Now It Can Be Told

bayonet) to the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of psychology. When men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken, he set to work to build up their vitality again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets⁠—the gamecocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, and to rear chicks, and tend flowers, and grow vegetables. Love, and not hate, was now his gospel. All his training was done by games, simple games arousing intelligence, leading up to elaborate games demanding skill of hand and eye. He challenged the whole army system of discipline imposed by authority by a new system of self-discipline based upon interest and instinct. His results were startling, and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, shell-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter in their eyes.

“It’s a pity,” he said, “they have to go off again and be shot to pieces. I cure them only to be killed⁠—but that’s not my fault. It’s the fault of war.”

It was Colonel Campbell who discovered “Willie Woodbine,” the fighting parson and soldier’s poet, who was the leading member of a traveling troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two. They fought one another with science (as old professionals) and challenged any man in the crowd. Then one of them played the violin and drew the soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after another fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of God, and war, and the weakness of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those fellows in his hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new revelation, gave them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches again.

XI

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as far back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and farmstead, villa, and château was inhabited by men in khaki, who made themselves at home and established friendly relations with civilians there unless they were too flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper, or too filthy in their habits. Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another.

For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of that British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world of ghosts carved their names on wooden beams, and on the whitewashed walls scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John Johnson was a bastard; or that a certain battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser Bill would die on the gallows, illustrating those remarks with portraits and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but vivid and significant.

The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which he made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his officers’ mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, “Où est le blooming couteau?” or “Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s’il vous plaît, madame.” It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that “Les pommes de terre frites are absolument all right if only madame will tenir ses cheveux on.” In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have passed them on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered kilts pumped up the water from old wells, and whistled “I Know a Lassie” to the girl who brought the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while Sandy played a “wee bit” on the pipes to the peasant-folk who gathered at the gate. Such good relations existed between the cottagers and their temporary guests that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversation was of dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and hell), the old lady who had given him her best bedroom at the beginning of the war flung her arms about him and greeted him like a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with