“poor devils on sentry,” said dixon. he shut the door quickly and came over to the fire. outside was a thick blizzard, and it was biting cold. he sat down on the bed nearest the fire and got warm again.
“look here, bill, can’t we possibly get any coal?”
“we sent a fellow into bray,” i answered, “but it’s very doubtful if he’ll get any. anyway we’ll see.”
tea was finished. the great problem was fuel. there were no trees or houses anywhere near 71 north. we had burnt two solid planks during the day; these had been procured by the simple expedient of getting a lance-corporal to march four men to the r.e. dump, select two planks, and march them back again. but by now the planks had surely been missed, and it would be extremely risky to repeat the experiment, even after dark. so a man had been despatched to bray to try and purchase a sack of coal; also, i had told the mess-sergeant to try and buy one for us, and bring it up with the rations. this also was a doubtful quantity. 196 meanwhile, we had a great blaze going, and were making the most of it.
i was writing letters; dixon was reading; nicolson was seeing to the rum ration; clark was singing, “now neville was a devil,” and showing his servant brady how to “make” a hammock. brady was a patient disciple, but his master had slept in a hammock for the first time in his life the night before and consequently was not a very clear exponent of the art. apparently certain things that happened last night must be avoided to-night; how they were to be avoided was left to brady’s ingenuity. every attempt on his part to solve the problems put before him was carefully tested by clark, and accepted or condemned according to its merit under the strain of clark’s body. at such times of testing the strains of “neville was a devil” would cease. at last brady hit on some lucky adjustment, and the occupant pronounced his position to be first rate. then brady disappeared behind the curtain that screened the servants’ quarters, and the song proceeded uninterruptedly, “now neville was a devil
a perfect little devil”;
and clark rocked himself contentedly into a state of restful slumber.
meanwhile, behind the arras the retainers prepared their masters’ meal. this dug-out was of the “tubular” pattern, a succession of quarter 197 circles of black iron riveted together at the top, and so forming a long tube, one end of which was bricked up and had a brick chimney with two panes of glass on each side of it; the other led into a small wooden dug-out curtained off. here abode five servants and an orderly. i should here state that this dug-out was the most comfortable i have ever lived in; as a matter of fact it was not a dug-out at all, but being placed right under the steep bank at 71 north it was practically immune from shelling. the brick chimney and the glass window-panes were certainly almost unique: one imagined it must have been built originally by the r.e.’s for their own abode! along the sides were four beds of wire-netting stretched over a wooden frame with a layer of empty sand-bags for mattress. in the centre was a wooden table. over this table, in air suspended, floated clark.
meanwhile, as above stated, behind the arras the retainers prepared their masters’ meal, with such-like comments—
“who’s going for rations to-night?”
“it’s lewis’s turn to-night, and smith’s.”
“all right, sergeant.”
“gr-r-r” (unintelligible).
“where’s dodger?”
“out chasing them hares. didn’t you hear the captain say he’d be for it, if he didn’t get one?”
“gr-r-r. he won’t get any —— hares.”
here followed a pause, and a lot of noise of 198 plates and boxes being moved. then there was a continued crackling of wood, as the fire was made up. followed a lot of coughing, and muttering, and “phew!” as the smoke got too thick even for that smoke-hardened crew.
“phew! stop it. jesus christ.”
more coughing, the door was opened, and soon a cold draught sped into our dug-out. there was but one door for both.
“shut that door!” i shouted.
“hi, lewis, your bloke’s calling. said, ‘shut that door.’”
then the door shut. more coughing ensued, but the smoke was better, apparently, for it soon ceased. we were each, by the way, “my bloke” to our respective retainers.
the conversation remained for some time at an inaudible level, until i heard the door open again, and a shout of “hullo! dodger. coo! jesus christ! he’s all right, isn’t he? there’s a job for you, sergeant, cooking that bloke. has the captain seen him? hey! look out of that! you’ll have the blood all over the place. get a bit of paper.”
the “sergeant” (private gray) made no comments on the prospect of cooking the “dodger’s” quarry, and the next minute private davies, orderly, appeared with glowing though rather dirty face holding up a large hare, that dripped gore from its mouth into a scrunched-up ball of daily mail held to its nose like a pocket-handkerchief. 199
“look here, dixon,” i said.
“devil’s alive,” exclaimed dixon. “then you’ve got one. by jove! splendid! i say, isn’t he a beauty?” and we all went up and examined him. he was a hare of the first order. to-morrow he should be the chef d’?uvre in “b” company mess at morlancourt. for we went out of reserve into billets the next morning.
“how did you get him, davies?”
“oh! easy enough, sir. i’ll get another if you like. there’s a lot of them sitting out in the snow there. i was only about fifty yards off. he don’t get much chance with a rifle, sir.” (here his voice broke into a laugh.) “it’s not what you call much sport for him, sir! i got this too, sir!”
and lo! and behold! a plump partridge!
“oh! they’re as tame as anything, and you can’t help getting them in this snow,” he said.
at last the dripping hare was removed from the stage to behind the scenes, and davies joined the smothered babel behind the arras.
“wonderful fellow, old davies,” said dixon.
“by the way, bill,” he added. “how about getting the little doctor in to-night for a hand of vingt-et-un? can we manage it all right?”
i was mess-president for the time, edwards being away on a course.
“oh! yes,” i answered. “rather. i’ll send a note.”
as i was writing a rather elaborate note (having 200 nothing better to do) requesting the pleasure of the distinguished presence of the medical officer, the man who had been to bray for coal came and reported a fruitless errand. he seemed very depressed at his failure, but cheered up when we gave him a tot of rum to warm him up. (all rum, by the way, is kept in the company officer’s dug-out; it is the only way.)
meanwhile, the problem of fuel must be faced. a log was crackling away merrily enough, but it was the very last. something must be done.
“davies,” i called out.
“sir?” came back in that higher key of his.
he appeared at the door.
“are you going down for rations?”
“yes, sir.”
“well, look here. there’s a sack of coal ordered from sergeant johnson, but i’m none too sure it’ll come up to-night. i only ordered it yesterday. but i want you to make sure you get it if it is there; in fact you must bring it, whether it’s there or not. see? if you don’t, you’ll be for it.”
this threat davies took for what it was worth. but he answered:
“i’ll get it, sir. i’ll bring something along somehow.”
and davies never failed of his word.
“good! do what you can.”
half an hour later he staggered in with a sack of coal, and plumped it down, all covered with snow. 201 the fire was burning very low, and we were looking at it anxiously. the sight of this new supply of fuel was wonderful good to the eyes. so busy were we in stoking up, that we forgot to ask davies if he had had any trouble in getting it. after all, it did not matter much. there was the coal; that was the point.
behind the curtain there was a great business. lewis and brady had brought up the rations; gray was busy with a big stew, and richards was apparently engaged in getting out plates and knives and forks from a box; davies was reading aloud, in the middle of the chaos, from the daily mail. sometimes the mess-president took it into his head to inspect the servants’ dug-out; but it was an unwise procedure, for it took away the relish of the meal, if you saw the details of its preparation. so long as it was served up tolerably clean, one should be satisfied.
at half-past seven came in richards to lay the table. the procedure of this was first to take all articles on the table and dump them on the nearest bed. then a knife, fork, and spoon were put to each place, and a varied collection of tin mugs and glasses arranged likewise; then came salt and mustard in glass potted-meat jars; bread sitting bareback on the newspaper tablecloth; and a bottle of o.v.h. and two bottles of perrier to crown the feast. all this was arranged with a deliberate smile, as by one who knew the exact value of 202 things, and defied instruction in any detail of laying a table. richards was an old soldier, and he had won from dixon at first unbounded praise; but he had been found to possess a lot too much talk at present, and had been sat on once or twice fairly heavily of late. so now he wore the face of one who was politely amused, yet, knowing his own worth, could forbear from malice. he gave the table a last look with his head on one side, and then departed in silence.
suddenly the door flew open, and the doctor burst in, shuddering, and knocking the snow off his cap.
“by jove, dicker,” he cried. “a bad night to go about paying joy visits. but, by jove, i’m jolly glad you asked me. there’s the devil to pay up at headquarters. the c.o.’s raving, simply. some blighter has pinched our coal, and there’s none to be got anywhere. good lord, it’s too hot altogether. i couldn’t stand mess there to-night at any price. i pity old dale. the c.o.’s been swearing like a trooper! he’s fair mad.”
“never mind,” he added after a pause. “i think we’ve raised enough wood to cook the dinner all right. see you’ve got coal all right.”
i hoped to goodness dixon wouldn’t put his foot in it. but he rose to the occasion and said:
“oh, yes. we ordered some coal from sergeant johnson. come on, let’s start. hi! richards!”
and richards came in with the stew in a tin jug 203 such as is used in civilised lands to hold hot water of a morning. and so the doctor forgot the colonel’s rage.
late that night, after the doctor had gone, i called davies.
“davies,” i said, “where did you get that coal?”
“off the ration cart, sir.”
“was it ours, do you think?”
“well, sir, i don’t somehow think it was. you see, the ration cart came up, and the man driving it was up by the horse—and i saw the bag o’ coal there, like. so i said to lewis, ‘lewis, you see to the rations. i’ll take the coal up quick!’ then i heard the man up by the horse say, ‘there’s coal there for headquarters.’ ‘oh, yes,’ i said, ‘that’s all right, but this here was ordered off sergeant johnson yesterday,’ i said. and i made off quick.”
“good lord!” i exclaimed. “was sergeant johnson there?”
“no,” answered davies. “he came later. i said to lewis just now, ‘what about that coal?’ and he said sergeant johnson came just after and started kicking up some bit of a row, sir, about some coal; but lewis, he said he didn’t know nothing about any coal, and the man at the horse he didn’t know who i was, sir; it was quite dark, you see, sir. lewis said sergeant johnson got the wind up a bit, sir, about losing the coal....” 204
“look here davies,” i remarked solemnly, “do you realise that that coal was for headquarters ...”
“i couldn’t say, sir,” began davies.
“but i can,” said i. “look here, you must just set a limit somewhere. i know i said you must get some coal, somewhere. but i wasn’t exactly thinking of bagging the c.o.’s coal. as a matter of fact he was slightly annoyed, though doubtless if he knew it was no. 14 davies, “b” company orderly, he would abate his wrath. do you realise this is a very serious offence?”
davies’ mouth wavered. he could never quite understand this method of procedure. he looked at the blazing fire, and his eyes twinkled. then he understood.
“yes, sir,” he said.
“all right,” i replied. “don’t let it occur again.”
and it never did—at least, not headquarters coal.
we did not get back to morlancourt till nearly half-past three the next day. things were not going well in our billet at the butcher’s shop. gray, the cook, and two of the servants had been sent on early to get the valises from the quartermaster’s stores, and to have a meal ready. we arrived to find no meal ready, and what was worse, the stove not lit. coal could not be had from the stores, was the statement that greeted us.
“what the blazes do you mean?” shouted 205 dixon. we were really angry as well as ravenous; for it was freezing hard, and the tiles on the floor seemed to radiate ice-waves.
“have you asked madame if she can lend us a little to go on with?” i queried.
no, they had not asked madame.
then followed a blaze of vituperation, and richards was sent at the double into the kitchen. soon madame appeared, with sticks and coal, and lit the fire. we watched the crackles, too cold to do anything else. the adjoining room, where dixon and i slept, was an ice-house, also tiled. it was too cold to talk even.
“c’est froid dans les tranchés,” said i in execrable french.
“mais oui, m’sieur l’officier,” said madame, deeply sympathising.
i thought of the blazing fire in 71 north, but it was too cold to say anything more. what matter if madame imagined us standing in a foot of snow? so we should have been for the most part had we been in the line the last two days, instead of in reserve.
soon it began to get less icy, and the stove looked a little less of the blacklead order. it was a kitchen-range really, with a boiler and oven; but the boiler was rather leaky. now, as the coal blazed up, life began to ebb back again.
confound it! the stove was smoking like fury. pah! the flues were all full of soot. dixon was 206 rather an expert on stoves, and said that all that was needed was a brush. where had all the servants disappeared to? why wasn’t someone there? i opened the door into our bedroom—a cold blast struck me in the face. in the middle of the room, unopened, sat our two valises, like desert islands in a sea of red tiles.
“hang it all, this is the limit,” i said, and ran out into the street, and into the next house, where the servants’ quarters were. and there, in the middle of a pile of half-packed boxes, stood gray, eating a piece of bread. now i discovered afterwards that the boxes had just been brought in by cody and lewis, that davies and richards had gone after the coal, and were at that moment staggering under the weight of it on their way from the stores, and that gray could not do anything more, having unpacked the boxes, until the coal came. but i did not grasp these subtle details of the interior economy of the servants’ hall, and i broke out into a real hot strafe. why should gray be standing there eating, while the officers shivered and starved?
i returned to dixon, and found clark and nicolson there; and together we all fumed. then in came the post-corporal with an accumulation of parcels, and we stopped fuming.
“by jove,” i exclaimed, a few minutes later. “the hare. i had forgotten le—what is it, lièvre, lèvre? i forget. never mind. lewis, bring the hare along, and ask madame in your best manner 207 if she would do us the honour of cooking it for us. to-night, now.”
presently madame came in, with lewis standing rather sheepishly behind. she delivered a tornado of very fluent french: “eau-de-vie,” “eau-de-vie,” was all i could disentangle.
“eau-de-vie?” i asked her. “pourquoi eau-de-vie?”
“brandy,” explained dixon.
“i know that,” said i (who did not know that eau-de-vie was brandy?)
“brandy,” said dixon, “to cook the hare with. that’s all she wants. oui, oui, madame. eau-de-vie. tout de suite. the doctor’s got brandy. send lewis along to the doctor to ask him to dinner, and borrow a little brandy.”
so lewis was despatched, and returned with a little brandy, but the doctor could not come.
“never mind,” we said.
meanwhile some tea was on the table, and bully and bread and butter; there was no sugar, however. richards smiled and said the rats had eaten it all in 71 north, but davies was buying some. whenever anything was missing, these rats had eaten it, just as they were responsible for men’s equipment and packs getting torn, and their emergency rations lost. in many cases the excuse was quite a just one; but when it came to rats running off with canteen lids, our sympathy for the rat-ridden tommy was not always very strong. 208
to-day, a new reason was found for the loss of three teaspoons.
“lost in the scuffle, sir, the night of the raid,” was the answer given to the demand for an explanation.
“what scuffle?” i asked.
“why, the box got upset, sir, the night of the raid when we all stood to in a bit of a hurry, sir.”
i remembered there had been some confusion and noise behind the arras that night when the germans raided on the left; apparently all the knives and forks had fallen to the ground and several had snapped under the martial trampling of feet when our retainers stood to arms. for many days afterwards when anything was lost, one’s anger was appeased by “lost in the scuffle, sir.” at last it got too much of a good thing.
“why this new teapot, davies?” i said a few days later.
“the old one was lost in the scuffle, sir.”
“look here,” i said. “we had the old one yesterday, and this morning i saw it broken on madame’s manure heap. here endeth ‘lost in the scuffle.’ see? go back to rats.”
“very good, sir.”
that night, about ten o’clock, when clark, nicolson, and brownlow (who had been our guest) had gone back to their respective billets, dixon and i were sitting in front of the stove, our feet up on the brass bar that ran along the top-front of it, on 209 a comfortable red-plush settee. this settee made amends for very many things, such as: a tile floor; four doors, one of which scraped most excruciatingly over the tiles, and another being glass-panelled allowed in much cold air from the butcher’s shop; no entry for the servants save either through the butcher’s shop or through the bedroom via the open window; very little room to turn round in, when we were all there; a smell of stale lard that permeated the whole establishment; and finally, the necessity of moving the settee every time madame or mam’selle wanted to get to either the cellar or the stairs.
but now all these disabilities were removed, everyone else having gone off to bed, and dixon and i were talking lazily before turning in also. i had a large pan of boiling water waiting on the top of the range, and my canvas bath was all ready in the next room.
“ah! the discomfort of it!” ejaculated dixon. “the terrible discomfort of it all!”
“how they are pitying us at home,” i replied. “‘those rabbit holes! i can’t think how you keep the water out of them at all!’ can’t you hear them? ‘and isn’t that bully beef most horribly tough and hard! ugh! i couldn’t bear it.’” i tried to imitate a lady’s voice, but it was not a great success. i was out of practice.
“yes,” said dixon, thinking of the extraordinarily good jugged hare produced by madame. then 210 his thoughts turned to davies, the hunter who was responsible for the feast.
“wonderful fellow, old davies,” he added. “in fact they’re all good fellows.”
“he’s a shepherd boy,” i said. “comes from blaenau festiniog, a little village right up in the welsh mountains. i know the place. a few years ago he was a boy looking after sheep out on the hills all day; a wide-eyed welsh boy, with a sheepdog trotting behind him. he’s rather like a sheepdog himself, isn’t he?”
“gad, he’s a wonderful fellow. but they all are, you know, bill. look at your chap, lewis; great clumsy red-faced fellow, with his piping voice, that sometimes gets on your nerves.”
“he’s too lazy at times,” i broke in; “but he’s honest, dead honest. he was a farm hand! good heavens, fancy choosing a fellow out of the farmyard to act as valet and waiter! i remember the first time he waited! he was so nervous he nearly dropped everything, and his face like that fire! o’brien said he was tight!”
“richards talks a jolly sight too much, sometimes—but after all what does it matter? they try their best; and think how we curse them! look at the way i cursed about that stove this afternoon: as soon as anything goes wrong, we strafe like blazes, whether it’s their fault or not. a fellow in england would resign on the spot. but they don’t care a damn, and just carry on. this 211 cursing’s no good, bill. hang it all, they’re doing their bit same as we are, and they have a d—d sight harder time.”
“i don’t think they worry much about the strafing,” i said. “it’s part of the ordinary routine. still, i agree, we do strafe them for thousands of things that aren’t their fault.”
“they’re a sort of safety-valve,” he answered with a laugh. “i don’t know how it is, one would never dream of cursing the men like we do these fellows. you know as well as i do, bill, the only way to run a company is by love. it’s no earthly use trying to get the men behind you, by cursing them day and night. i really must try and stop cursing these servants. after all, they’re the best fellows in the world.”
“the men curse all right,” i said, “when they don’t get their food right. i guess we’re all animal, after all. it’s merely a method of getting things done quickly. besides, you know perfectly well you won’t be able to stop blazing away when there’s no fire or food. it creates an artificial warmth.”
“d—d artificial,” laughed he.
there was a silence.
“by jove, bill,” he said at last, getting up to go to bed. “when’s this war going to end?”
to which i made no reply, but moved my bath out of the icy bedroom and dragged it in front of the fire.
