The adventures of an ensign

“Fair sets the wind for France!”

This story, like so many others in England’s military history, opens at Waterloo Station. We shall abridge the formalities of introducing its central figure, for he can only claim attention in connection with certain military events in which he played a diminutive rôle. Indeed, save for the fact that he is wearing the service uniform of one of the Guards’ regiments, there is nothing to distinguish him from the thousands of other second lieutenants, insignificant even as he, whose share in shaping the destinies of the world on the battlefields of France and Belgium has likewise begun at one or other of the great London termini.

Here, then, is our Ensign--a colloquial phrase for referring to a second lieutenant of the Guards, for the title was dropped many years ago--in company with a brother ensign, his fellow-traveller, known to the ante-room at home as “The Lad,” and, like the other, for the first time “proceeding on active service.” They are going out alone--that is to say, not as part of a draft--and beyond the known fact that they are bound for the Guards’ Base Depôt in France, what military writers call “the fog of war” envelops their future.

“Thank goodness, we’re not conducting a draft!”

Thus our Ensign, as he stood on the platform at Waterloo, to his fellow-traveller, indicating with a jerk of his head a flushed and heated youth, heavily laden with pack and equipment, who was chivvying a party of men to the train.

“Probably we should get up to the Front quicker if we were!” replied his companion gloomily. Waking and sleeping, The Lad was haunted by the fear that the war would be over before he could get into the firing line.

“We shall get there quick enough, don’t you worry!” replied the other; “there’s something happening in France. I was at Broadstairs yesterday, and we heard the guns all day!”

For this was in those summer days of 1916, when even in Kent the air throbbed to the unending tremulo of the guns playing the overture to the battle of the Somme.

It was a beautiful morning--a Saturday--and the train was very crowded. The two officers started their journey under the most favourable auspices. On returning to their compartment of the train, after purchasing papers at the bookstall, our Ensign found a bearded cleric seated upon his Wolseley valise on the floor of the carriage, for every seat was taken. The Lad and our young friend made room for the ecclesiastic upon the seat between them, and in the conversation which ensued The Lad identified the stranger as a Bishop travelling down to Winchester to see a school cricket match.

“In this heat,” said The Lad to our Ensign, after taking leave of the Bishop at Winchester, “he must have mentally blessed us for coming to his rescue, so I think we’ve made a pretty good start!”

At the port of embarkation, which the Censor will hardly let me name, a timely hint recurred to them as they drove down to the docks in an ancient fly. The advice had been offered by a veteran of Mons and Ypres.

“Don’t go on board the transport too early,” this authority had said, “or the M.L.O. or one of those fellows will rope you in for the job of O.C. troops going across. They generally pick on somebody who is not conducting a draft!” So the two young officers, having ascertained that the transport would not sail till the late afternoon, dumped their kits on the quayside and fled back to the town for lunch. Cold beef and pickles and very stale bread and tired butter laid out on a stained table-cloth, in a depressing atmosphere of faded victuals, amid red wall-paper, whisky advertisements, and dyed grasses--truly we English love to soften the pangs of parting from our native shores! Nevertheless the travelling companions made an excellent luncheon, and even professed to recognise feminine allurements in the dingy slattern who served them.

The transport which was to take them to France was not a prison hulk such as bore young Colonel Wesley to his first taste of active service on the West Indies expedition, nor was she verminous like the coffin ships that conveyed the Guards to Malta in ’54; but when it is noted that she was clean, nothing remains to be said. There were a few bunks for officers below; but these were appropriated by the early comers. Everybody else, officers and men, sprawled about on the decks and in the bare open spaces made by clearing out the first and second class saloons--for, in her youth, the transport had been a passenger steamer.

The ship was very crowded. On board were big drafts of the King’s Royal Rifles, with their black cross badges, of London Territorials, and of Irish Rifles and Irish Fusiliers, a fine rowdy lot of Irishmen these two last, as well as some yeomanry and various oddments coming back from leave. Our Ensign, who possessed to some extent the faculty of observation, noticed that the leave men did not seem to return to the prospect before them with that blitheness of heart of which the lady war writers tell us. On the other hand, the men were by no means gloomy. They just sat about on their packs and smoked their fags and chatted about the good time they had had in Blighty, and cracked a little joke or two about the life to which they were going back.

Our two young Guardsmen walked the upper deck until the transport was well out in the open sea. Then the prostration became so general that progress was a sort of egg-dance. So they turned their steps towards the stairs leading to the lower deck, where they ran into a Grenadier subaltern. They stopped and chatted. He was going back from leave. They told him they were going to the Base.

“Do you think they’ll keep us there long?” asked The Lad hastily.

“Can’t say,” answered the other; “things are pretty quiet up Ypres way.”

Then they talked about the amenities of life in the Salient, and about mutual acquaintances out in France with the Guards’ Division and in the Brigade at home.

“I believe there’s some kind of restaurant place on board for officers,” suddenly remarked the Grenadier; “suppose we go and have something to eat!”

They found a tiny place, literally crammed to the narrow door with officers, packed as tight as herrings in a barrel, round several small tables, the napery of which showed signs of the tossing of the vessel and the rough-and-scramble of the accommodation. Fortunately some one there espied a submarine through the port-hole, and in the ensuing rush for the deck the three officers managed to wedge themselves in at a table. Here, in the course of time, they received successively from the hands of the perspiring stewards a piece of cold beef, a sardine in a saucer, a loaf of bread, considerably damaged, a knife, a spoon, a teapot full of very hot and very strong tea, and a plate. With these ingredients they contrived to make a very fair supper on the co-operative system.

After that the trio parted company, and our Ensign and The Lad, after much scrambling over prostrate forms, found an empty boat into which they clambered, and slept comfortably till daylight.

Our Ensign awoke to find The Lad shaking him. The rising sun was daubing the wide stretch of sky with a grand splash of colour. The transport was lying alongside a quay where lines of khaki figures were forming up on the greasy planking among cranes, gangways, and stacks of packing-cases.

“Listen!” said The Lad in a reverent voice.

But our Ensign had already heard it--that steady throb of distant cannon, an incessant pounding, as it seemed, upon the roof of the sky.

The guns of the Somme!

An officer, the snout of a megaphone to his face, was bawling orders.

“All leave men to come ashore at once. The remainder stay on board!” he boomed from the quayside.

“H--l!” exclaimed The Lad in a tone which suggested that peace might be declared before they could disembark.

“H--l!” echoed his companion.

Then they went and searched the vessel for breakfast. A Coldstream sergeant, whom The Lad had met on a bombing course somewhere at home, meeting them, volunteered the information that hot cocoa was going in the cook’s galley. There, sure enough, our heroes found two grimy-looking privates in their shirt sleeves presiding over dixies of some dark and scalding liquid. The procedure was simple. You grabbed a mug from somebody who had finished--officers and men were all mixed up together in that little place--and had as many dips as you could contrive in the scrum. Hot cocoa in the chilly dawn is nectar.

Soon after the travelling companions landed, and a very friendly M.L.O. abbreviated formalities for them and indicated an hotel where breakfast and a bath might be obtained before they went on to the Guards’ Base Depôt, the intermediate stage on their journey towards the Front.

The air still vibrated to the throb of distant gun fire. The whole town was throbbing in sympathy. The morning communiqué was full of the story of the British successes on the Somme, with a long tale of prisoners and guns captured. People stood about the docks and at street corners in the bright sunshine discussing the great news. At the barber’s where they were shaved, at the hotel where they bathed and breakfasted, the new-comers heard little else save enthusiastic comments on the British advance.

Later in the day our Ensign and The Lad found themselves staring wide-eyed at a broad stretch of hillside, covered, as far as the eye could see, with a vast and mighty camp--a sea of tents and huts and sheds all astir with life.

Here, presently, they reported at an office in company with a throng of officers from every arm of the service, and were directed to proceed to the portion of the camp set apart for the Guards’ Division. A long, well-kept road, fringed on either side with tents and huts of all descriptions, led them through a series of camps, past orderly-rooms and guard-rooms and cinema sheds and Y.M.C.A. huts and church tents, with little gardens and regimental crests worked in white and black stones, to a low slope, dotted with huts and sheds and bell-tents in orderly rows, with a well-known flag floating from a flagstaff on the roof of a long low building.

A white star on a red and blue ground--it was the Brigade flag.