From the press to the censorship was but a step. I objected to the English method as having lost us our perspective on the war.
“You allow anything to go through the censor’s office that is not considered dangerous or too explicit,” I said. “False reports go through on an equality with true ones. How can America know what to believe?”
It was suggested by some one that the only way to make the censorship more elastic, while retaining its usefulness in protecting military secrets and movements, was to establish such a censorship at the front, where it is easier to know what news would be harmful to give out and what may be printed with safety.
I mentioned what a high official of the admiralty had said to me about the censorship—that it was “an infernal nuisance, but necessary.”
“But it is not true that messages are misleadingly changed in transmission,” said one of the officers at the table.
I had seen the head of the press-censorship bureau, and was able to repeat what he had said—that where the cutting out of certain phrases endangered the sense of a message, the words “and” or “the” were occasionally added, that the sense might be kept clear, but that no other additions or changes of meaning were ever made.
Luncheon was over. We went into the library, and there, consulting the map, Colonel Fitzgerald and General Huguet discussed where I might go that afternoon. The mist of the morning had turned to rain, and the roads at the front would be very bad. Besides, it was felt that the “Chief” should give me permission to go to the front, and he had not yet returned.
“How about seeing the Indians?” asked Colonel Fitzgerald, turning from the map.
“I should like it very much.”
The young officer was turned to, and agreed, like a British patriot and gentleman, to show me the Indian villages. General Huguet offered his car. The officer got his sheepskin-lined coat, for the weather was cold.
“Thirty shillings,” he said, “and nothing goes through it!”
I examined that coat. It was smart, substantial, lined throughout with pure white fur, and it had cost seven dollars and a half.
There is a very popular English word just making its place in America. The word is “swank.” It is both noun and verb. One swanks when one swaggers. One puts on swank when one puts on side. And because I hold a brief for the English, and because I was fortunate enough to meet all sorts of English people, I want to say that there is very little swank among them. The example of simplicity and genuineness has been set by the King and Queen. I met many different circles of people. From the highest to the lowest, there was a total absence of that arrogance which the American mind has so long associated with the English. For fear of being thought to swagger, an Englishman will understate his case. And so with the various English officers I met at the front. There was no swank. They were downright, unassuming, extremely efficient-looking men, quick to speak of German courage, ready to give the benefit of the doubt where unproved outrages were in question, but rousing, as I have said, to pale fury where their troops were being unfairly attacked.
While the car was being brought to the door General Huguet pointed out to me on the map where I was going. As we stood there his pencil drew a light semicircle round the town of Ypres.
“A great battle,” he said, and described it. Colonel Fitzgerald took up the narrative. So it happened that, in the three different staff headquarters, Belgian, French and English, executive officers of the three armies in the western field described to me that great battle—the frightful slaughter of the English, their re-enforcement at a critical time by General Foch’s French Army of the North, and the final holding of the line.
The official figures of casualties were given me again: English forty-five thousand out of a hundred and twenty thousand engaged; the French seventy thousand, and the German over two hundred thousand.
Turning to the table, Colonel Fitzgerald picked up a sheet of paper covered with figures.
“It is interesting,” he said, “to compare the disease and battle mortality percentages of this war with the percentages in other wars; to see, considering the frightful weather and the trenches, how little disease there has been among our troops. Compare the figures with the Boer War, for instance. And even then our percentage has been somewhat brought up by the Indian troops.”
“Have many of them been ill?”
“They have felt the weather,” he replied; “not the cold so much as the steady rain. And those regiments of English that have been serving in India have felt the change. They particularly have suffered from frostbitten feet.”
I knew that. More than once I had seen men being taken back from the British lines, their faces twisted with pain, their feet great masses of cotton and bandages which they guarded tenderly, lest a chance blow add to their agony. Even the English system of allowing the men to rub themselves with lard and oil from the waist down before going into flooded trenches has not prevented the tortures of frostbite.
It was time to go and the motor was waiting. We set off in a driving sleet that covered the windows of the car and made motoring even more than ordinarily precarious. But the roads here were better than those nearer the coast; wider, too, and not so crowded. To Ham, where the Indian regiment I was to visit had been retired for rest, was almost twenty miles. “Ham!” I said. “What a place to send Mohammedans to!”
In his long dispatch of February seventeenth Sir John French said of the Indian troops:
“The Indian troops have fought with the utmost steadfastness and gallantry whenever they have been called upon.”
This is the answer to many varying statements as to the efficacy of the assistance furnished by her Indian subjects to the British Empire at this time. For Sir John French is a soldier, not a diplomat. No question of the union of the Empire influences his reports. The Indians have been valuable, or he would not say so. He is chary of praise, is the Field Marshal of the British Army.
But there is another answer—that everywhere along the British front one sees the Ghurkas, slant-eyed and Mongolian, with their broad-brimmed, khaki-coloured hats, filling posts of responsibility. They are little men, smaller than the Sikhs, rather reminiscent of the Japanese in build and alertness.
When I was at the English front some of the Sikhs had been retired to rest. But even in the small villages on billet, relaxed and resting, they were a fine and soldierly looking body of men, showing race and their ancient civilisation.
It has been claimed that England called on her Indian troops, not because she expected much assistance from them but to show the essential unity of the British Empire. The plain truth is, however, that she needed the troops, needed men at once, needed experienced soldiers to eke out her small and purely defensive army of regulars. Volunteers had to be equipped and drilled—a matter of months.
To say that she called to her aid barbarians is absurd. The Ghurkas are fierce fighters, but carefully disciplined. Compare the lances of the Indian cavalry regiments and the kukri, the Ghurka knife, with the petrol squirts, hand grenades, aëroplane darts and asphyxiating bombs of Germany, and call one barbarian to the advantage of the other! The truth is, of course, that war itself is barbarous.
CHAPTER XXVII
A STRANGE PARTY
THE road to Ham turned off the main highway south of Aire. It was a narrow clay road in unspeakable condition. The car wallowed along. Once we took a wrong turning and were obliged to go back and start again.
It was still raining. Indian horsemen beat their way stolidly along the road. We passed through hamlets where cavalry horses in ruined stables were scantily protected, where the familiar omnibuses of London were parked in what appeared to be hundreds. The cocoa and other advertisements had been taken off and they had been hastily painted a yellowish grey. Here and there we met one on the road, filled and overflowing with troops, and looking curiously like the “rubber-neck wagons” of New York.
Aside from the transports and a few small Indian ammunition carts, with
open bodies made of slats, and drawn by two mules, with an impassive turbaned driver calling strange words to his team, there was no sign of war. No bombarding disturbed the heavy atmosphere; no aëroplanes were overhead. There was no barbed wire, no trenches. Only muddy sugarbeet fields on each side of the narrow road, a few winter trees, and the beat of the rain on the windows.
At last, with an extra lurch, the car drew up in the village of Ham. At a gate in a brick wall a Scotch soldier in kilts, carrying a rifle, came forward. Our errand was explained and he went off to find Makand Singh, a major in the Lahore Lancers and in charge of the post.
It was a curious picture that I surveyed through the opened door of the car. We were in the centre of the village, and at the intersection of a crossroads was a tall cross with a life-size Christ. Underneath the cross, in varying attitudes of dampness and curiosity, were a dozen Indians, Mohammedans by faith. Some of them held horses which, in spite of the rain, they had been exercising. One or two wore long capes to the knees, with pointed hoods which fitted up over their great turbans. Bearded men with straight, sensitive noses and oval faces, even the absurdity of the cape and pointed hood failed to lessen their dignity. They were tall, erect, soldierly looking, and they gazed at me with the bland gravity of the East.
Makand Singh came hastily forward, a splendid figure of a man, six foot two or thereabout, and appearing even taller by reason of his turban. He spoke excellent English.
“It is very muddy for a lady to alight,” he said, and instructed one of the men to bring bags of sacking, which were laid in the road.
“You are seeing us under very unfavourable conditions,” he said as he helped me to alight. “But there is a fire if you are cold.”
I was cold. So Makand Singh led the way to his living quarters. To go to them it was necessary to pass through a long shed, which was now a stable for perhaps a dozen horses. At a word of command the Indian grooms threw themselves against the horses’ heads and pushed them back. By stepping over the ground pegs to which they were tethered I got through the shed somehow and into a small yard.
Makand Singh turned to the right, and, throwing open the low door of a peasant’s house, stood aside to allow me to enter. “It is not very comfortable,” he explained, “but it is the best we have.”
He was so tall that he was obliged to stoop as he entered the doorway. Within was an ordinary peasant’s kitchen, but cleaner than the average. In spite of the weather the floor boards were freshly scrubbed. The hearth was swept, and by the stove lay a sleek tortoise-shell cat. There was a wooden dresser, a chimney shelf with rows of plates standing on it, and in a doorway just beyond an elderly peasant woman watching us curiously.
“Perhaps,” said Makand Singh, “you will have coffee?”
I was glad to accept, and the young officer, who had followed, accepted also. We sat down while the kettle was placed on the stove and the fire replenished. I glanced at the Indian major’s tall figure. Even sitting, he was majestic. When he took the cape off he was discovered clothed in the khaki uniform of his rank in the British Army. Except for the olive colour of his skin, his turban, and the fact that his beard—the soft beard of one who has never shaved—was drawn up into a black net so that it formed a perfect crescent around the angle of his jaw, he might have been a gallant and interested English officer.
For the situation assuredly interested him. His eyes were alert and keen. When he smiled he showed rows of beautiful teeth, small and white. And although his face in repose was grave, he smiled often. He superintended the making of the coffee by the peasant woman and instructed her to prepare the table.
She obeyed pleasantly. Indeed, it was odd to see that between this elderly Frenchwoman and her strange guests—people of whose existence on the earth I dare say she had never heard until this war—there was the utmost good will. Perhaps the Indians are neater than other troops. Certainly personal cleanliness is a part of their religion. Anyhow, whatever the reason, I saw no evidence of sulkiness toward the Indians, although I have seen surly glances directed toward many of the billeted troops of other nationalities.
Conversation was rather difficult. We had no common ground to meet on, and the ordinary currency of polite society seemed inadequate, out of place.
“The weather must be terrible after India,” I ventured.
“We do not mind the cold. We come from the north of India, where it is often cold. But the mud is bad. We cannot use our horses.”
“You are a cavalry regiment?” I asked, out of my abysmal ignorance.
“We are Lancers. Yes. And horses are not useful in this sort of fighting.”
From a room beyond there was a movement, followed by the entrance of a young Frenchman in a British uniform. Makand Singh presented him and he joined the circle that waited for coffee.
The newcomer presented an enigma—a Frenchman in a British uniform quartered with the Indian troops! It developed that he was a pupil from the Sorbonne, in Paris, and was an interpreter. Everywhere afterward I found these interpreters with the British Army—Frenchmen who for various reasons are disqualified from entering the French Army in active service and who are anxious to do what they can. They wear the British uniform, with the exception that instead of the stiff crown of the British cap theirs is soft. They are attached to every battalion, for Tommy Atkins is in a strange land these days, a land that knows no more English than he knows French.
True, he carries little books of French and English which tell him how to say “Porter, get my luggage and take it to a cab,” or “Please bring me a laundry list,” or “Give my kind regards to your parents.” Imagine him trying to find the French for “Look out, they’re coming!” to call to a French neighbour, in the inevitable mix-up of the line during a mêlée, and finding only “These trousers do not fit well,” or “I would like an ice and then a small piece of cheese.”
It was a curious group that sat in a semicircle around that peasant woman’s stove, waiting for the kettle to boil—the tall Indian major with his aristocratic face and long, quiet hands, the young English officer in his Headquarters Staff uniform, the French interpreter, and I. Just inside the door the major’s Indian servant, tall, impassive and turbaned, stood with folded arms, looking over our heads. And at the table the placid-faced peasant woman cut slices of yellow bread, made with eggs and milk, and poured our coffee.
It was very good coffee, served black. The woman brought a small decanter and placed it near me.
“It is rum,” said the major, “and very good in coffee.”
I declined the rum. The interpreter took a little. The major shook his head.
“Although they say that a Sikh never refuses rum!” he said, smiling.
Coffee over, we walked about the village. Hardly a village—a cluster of houses along unpaved lanes which were almost impassable. There were tumbling stables full of horses, groups of Indians standing under dripping eaves for shelter, sentries, here and there a peasant. The houses were replicas of the one where Makand Singh had his quarters.
Although it was still raining, a dozen Indian Lancers were exercising their horses. They dismounted and stood back to let us pass. Behind them, as they stood, was the great Cross.
That was the final picture I had of the village of Ham and the Second Lahore Lancers—the turbaned Indians with their dripping horses, the grave bow of Makand Singh as he closed the door of the car, and behind him a Scotch corporal in kilt and cap, with a cigarette tucked behind his ear.
We went on. I looked back. Makand Singh was making his careful way through the mud; the horses were being led to a stable. The Cross stood alone.
CHAPTER XXVIII
SIR JOHN FRENCH
THE next day I was taken along the English front, between the first and the second line of trenches, from Béthune, the southern extremity of the line, the English right flank, to the northern end of the line just below Ypres. In a direct line the British front at that time extended along some twenty-seven miles. But the lin
e was irregular, and I believe was really well over thirty.
I have never been in an English trench. I have been close enough to the advance trenches to be shown where they lay, and to see the slight break they make in the flat country. I was never in a dangerous position at the English front, if one excepts the fact that all of that portion of the country between the two lines of trenches is exposed to shell fire.
No shells burst near me. Béthune was being intermittently shelled, but as far as I know not a shell fell in the town while I was there. I lunched on a hill surrounded by batteries, with the now celebrated towns of Messines and Wytschaete just across a valley, so that one could watch shells bursting over them. And still nothing threatened my peace of mind or my physical well-being. And yet it was one of the most interesting days of a not uneventful period.
In the morning I was taken, still in General Huguet’s car, to British Headquarters again, to meet Sir John French.
I confess to a thrill of excitement when the door into his private office was opened and I was ushered in. The Field Marshal of the British Army was standing by his table. He came forward at once and shook hands. In his khaki uniform, with the scarlet straps of his rank on collar and sleeves, he presented a most soldierly and impressive appearance.
A man of middle height, squarely and compactly built, he moves easily. He is very erect, and his tanned face and grey hair are in strong contrast. A square and determined jaw, very keen blue eyes and a humorous mouth—that is my impression of Sir John French.
“We are sending you along the lines,” he said when I was seated. “But not into danger. I hope you do not want to go into danger.”
I wish I might tell of the conversation that followed. It is impossible. Not that it dealt with vital matters; but it was understood that Sir John was not being interviewed. He was taking a little time from a day that must have been crowded, to receive with beautiful courtesy a visitor from overseas. That was all.
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