Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (1233 page)

They returned to their depleted camps until more young officers came along for instruction, and in the last week of September their comrades, the 4th Grenadiers and the 3rd Coldstream, were called away to the moving front — ”to fight” — as the horrified Diary puts it! Actually, the two battalions merely followed the advance in the wake of the cavalry corps as mobile infantry on lorries, till the 26th of October. They then returned to their brigade till the 14th November, when they joined the Guards Division for the march into Germany.

For the next six weeks or so, then, Criel Plage was all the Battalion’s deserted own during the autumn days that saw the German armies driven back, but it is interesting to observe that, on the 10th of October, a special order of the day, issued by the G.O.C. Fourth Army, laid down that “all peace-talk must cease.” As usual, they seemed to know more in the back-areas than at the front, where the 1st Battalion certainly did not believe on the chances of any immediate end.

On the 14th October, their small world was shaken out of all its talk by the really serious news that their C.O. (Colonel the Hon. H. R. Alexander) was to transfer to command the 10th Army School. He left on the 18th, and the whole Battalion turned out to bid him good-bye with an affection few commanding officers had ever awakened. He wrote in orders (but he had spoken as well, straight from his heart): “I wish to express my sincere grief in leaving the Battalion I am so fond of. We have been through some hard times together, but the remembrance of those battles in which the 2nd Battalion has taken such a glorious part will always be a great pride to me. Remember the great name that this wonderful Battalion has made for itself in the War. Be proud of it and guard it jealously. I leave you with complete confidence that its reputation is safe in your hands. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the loyalty that you have always shown me during the whole time that I have had the honour of commanding you. I wish you all and individually the best possible luck and success, and a safe return to your homes when the War is over.”

It is undeniable that Colonel Alexander had the gift of handling the men on the lines to which they most readily responded; as the many tales in this connection testify. At the worst crises he was both inventive and cordial and, on such occasions as they all strove together in the gates of Death, would somehow contrive to dress the affair as high comedy. Moreover, when the blame for some incident of battle or fatigue was his, he confessed and took it upon his own shoulders in the presence of all. Consequently, his subordinates loved him, even when he fell upon them blisteringly for their shortcomings; and his men were all his own.

On the 26th October the 4th Grenadiers and the 3rd Coldstream returned from their adventures at the front with the cavalry, full of their impressions that everything was over now except the shouting. Then there was more “peace-talk” than ever in the camp, and, three days after the Armistice was declared, the Battalion with the Brigade rolled statelily out of Criel for Cambrai by a “strategical” train, which is slower than a sundial. They were clean, polished, and splendid to behold, and they instantly fought with Brigade Headquarters and their own trench-mortar battery, who had generous ideas as to the amount of truckage which they themselves required.

They wandered half round northern France on that queer journey, halting for hours in a battered world just realising that the weight of the past four years had lifted. Whereby everybody attended to everything except his proper job. At this distance one sees how all men were walking in a mild delirium of reaction, but it annoyed people at the time. Said one who had experienced it: “Ye would come on a man an’ ask him for what ye wanted or where you was to go, an’ the Frenchman, he’d say, ‘
Oui! Oui! Gare finne
,’ an’ smile an’ rub his hands an’ push off. The Englishman — some dam’ back-area sergeant-clerk or ticket-collector that had been playin’ ping-pong at Boulogne since ‘14 — he’d smile the same way an’ ‘‘Tis over, ‘tis over!’ he’d say, clean forgettin’ everything for you that he hadn’t done wrong-end-up. But we was all like that together — silly, foolish, an’ goin’ about grinnin’.” At one of their many resting-places, they found the 4th Grenadiers who had started four hours before them. The rail ahead was reported mined, and though the Battalion politely suggested that their friends might hurry on and test the truth of the rumour for themselves the Grenadiers declined. Men were beginning to set a value on their lives again. At ruined Cambrai, forty-eight hours after their start, they were warned to join the Guards Division, who were going to Cologne, and to travel light, as no further transport could be taken up. So they dumped surplus kit, including boots, which was a mistake, at Cambrai, and waited twenty-four hours till lorries should turn up, as guaranteed. When these at last appeared no destination was laid down, but the Guards Division was supposed to be somewhere near Maubeuge. They lost their way from Cambrai at the outset and managed to mislay no small portion of their lorries, all the Battalion, less Headquarters, and a good deal of the 3rd Coldstream, ere they reached Maubeuge, which was in the full swing of Armistice demonstrations. Their orders were to march with the 2nd Guards Brigade next day to Vieux Reng, which they did through a friendly and welcoming country-side, and on the 20th November to Charleroi through Marchienne where they were met by a mad brass band (entirely composed of men in bowler hats!). The roads filled as they went on, with returning prisoners even more compositely dressed than the natives — a general gaol-delivery of hidden, escaped, released, and all the flotsam and jetsam of violently arrested war. The customs of His Majesty’s armies were new to the world, and Charleroi did not in the least understand “saluting drill” with the drums in the background, and when, to this marvel, was added the sight of a regiment of Grenadiers at physical drill, hopping on one foot, they assembled and shouted like the men of Ephesus.

The next move (November 24th) was to Presles on a frosty day, with billets for the officers in the superbly comfortable Château, with its pictures and wallpapers intact on the wall, handles to the doors, and roofs of flawless integrity. To wake up among surroundings that had altogether escaped the past four years was curious. (“Somehow or other, it felt like being in a shop where everything was free, and one could take down what one wanted. I remember looking at a ceiling with flowers painted on it one morning and wondering how it hadn’t been cracked.”) They were landed in the dull and cramped village of Lesves by November the 25th and rained upon in their utter boredom. Our national methods of conquest have nothing spectacular. They were neither talked to, sung to, nor lectured on their victory, nor encouraged to demonstrate their superiority over the rest of mankind. They marched and mourned that they had not brought spare boots. Company physical training and drills were kept up, and the sole thing approaching war was a football match of the right half-battalion against the left, which blossomed into an argument, which verged upon a free fight and, almost, the slaughter of the umpire. At Petit Han, in the remoter districts of the border where the people had accepted the Hun from the first, and had profited by his rule, the attitude of the civilians changed. Here they were prosperous pacifists who objected to militarism; even cursing and swearing and shaking their fists at the invaders. So one old lady had to be gently locked up in her own room for two hours while billets were being arranged and the officers patiently argued and entreated. Ouffey, another hamlet of a few sad houses, was of the same unaccommodating temper, and their transport turned up hours late after being delayed by traffic and bad roads. A halt was necessary here to sort out the general confusion of our brigades converging on Cologne. They were held, then, at Ouffey till the 10th December, another day at Aisomont, an unknown village, and at last on the 12th crossed into Germany from Stavelot at Pont Rucken with the Brigade. The Battalion, whose staff never neglected their interests, had contrived to secure waterproof capes at some issue or other, which they wore under the approving eyes of the Corps Commander, who watched the march past in the unending rain. Honsfeld was their last journey afoot; there they got orders to go south to Burg and entrain for Cologne, and at Ehrenfeld, on the outskirts of that city, they dropped into the Pioneer Barracks, fitted with every luxury from electric-light to drying-rooms and baths, and found the inhabitants both friendly and intensely curious.

Here some of our men noticed, first, how keenly curious were the natives to discover exactly what the strangers had in their minds, and, that point established, exactly how far they might presume upon their limitations. It was soon felt that our armies boasted no tradition nor ritual of victory as the Germans understood it — that the utmost they could devise was some form of polite police-work and traffic regulation. So, as one observer put it “There was Jerry takin’ stock of us, under his hatbrim at the street-corners in the wet; and there was those little steamers with some of our officers in charge (an’ the Irish flag flyin’ at the bows of course) convoyin’ prisoners an’ refugees an’ details an’ all, up an’ down that Rhine River, like pirates play actin’! An’ there was the Jerry frowlines so polite an’ anxious for to please, playin’ the ‘Marseillaise’ an’ ‘God Save the King’ to the officers in the evenin’, an’ every Jerry willin’ to sell us everything he thought we’d like to buy. An’ there was us Micks mountin’ guard on the dumps, an’ patrollin’ the streets an’ sittin’ on machine-guns acrost bridges in that wet an’ cold an’ — an’ ‘twas all like play-actin’. Nothin’ real to it at all, except the long waitin’ an’ we crazy to get home. Maybe the new hands an’ the cease fire drafts liked the victoriousness of it, but for us, the old birds, that had come through great doin’s for so long, ‘twas not in nature, ye’ll understand. All false-like, except the dam’ ceremonials.”

The last was quite true. The “smartening-up” that overtook both battalions in Cologne was of a thoroughness new even to the extended experience of the “old birds.” Sergeants, sickened by long months of gritty and dusty hutments that ruin the bloom and port of the ideal “soldier,” with officers on the rebound from service requirements to a desperate interest in the haberdashery and appurtenances of real, and possible, life, fell upon them from either flank; while colonels in the background and generals on far heights proclaimed the iniquity of deviating by one hair’s breadth from the highest standards of propriety in kit, conduct, and bearing while they were among the late enemy. So they said, with justice, that Jerry managed to give them as much trouble when they occupied him as when he was occupying them on the Somme.

It was an insane interval of waiting, as the world did in those days, for the immediate demobilisation of democratic hosts, all units of which were convinced that they had the right to go home before all others. “The prisoner at the Bar,” as men then styled Germany, being entirely at home, was saving himself to continue the War underground when time, occasion, and dissension among his conquerors should show him his chance. But of this there was no foreknowledge. The hearts of the men who had borne the burden were still pulsing to the thud of the guns; their minds still obsessed in their leisure by the return of horrors seen and beard; their souls crying out for something that should veil them from themselves; and at the hour when the spent world, like a spent battalion, most needed a few low-voiced, wholly unsentimental orders and an orderly return to light but continuous mechanical work, when, above all, it was in no shape to be talked at or to or over, it was delivered to whirlwinds and avalanches of allocutions, exhortations, and strenuously conflicting “ideals” that would have shaken the sanity of the gods themselves. Thus the barren months passed. The most fortunate people were those who had their hands full of necessary and obvious work — mere detail to be put through for immediate needs. “We cursed it enough at the time, but we would have given a good deal for it afterwards. You see, it kept one from thinking.”

And in the spring of ‘19 came the release, and the return of the Guards to England, and, on a grey March day, the Division, for the last time, was massed and moved through London, their wounded accompanying them on foot, or in the crowded lorries, while their mascots walked statelily in the intervals.

To see the actual weapons with which great works have been done is always astonishing. The stream of troops seemed scanty between the multitudes that banked it. Their faces, too, told nothing, and least of all the faces of the veterans — the sergeants of twenty-three, and the commanding officers of twenty-eight, who, by miracle or the mercy of severe wounds, had come through it all since that first hot August evening, at the milestone near Harmignies, when the first bullet fell on the turf, and men said, “This is The War!” The wounded, in civil kit, having no more fear of their superior officers before their eyes, occasionally, when they shouted to a friend, gave away by unguarded tone, or change of countenance, a hint of the hells which they had shared together. And London, solid on its pavements; looked, counted over, compared, hailed, but never too loudly, some known face in the ranks or figure on horseback, and rejoiced or grieved as the fortune of war had dealt with its men. For the Guards belong to London, and, by that time, even the Irish Guards were half London recruits.

The Second Battalion of the Irish Guards was marked to be disbanded later, with thousands of others. Their loyalty, their long endurance, their bravery — the ceaseless labour, love, and example that had gone to their making and upholding, in which work men had died as directly as any killed by gas or shell — had done all that was called for. They made no claim to have accomplished or suffered more than others. They knew what load had been laid upon all.

They were the younger battalion, born in Warley, officered from the first by special reserve officers, always most intimately bound up with their sister battalion, yet always most strictly themselves. They had been a “happy” battalion throughout, and, on the admission of those whose good opinion they most valued, one that had “done as well as any” in a war that had made mere glory ridiculous. Of all these things nothing but the memory would remain. And, as they moved — little more than a company strong — in the wake of their seniors, one saw, here and there among the wounded in civil kit, young men with eyes which did not match their age, shaken beyond speech or tears by the splendour and the grief of that memory.