that everything
good in this world is theirs by right, sahib.’

Then came the big, still English gunners, who are trained to play with
the little guns. They took one such gun and melted it into trifling
pieces of not more than a hundred and fifty pounds each, and reassembled
it, and explained its innermost heart till even a layman could
understand. There is a lot to understand about screw-guns—specially the
new kind. But the gunner of to-day, like his ancestor, does not talk
much, except in his own time and place, when he is as multitudinously
amazing as the Blue Marine.


                             THE MULE LINES

We went over to see the mule lines. I detest the whole generation of
these parrot-mouthed hybrids, American, Egyptian, Andalusian, or
up-country: so it gave me particular pleasure to hear a Pathan telling
one chestnut beast who objected to having its mane hogged any more, what
sort of lady-horse his mamma had been. But _qua_ animals, they were a
lovely lot, and had long since given up blowing and finicking over
English fodder.

‘Is there any sickness? Why is yonder mule lying down?’ I demanded, as
though all the lines could not see I was a shuddering amateur.

‘There is no sickness, sahib. That mule lies down for his own pleasure.
Also, to get out of the wind. He is very clever. He is from Hindustan,’
said the man with the horse-clippers.

‘And thou?’

‘_I_ am a Pathan,’ said he with impudent grin and true border cock of
the turban, and he did me the honour to let me infer.

The lines were full of talk as the men went over their animals. They
were not worrying themselves over this new country of Belait. It was the
regular gossip of food and water and firewood, and where So-and-So had
hid the curry-comb.

Talking of cookery, the orthodox men have been rather put out by English
visitors who come to the cook-houses and stare directly _at_ the food
while it is being prepared. Sensible men do not object to this, because
they know that these Englishmen have no evil intention nor any evil eye;
but sometimes a narrow-souled purist (toothache or liver makes a man
painfully religious) will ‘spy strangers,’ and insist on the strict
letter of the law, and then every one who wishes to be orthodox must
agree with him—on an empty stomach, too—and wait till a fresh mess has
been cooked. This is _taklif_—a burden—for where the intention is good
and war is afoot much can and should be overlooked. Moreover, this war
is not like any other war. It is a war of _our_ Raj—‘everybody’s war,’
as they say in the bazaars. And that is another reason why it does not
matter if an Englishman stares at one’s food. This I gathered in small
pieces after watering time when the mules had filed up to the troughs in
the twilight, hundreds of them, and the drivers grew discursive on the
way to the lines.

The last I saw of them was in the early cold morning, all in marching
order, jinking and jingling down a road through woods.

‘Where are you going?’

‘God knows!’


                          THE INN OF GOOD-BYES

It might have been for exercise merely, or it might be down to the sea
and away to the front for the battle of ‘Our Raj.’ The quiet hotel where
people sit together and talk in earnest strained pairs is well used to
such departures. The officers of a whole Division—the raw cuts of their
tent-circles lie still unhealed on the links—dined there by scores;
mothers and relatives came down from the uttermost parts of Scotland for
a last look at their boys, and found beds goodness knows where: very
quiet little weddings, too, set out from its doors to the church
opposite. The Division went away a century of weeks ago by the road that
the mule-battery took. Many of the civilians who pocketed the wills
signed and witnessed in the smoking-room are full-blown executors now;
some of the brides are widows.

And it is not nice to remember that when the hotel was so filled that
not even another pleading mother could be given a place in which to lie
down and have her cry out—not at all nice to remember that it never
occurred to any of the comfortable people in the large but sparsely
inhabited houses around that they might have offered a night’s lodging,
even to an unintroduced stranger.


                       GREATHEART AND CHRISTIANA

There were hospitals up the road preparing and being prepared for the
Indian wounded. In one of these lay a man of, say, a Biluch regiment,
sorely hit. Word had come from his colonel in France to the colonel’s
wife in England that she should seek till she found that very man and
got news from his very mouth—news to send to his family and village. She
found him at last, and he was very bewildered to see her there, because
he had left her and her child on the verandah of the bungalow, long and
long ago, when he and his colonel and the regiment went down to take
ship for the war. How had she come? Who had guarded her during her
train-journey of so many days? And, above all, how had the baba endured
that sea which caused strong men to collapse? Not till all these matters
had been cleared up in fullest detail did Greatheart on his cot permit
his colonel’s wife to waste one word on his own insignificant concerns.
And that she should have wept filled him with real trouble. Truly, this
is the war of ‘Our Raj!’




                                   VI

                         TERRITORIAL BATTALIONS

    To excuse oneself to oneself is human: but to excuse oneself to
    one’s children is Hell.—_Arabic Proverb._


Billeted troops are difficult to get at. There are thousands of them in
a little old town by the side of an even older park up the London Road,
but to find a particular battalion is like ferreting unstopped burrows.

‘The Umpty-Umpth, were you looking for?’ said a private in charge of a
side-car. ‘We’re the Eenty-Eenth. ‘Only came in last week. I’ve never
seen this place before. It’s pretty. Hold on! There’s a postman. He’ll
know.’

He, too, was in khaki, bowed between mailbags, and his accent was of a
far and coaly county.

‘I’m none too sure,’ said he, ‘but I think I saw——’

Here a third man cut in.

‘Yon’s t’ battalion, marchin’ into t’ park now. Roon! Happen tha’ll
catch ‘em.’

They turned out to be Territorials with a history behind them; but that
I didn’t know till later; and their band and cyclists. Very polite were
those rear-rank cyclists—who pushed their loaded machines with one vast
hand apiece.

They were strangers, they said. They had only come here a few days ago.
But they knew the South well. They had been in Gloucestershire, which
was a very nice southern place.

Then their battalion, I hazarded, was of northern extraction?

They admitted that I might go as far as that; their speech betraying
their native town at every rich word.

‘Huddersfield, of course?’ I said, to make them out with it.

‘Bolton,’ said one at last. Being in uniform the pitman could not
destroy the impertinent civilian.

‘Ah, Bolton!’ I returned. ‘_All_ cotton, aren’t you?’

‘Some coal,’ he answered gravely. There is notorious rivalry ‘twixt coal
and cotton in Bolton, but I wanted to see him practise the self-control
that the Army is always teaching.

As I have said, he and his companion were most polite, but the total of
their information, boiled and peeled, was that they had just come from
Bolton way; might at any moment be sent somewhere else, and they liked
Gloucestershire in the south. A spy could not have learned much less.

The battalion halted, and moved off by companies for further evolutions.
One could see they were more than used to drill and arms; a hardened,
thick-necked, thin-flanked, deep-chested lot, dealt with quite
faithfully by their sergeants, and altogether abreast of their work.
Why, then, this reticence? What had they to be ashamed of, these big
Bolton folk without an address? Where was their orderly-room?

There were many orderly-rooms in the little old town, most of them in
bye-lanes less than one car wide. I found what I wanted, and—this was
north-country all over—a private who volunteered to steer me to
headquarters through the tricky southern streets. He was communicative,
and told me a good deal about typhoid-inoculation and musketry practice,
which accounted for only six companies being on parade. But surely they
could not have been ashamed of _that_.


                           GUARDING A RAILWAY

I unearthed their skeleton at last in a peaceful, gracious
five-hundred-year-old house that looked on to lawns and cut hedges
bounded by age-old red brick walls—such a perfumed and dreaming place as
one would choose for the setting of some even-pulsed English love-tale
of the days before the war.

Officers were billeted in the low-ceiled, shiny-floored rooms full of
books and flowers.

‘And now,’ I asked, when I had told the tale of the uncommunicative
cyclist, ‘what _is_ the matter with your battalion?’

They laughed cruelly at me. ‘Matter!’ said they. ‘We’re just off three
months of guarding railways. After _that_ a man wouldn’t trust his own
mother. You don’t mean to say our cyclists let you know where we’ve come
from last?’

‘No, they didn’t,’ I replied. ‘That was what worried me. I assumed you’d
all committed murders, and had been sent here to live it down.’

Then they told me what guarding a line really means. How men wake and
walk, with only express troop-trains to keep them company, all the night
long on windy embankments or under still more windy bridges; how they
sleep behind three sleepers up-ended or a bit of tin, or, if they are
lucky, in a platelayer’s hut; how their food comes to them slopping
across the square-headed ties that lie in wait to twist a man’s ankle
after dark; how they stand in blown coal-dust of goods-yards trying to
watch five lines of trucks at once; how fools of all classes pester the
lonely pickets, whose orders are to hold up motors for inquiry, and then
write silly letters to the War Office about it. How nothing ever happens
through the long weeks but infallibly would if the patrols were taken
off. And they had one refreshing story of a workman who at six in the
morning, which is no auspicious hour to jest with Lancashire, took a
short cut to his work by ducking under some goods-wagons, and when
challenged by the sentry replied, posturing on all fours, ‘Boo, I’m a
German!’ Whereat the upright sentry fired, unfortunately missed him, and
then gave him the butt across his ass’s head, so that his humour, and
very nearly his life, terminated.

After which the sentry was seldom seen to smile, but frequently heard to
murmur, ‘Ah should hev slipped t’ baggonet into him.’


                          PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

‘So you see,’ said the officers in conclusion, ‘you mustn’t be surprised
that our men wouldn’t tell you much.’

‘I begin to see,’ I said. ‘How many of you are coal and how many
cotton?’

‘Two-thirds coal and one-third cotton, roughly. It keeps the men deadly
keen. An operative isn’t going to give up while a pitman goes on; and
very much _vice versâ_.’

‘That’s class-prejudice,’ said I.

‘It’s most useful,’ said they. The officers themselves seemed to be
interested in coal or cotton, and had known their men intimately on the
civil side. If your orderly-room sergeant, or your quarter-master has
been your trusted head clerk or foreman for ten or twelve years, and if
eight out of a dozen sergeants have controlled pitmen and machinists,
above and below ground, and eighty per cent of these pitmen and
machinists are privates in the companies, your regiment works with
something of the precision of a big business.

It was all new talk to me, for I had not yet met a Northern Territorial
battalion with the strong pride of its strong town behind it. Where were
they when the war came? How had they equipped themselves? I wanted to
hear the tale. It was worth listening to as told with North-Country joy
of life and the doing of things in that soft down-country house of the
untroubled centuries. Like every one else, they were expecting anything
but war. ‘Hadn’t even begun their annual camp. Then the thing came, and
Bolton rose as one man and woman to fit out its battalion. There was a
lady who wanted a fairly large sum of money for the men’s extra
footgear. She set aside a morning to collect it, and inside the hour
came home with nearly twice her needs, and spent the rest of the time
trying to make people take back fivers, at least, out of tenners. And
the big hauling firms flung horses and transport at them and at the
Government, often refusing any price, or, when it was paid, turning it
into the war funds. What the battalion wanted it had but to ask for.
Once it was short of, say, towels. An officer approached the head of a
big firm, with no particular idea he would get more than a few dozen
from that quarter.

‘And how many towels d’you want?’ said the head of the firm. The officer
suggested a globular thousand.

‘I think you’ll do better with twelve hundred,’ was the curt answer.
‘They’re ready out yonder. Get ‘em.’

And in this style Bolton turned out her battalion. Then the authorities
took it and strung it by threes and fives along several score miles of
railway track: and it had only just been reassembled, and it had been
inoculated for typhoid. Consequently, they said (but all officers are
like mothers and motor-car owners), it wasn’t up to what it would be in
a little time. In spite of the cyclist, I had had a good look at the
deep-chested battalion in the park, and after getting their musketry
figures,[1] it seemed to me that very soon it might be worth looking at
by more prejudiced persons than myself.

Footnote 1:

  Thanks to the miniature rifle clubs fostered by Lord Roberts a certain
  number of recruits in all the armies come to their regiments with a
  certain knowledge of sighting, rifle-handling, and the general details
  of good shooting, especially at snap and disappearing work.

The next day I read that this battalion’s regular battalion in the field
had distinguished itself by a piece of work which, in other wars, would
have been judged heroic. Bolton will read it, not without remarks, and
other towns who love Bolton, more or less, will say that if all the
truth could come out their regiments had done as well. Anyway, the
result will be more men—pitmen, mill-hands, clerks, checkers, weighers,
winders, and hundreds of those sleek, well-groomed business-chaps whom
one used to meet in the big Midland hotels, protesting that war was out
of date. These latter develop surprisingly in the camp atmosphere. I
recall one raging in his army shirt-sleeves at a comrade who had derided
his principles. ‘I _am_ a blanky pacificist,’ he hissed, ‘and I’m proud
of it, and—and I’m going to make _you_ one before I’ve finished with
you!’


                       THE SECRET OF THE SERVICES

Pride of city, calling, class, and creed imposes standards and
obligations which hold men above themselves at a pinch, and steady them
through long strain. One meets it in the New Army at every turn, from
the picked Territorials who slipped across Channel last night to the
six-week-old Service battalion maturing itself in mud. It is balanced by
the ineradicable English instinct to understate, detract, and decry—to
mask the thing done by loudly drawing attention to the things undone.
The more one sees of the camps the more one is filled with facts and
figures of joyous significance, which will become clearer as the days
lengthen; and the less one hears of the endurance, decency,
self-sacrifice, and utter devotion which have made, and are hourly
making, this wonderful new world. The camps take this for granted—else
why should any man be there at all? He might have gone on with his
business, or—watched ‘soccer.’ But having chosen to do his bit, he does
it, and talks as much about his motives as he would of his religion or
his love-affairs. He is eloquent over the shortcomings of the
authorities, more pessimistic as to the future of his next neighbour
battalion than would be safe to print, and lyric on his personal
needs—baths and drying-rooms for choice. But when the grousing gets
beyond a certain point—say at three a.m., in steady wet, with the
tent-pegs drawing like false teeth—the nephew of the insurance-agent
asks the cousin of the baronet to inquire of the son of the fried-fish
vendor what the stevedore’s brother and the tutor of the public school
joined the Army _for_. Then they sing ‘Somewhere the Sun is Shining’
till the Sergeant Ironmonger’s assistant cautions them to drown in
silence or the Lieutenant Telephone-appliances-manufacturer will speak
to them in the morning.

The New armies have not yet evolved their typical private, n.c.o., and
officer, though one can see them shaping. They are humorous because, for
all our long faces, we are the only genuinely humorous race on earth;
but they all know for true that there are no excuses in the Service. ‘If
there _were_,’ said a three-month-old under-gardener-private to me,
‘what ‘ud become of Discipline?’

They are already setting standards for the coming millions, and have
sown little sprouts of regimental tradition which may grow into age-old
trees. In one corps, for example, though no dubbin is issued a man loses
his name for parading with dirty boots. He looks down scornfully on the
next battalion where they are not expected to achieve the impossible. In
another—an ex-Guards sergeant brought ‘em up by hand—the drill is rather
high-class. In a third they fuss about records for route-marching, and
men who fall out have to explain themselves to their sweating
companions. This is entirely right. They are all now in the Year One,
and the meanest of them may be an ancestor of whom regimental posterity
will say: ‘There were giants in those days!’


                           THE REAL QUESTION

This much we can realise, even though we are so close to it. The old
safe instinct saves us from triumph and exultation. But what will be the
position in years to come of the young man who has deliberately elected
to outcaste himself from this all-embracing brotherhood? What of his
family, and, above all, what of his descendants, when the books have
been closed and the last balance struck of sacrifice and sorrow in every
hamlet, village, parish, suburb, city, shire, district, province, and
Dominion throughout the Empire?


           _Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                                  THE

                            SERVICE KIPLING


               _In 26 vols._ _16 mo._ _2s. 6d. net each_

The volumes are bound in blue cloth, and printed in an old-style type
designed after an old Venetian model and known as the Dolphin Type.

 Plain Tales from the Hills. 2 Vols.
 Soldiers Three. 2. Vols.
 Wee Willie Winkie. 2 Vols.
 From Sea to Sea. 4 Vols.
 Life’s Handicap. 2 Vols.
 The Light that Failed. 2 Vols.
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬──────────
 The Naulahka. 2 Vols.                                       │1915
 Many Inventions. 2 Vols.                                    │_February_
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────
 The Day’s Work. 2 Vols.                                     │_March_
 Kim. 2 Vols.                                                │
 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼──────────
 Traffics and Discoveries. 2 Vols.                           │_April_
 Actions and Reactions. 2 Vols.                              │

                    LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.

------------------------------------------------------------------------




                          TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


 1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
 2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard spellings as printed.
 3. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.





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