War Classics (13 page)

She looked at me. ‘Nobody will believe that, you know. If you go with Captain S, you’ll have to come back with a wedding ring.’

I stared at her aghast and then I felt myself grow red. ‘But he’s married,’ I stammered, ‘I know he is.’

‘They all are,’ she rejoined acidly.

I said no more, but next time I saw Captain S I took occasion to tell him quietly that I was not now going to Paris. ‘Aren’t you?’ he said lightly. ‘Well I’m not going either, as it happened.’

I soon received shocks enough to become disillusioned entirely about our officers. I ceased to take any further interest in them till Christmas, and agreed with Miss Mordaunt that Base officers by and large were ‘like nothing on earth’. She, of course, judged them from the superior heights of the Guards’ Brigade.

But, after Christmas, I revised my judgement – even of Captain S. It was bitterly cold and we had no fire at the School – hardly a blink of oil, even, for when the men came. I had to go along to Captain S’s office one dark, wintry night. His office was at the top of several flights of stairs and I arrived wet, weary and cold. ‘Oh, you’ve got a fire,’ I said, as I stumbled in.

‘Come along in and get warm.’ He poked the fire – a real open English fire. He was Army, I remembered – not like us – and could indent for coal. ‘You’re wearing shoes,’ he went on, ‘and they’re wet through.’

‘We can’t get them mended now by the Army,’ I explained, ‘and the French have only brown paper.’

‘Well, I can get them mended anyhow,’ he returned. ‘I’ll send an orderly round for yours tonight and have them done for you.’

‘But it’s only the RE people who can get them done,’ I stammered stupidly.

‘That’s all right,’ he said briefly. My shoes had many adventures. He gave them to an RE officer who gave them to his corporal with instructions to be ‘done’. The RE officer was demobbed, Captain S went on leave and it was late in March before I saw my shoes again. But he meant well.

That night he trudged back through the sleet to School with me. ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ he said abruptly, as we neared the door. In the midst of the storm he flashed an electric torch on the photograph of quite an ordinary woman and child. But he looked at them with veneration. ‘My wife and little girl,’ he explained. So I revised my judgement of Captain S. It was none so common to find an officer talking of his wife.

After Christmas the type of officer changed. Battalions began to be drafted down to our Area preparatory to demobilisation. A large demobilisation camp, capable of holding about 3,000 troops, was established close to our Base. All sorts and conditions of officers – from the Guards downwards – began to come to the School. They were all gay and carefree, some of them ‘fey’ as the Scotch have it. Their one object in life seemed to be to flirt with us. At first I was shocked – profoundly. In a crowded College life, one has hardly time to flirt, and I had never seen the fun of it any more than I had of dancing. So I sat in a corner and watched the Chief’s secretary – who did it beautifully. But there were only two of us at School and they could not all talk to her.
2

One, madder than most – merry blue eyes and daredevil manner – began to devote himself to me. He was so gay and I so grave that nobody believed we should hold together for more than half an hour. I would see nothing in him and he would soon be bored stiff with me. Well, we were neither of us bored, and with him I made the acquaintance of the cosiest little restaurants in the Base for tête-à-tête dinners. Sipping cider – I would drink nothing else – we talked of the good days that had come, with no thought of the past and none at all of the future. Sing
‘
A Little Cosy Corner and an Armchair for Two’ and you’ll bring it all back again.
3
Instead of heavy tramps through mud to soaking camps, I walked along the seafront with the Sainte Valerie lights playing on the green waters, and picnicked on omelettes and coffee at wayside cottages. There were joyrides too, when I was tucked up in a rug, with a hot brick at my feet and we went spinning along. After three weeks, he had taught me pretty nearly everything. Every prejudice I had started out with had been broken down. He set out to teach me to flirt as, in his opinion, what with Colleges and all that, I must have had the devil of a time. I am generally fairly quick at learning and I found this more intoxicating than Plato.

The Secretary, alarmed, spoke a word of warning. ‘He’s married, you know,’ she said in disturbed tones.

I laughed back at her. ‘They all are.’ It was Circe’s answer. I had learned to smoke – Pearls of Egypt by preference. I could hold my own in persiflage and repartee, if not score, and I never even thought of the wives in England any more than did their husbands. Boxes of chocolate came raining in, so did carnations and roses, till my room was like a garden. I learned it all with enthusiasm. I began to appreciate the French proverb, ‘
Ce n’est que le premier pas qui coûte
’ [‘It is only the first step that is difficult’] – it is only in France that one could learn that.

‘You’re not going to Paris with him, Tiny,’ the Secretary said to me one day sternly, remembering my predilections for Paris, ‘you’re not – I won’t let you.’

I looked at her – blowing rings from my Egyptian cigarette – I had learned to do that too. ‘Why not?’ I queried amusedly.

‘Because you’ll spoil everything if you do,’ she said in desperation.

I looked out of the window. There was England across the seas – solid and prejudiced and strong. Not even the sea could blot England out. ‘It’s all right,’ I said quietly, ‘I’m not going. I’ve told him I’m not. After all, we’ve both of us got to live in England afterwards.’

‘But there isn’t only him,’ she protested ungrammatically. ‘There are others now.’

‘I hope there’ll be lots,’ I said with ardour. ‘I’ve only got six weeks more.’

‘Tiny, you’re different,’ she sighed.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, contemplating the dull vistas of my past. ‘I should think I am.’ She was silent.

The Staff, flabbergasted, took to humming, ‘I was a good little girl till I met you
.
’ But the Secretary and I had a counter effort. ‘We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go’ came in very neatly after visits of from two-to-three hours. One time I was enjoying a prolonged tête-à-tête with a gallant Artillery Major and began to wonder why nobody else was appearing.

‘Where is Captain C?’ I said suddenly. ‘He said he was coming in this afternoon.’

‘Oh, I told Marie Henriette not to let anyone else in – that you were engaged,’ the Artillery Major said.

I jumped. I knew the possibilities of that and the gallant Artillery Major had no more tête-à-têtes.

Then there was the dancing. Captain B was one day doing his best to persuade me to come to a dance; he was not the first to try. But I had no great desire to dance again. I said ‘no’ merely because dancing had always bored me. To my surprise, nobody ever believed that. They thought there was some mystery behind it, and the more I refused, the more keenly I was begged to dance. And Captain B would not take ‘no’ for an answer.

‘Come to the dance anyway,’ he pleaded. ‘You’ll want to dance if you see the others.’

‘Come and sit in the corner like a wallflower, no thank you!’ I retorted.

‘You won’t do that – I promise you, you won’t do that,’ he said eagerly.

By this time I knew I wouldn’t either and a sudden thought came to me. ‘All right,’ I laughed, ‘I’ll come but I won’t dance.’

When I entered the ballroom, during a waltz, nobody but Captain B the Artillery Major knew that I was coming. He sat with me till the waltz ended, while I enjoyed the amazed glances of my friends. After that, the fun was fast and furious. I did not dance, but never a girl in the room had so many partners to talk to. And all of them of the most exciting kind and all of them good dancers. For once in my life – strange to say – I was actually belle of a ball. It was in vain that the chaperone suggested introductions – not one of my partners wanted to dance.

Next day the Secretary spoke to me, ‘Tiny, you sat out every dance.’

‘Every single one,’ I sighed with satisfaction. ‘It was most amusing.’

‘But not moral, my friend,’ she laughed.

‘Oh, là, là,’ I told her. ‘What does that matter in France? I only wanted to know if I could do it.’

In England it was the husbands I felt for when the war widows paired off gaily again. But in France I learned better. My admiration for the wisdom of the War Office in refusing to allow wives in France rose to unprecedented heights. I can still hear the officers’ toast at School, ‘The wives we’ve left in England and the hearts we leave in France.’ It was rather perturbing, but in most cases it fitted the situation exactly. I shall never believe again – as I did in England – that because a man is married, he will not make love to anybody but his wife. I am afraid I smile at the thought now. And there is one other result too. Since leaving France, I have never been able to read a novel or listen to a play without boredom. They are so slow – dead slow – as the men used to say of the prose of Sir Thomas Browne. And the books make love so badly. I could give them points every time in how to do it well. We managed things better in France.

But in all the whirl of laughter and lovemaking, with its undertone of sadness – for we all knew it couldn’t last and that serious life awaited us soon – in it all there was one rope that held. It wasn’t what we had been told was right or wrong – nor yet what we believed to be right and wrong. Not a little bit. I was greatly surprised to find that it wasn’t. Nothing I ever read or believed would have kept me from going to Paris. No! But in the last resort, the only rope that held was that we mustn’t let the home folks down. And on the whole we didn’t. Still when the bandmaster proposed to play off the departing transport with ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me
’
on the plea that it was always played when troops were leaving, even the Base Commandant grew hot. With thoughts of an amused France behind him, he suppressed the band, and the troops departed – unplayed! But it isn’t the French population that would have been shocked – it was the
Daily Mail
.

I was looking out across the Channel one day as the train ferry came in. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ I said to Captain L who was walking with me, ‘if we had a surprise ship from home, bringing all the wives? We’d have them all to tea at School to meet their husbands.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ he ejaculated fervently. ‘What awful things you do think about.’

Many months afterwards Miss Mordaunt met him with his wife in the Strand – a staid, conventional Captain L very different from ours. If I had been there, I should have been tempted to hum:

I love them all just a little bit, just a little bit – that’s true

Each little girl is a rare little pearl, but any little girl will do.

Some men love just one girl and some love two or three

But I love them all just a little bit, just a little bit for me.

I wonder if he would have smiled – he had heard it often enough.

It is odd how these jaunty little airs sang themselves into our hearts and heads over there. I was never musical so I learnt to love them all. Play ‘If You Were The Only Girl in the World’ and I see nothing but a crowded hut and the men all clamouring for tea and Twist. Or ‘Blue Eyes, Blue Eyes, Sweetest I Ever Saw
’
bring back rows of khaki at unforgettable concerts. And when the hours are slow, I have only to hear the barrel organ stammer out
‘
K-K-K-Katy’ to sweep away the years between and see me back in an old French street with the Army on either side.

But there is one song I hope I shall never hear again – ‘Roses of Picardy’. These are France and all France – they go with the English bugles blowing over the mud of Martin-Église where the Demob camp was – they go with the streets of Arras as I walked down them one March morning and English voices sang snatches from the windows, ‘Roses are blooming in Picardy, But there’s never a rose like you’– and they go with Thiepval Wood at three o’clock in the morning and the Battery Major who asked me to marry him there and then. No – ‘Roses of Picardy’ are too redolent of France and carry too many memories and too much pain for me.
4

There’s another song too that always brings back demobbing time. Miss Mordaunt was stationed at the big Demob camp a few miles from our Base. She was the only young woman there, as she could keep her head under all circumstances. The canteens – at the CC’s urgent request – sent only elderly ladies, for here troops only stayed three days to be washed, fitted out with clean clothes and made respectable for England. It was the wildest three days of their lives. There was nothing they would not say or do; they were clean daft with joy. Many times on a Sunday – our slackest day – I went out to spend the day with Miss Mordaunt. In the village street the men were busy buying ‘souvenirs of France’ as if four years of it wasn’t enough ‘souvenir’ by itself, but, as we passed, we heard the snatches of the song that we delighted to hear:

Hullo! Hullo! Hullo! It’s an English girl again,

English eyes, English nose,

English hair and English clothes.

Hullo! Hullo! Hullo! to me it’s very plain,

The days of the war are over

It’s an English girl again.

Sometimes they sang it, sometimes they whistled it, sometimes they hummed it, but they wouldn’t have been demobbing troops without it. And the officers billeted in the dear old Clos Normand, where Miss Mordaunt and I had lunch – they all of them talked to us, laughed with us, flirted with us with that frank camaraderie that the breaking of all conventions gives.
5
For three days there was no such thing as convention – it was like drinking Monsieur’s champagne. But the Lady of the Lovely Hair was unperturbed.

If the British Army – all ranks – was delighted to see English girls again, it was not one whit less pleased to meet little children. ‘
L’Ami des petits français
’ printed the current number of
Les Annales
, showing an English Tommy with a crowd of ragged French children round him and a couple of them on his shoulder and in his arms. It was no less than the truth. Out at Martin-Èglise nearly every batch of returning officers wished to celebrate its farewell to France by giving a treat to the village children, but, as the treats would then have occurred at intervals of three days, even the French mothers took alarm for the digestion of their bairns. But treats of a kind there were – clothes and toys and Christmas trees, crackers and fruit and good things of all sorts were showered on ‘
les petits français
’. If it were possible, the men would have outdone their officers in this.