A Padre in France Part 17

I was let down rather badly once or twice by men who were anxious to play for the service, but turned out to be capable of no more than three or four hymns, played by ear, sometimes in impossible keys. I became cautious and used to question volunteers carefully beforehand.

One man who offered himself seemed particularly diffident and doubtful about his ability to play what I wanted. I asked him at last whether he had ever played any instrument, organ or harmonium, at a Church of England service.

"Oh yes, sir, often," he said. "Before the war I was a.s.sistant organist at ----."

He named a great English cathedral, one justly famous for its music.

The next Sunday and for several Sundays afterwards our music was a joy. My friend was one of those rare people who play in such a way that every one present feels compelled to sing.

Looking back over the time I spent in France, it seems as if a long procession of interesting and splendid men pa.s.sed by me. They came from every rank of society, from many processions and trades.

There were rich men among them, a few, and very many poor men. I have witnessed the signature of a private in a north of England regiment to papers concerned with the transfer of several thousand pounds from one security to another. I have helped to cash cheques for men with large bank balances. I have bought crumpled and very dirty penny stamps from men who otherwise would not have been able to pay for the cup of cocoa or the bun they wanted.

There were men in trouble who came to me with letters in their hands containing news from home which brought tears to their eyes and mine.

There were men--wonderfully few of them--with grievances, genuine enough very often, but impossible to remove.

There were men with all sorts of religious difficulties, with simple questions on their lips about the problems which most of us have given up as insoluble on this side of the grave. We met. There was a swiftly formed friends.h.i.+p, a brief intimacy, and then they pa.s.sed from that camp, their temporary resting-place, and were caught again into the intricate working of the vast machine of war.

We were "s.h.i.+ps that pa.s.s in the night and speak one another in pa.s.sing." The quotation is hackneyed almost beyond enduring, but it is impossible to express the feeling better. Efforts to carry on a correspondence afterwards generally ended in failure. A letter or two was written. Then new friends were made and new interests arose. It became impossible to write, because--oddest of reasons--after a time there was nothing to say. The old common interests had vanished.

From time to time we who remained in a camp--workers there--got news of one friend or another, heard that some boy we knew had won distinction for his gallantry. Then we rejoiced. Or, far oftener, we found a well-known name in the casualty lists, and we sorrowed.

Sometimes our friends came back to us, wounded afresh or ground down again to sickness by the pitiless machine. They emerged from the fog which surrounded for us the mysterious and awful "Front," and we welcomed them. But they told us very little. The soldier, whatever his position or education was in civil life, is strangely inarticulate. He will speak in general terms of "stunts" and sc.r.a.ps, of being "up against it," and of "carrying on"; but of the living details of life in the trenches or on the battlefield he has little to say. Still less will he speak of feelings, emotions, hopes, and fears. I suppose that life in the midst of visible death is too awful a thing to talk of and that there is no language in which to express the terrific waves of fear, horror, hope, and exaltation.

Perhaps we may find in the very monstrousness of this war an explanation of the soldier's unceasing effort to treat the whole business as a joke, to laugh at the very worst that can befall him.

With men of other nations it is different no doubt. The French fight gloriously and seem to live in a high, heroic mood. The men of our empire, of all parts of it, jest in the presence of terror, perhaps because the alternative to jesting is either fear or tears. Others may misunderstand us. Often we do not understand ourselves. It is not easy to think of Sam Weller or Mark Tapley as the hero of a stricken field. Yet it is by men with Sam Weller's quaint turn of wit and Mark Tapley's unfailing cheerfulness that the great battles in France and Belgium are being won.