War Classics (18 page)

‘Do try him!' I begged. ‘He can only say “No” at any rate and he won't be angry with you for asking.'

‘Give me your red pass,' he said briefly, ‘and I'll see what I can do.'

A few days later he drew me aside. ‘I've got a permit for two of you,' he announced, ‘as far as Amiens. After that you'll have to wangle it. And, as you're the first to get it, you'll have to be jolly quiet about it.'

Overjoyed I dashed off to the Chief. ‘You will have to take a Hut Lady with you,' he said sternly, ‘a serious and sensible one too. No! My Secretary won't do.' (In any case she preferred to wait for the promised car. ‘I don't believe you'll ever see anything going by rail,' she told me, ‘and so uncomfortable too.')

But the officers were good sports. It appeared that the APM's permit did not cover railway travelling. ‘He only says you may go there,' explained the RTO over a German lesson. ‘He doesn't say how. And I can hold you up on the train. He's got nothing to do with that.'

‘Oh, but you wouldn't,' I cried in dismay. ‘Do give me that bit of paper that lets me go – you know what it is. Please do let me go.' It was too cruel to be stopped like this.

‘You don't know what you're going to,' he said gruffly.

‘No,' I coaxed, ‘but I'll tell you all about it when I come back. And the most English of all the Hut Ladies is coming with me – you should see her – nothing could happen to me with her.'

‘I wish I were going with you,' he laughed.

‘So do I,' I sighed. ‘I should see everything then.'

The AMLO [Assistant Military Landing Officer] was discouraging. ‘I can't imagine what you want to see,' he said, in tones of the utmost surprise, ‘and in any case you won't see it.' It sounded final enough.

The Hut Lady was delighted to go, but she impressed on me that I was to do all the wangling. She took no responsibility at all – washed her hands of the whole affair – but she would do as she was told – exactly as she was told. I began to feel frightened, which was rather awkward, seeing I was still determined to go.

‘Do you think I'll manage?' I asked the Chief anxiously.

‘What about the trains?' he enquired.

‘I've got six movement orders from the RTO,' I replied eagerly. ‘He said I could fill them in for wherever I want. That's all right isn't it?'

The Chief roared. ‘Very much all right,' he laughed. ‘With those,' he went on, ‘and the APM's permit, I think you should just bring it off. I'd trust you as soon as anyone I know, to wangle it.' This was the only comfort I got and I hung on to it.

At my billet, Madame packed stores of bread and chocolate, tins of bully beef and a few eggs, as we could not reckon on getting any food to buy up the line and of course we would not have our rations. Such hotels, it appears, as were open in Amiens, were crowded to the door with the returning French. At this news, the Hut Lady took pillowslips, as we were prepared now to sleep on our suitcases on the station platform.

The first train we had to catch left at 5 a.m. – it was not prompt, though we were, and I was quarter of an hour at the
guichet
before the ticket office would consent to giving me tickets at all. ‘
Pas militaire
,' the man kept repeating. ‘
Impossible
,
Mlle
,
pas militaire
[not military].'

But I had not got as far as that to be stopped by a French ticket clerk. The Hut Lady stood impassive by the suitcases. I had an idea. ‘
Deux billets pour
Eu –
militaire
,' [‘Two tickets for Eu – military,'] I demanded, mentioning the first place where I knew we would have to change and at the same time slipping a couple of francs into his hand. It was the only bribe I ever needed to give in France. He gave me the tickets to Eu, and we climbed into the train. Though Eu was only twelve miles off as the crow flies, it was a good three hours' run by the French train, which works on the plan of calling everywhere else first, in the vain hope of eluding its destination if at all possible. Before we got to Eu, I had to think of some plan to persuade the railway authorities that we were ‘
militaire
' and so make them willing to accept the RTO's order.

A padre, entering at one of the stations, provided the requisite excuse. As padres do, he began to talk to us at once and I forgot my customary code that padres were all ‘duds' and told him of our difficulty. ‘I'll get the tickets for you,' he said, ‘at Eu.' But of course he got the wrong ones – ‘
civils
' – which made us pay four times as much as if he'd used the RTO's movement order. Padres are duds – I lost this one as soon as we got to Amiens.

It was at Abbeville that we first struck the Somme, and as I leant out of the window, I wondered to see how sluggish and placid was its flow. By its banks, on either side, lay trees hewn to the ground. They had blocked no path, they had done no harm, but there they lay. ‘The Boche did that,' said a quiet-looking man in civilian clothes. We were going very slowly now – so slowly that he did a thing I had only read of in fiction before. He got out of the train and collected two shell cases, one for the Hut Lady and one for me and came in again – all without the train stopping.

It was late in the afternoon when at last – beyond my expectation – we pulled up at Amiens. The station was crowded, mostly with French and English soldiers, and I made a beeline for the
sortie
marked ‘for English army only'. Amiens lay before us and the mud on her streets was much the same as the mud at our Base. We were rather exhausted with our long journey – about twelve hours now – and sadly in need of a drink, but I knew we must find the RTO before we did anything. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and we did not know a soul in Amiens – we had nowhere to go to, and we had not even permission to re-enter the station. Happily the RTO was not far off and I managed actually to see him.

He was in a little wooden room with three other officers when I went in. I must say it was the padre who had found him for me and who had insisted that my one chance of success lay in seeing the RTO himself.

The great man was rather amused – fortunately for me. I knew I wasn't looking wholly unpresentable because my uniform was always smart, and whilst the padre had been burrowing about for the office, I had taken the precaution of smoothing my hair and powdering my nose. Once inside the little wooden room, I found myself deserted. The padre vanished, and the Hut Lady, true to her promise, stood outside with the suitcases. I was alone with four strange officers and nearly all of them with coloured tabs.

‘Well, and what can I do for you?' began the RTO as if he were talking to a pet dog.

‘Oh, just ever so much' I answered warmly, ‘if you'll only be so kind.'

He laughed. ‘I suppose I've got to be so kind now,' he murmured. ‘Well, out with it.' I told him. ‘Devastated areas,' he echoed, with some astonishment. ‘I can't think whatever you want to go there for.'

‘We've only got four days' leave,' I pleaded. ‘It won't take long.'

‘I wouldn't go if you paid me,' he said. ‘It's much nicer here.'

At this point I was very near using the final weapon in my armoury, which was that I was kith and kin with the 51st Division. And who had a better right to see the ground they'd won? It would be ill on his part to refuse me.
1
But I thought better of using this dramatic weapon. I looked helpless instead. I could do that very nicely by this time.

A tall officer, lounging in a corner, now spoke up. ‘Oh, let her go. It'll be rather fun to hear what she thinks of it.'

The RTO looked at me through his eyeglasses. ‘Well,' he said finally, ‘if I'm to be so kind, you'll have to be so good.' Not knowing what he was driving at, I thought it better to promise.

‘D'you know anything about the way?' said the tall officer.

‘No,' I answered, forlornly helpless again.

He drew a sketch plan. ‘There,' he said, ‘take this with you. These are some of the places you will pass.'

Relieved and thanking them all, I prepared to go. The RTO stopped me. ‘By the way,' he said, ‘Where are you stopping tonight?'

‘I don't know,' I said cheerily, too happy at having got permission to care where I stayed. ‘I suppose we'll try some of the Hotels.'

He sat up. ‘You jolly well won't,' he said.

‘You can't go to the Hotels,' explained the tall officer quietly. Where were we to go then? Was it to be the station platform and the Hut Lady's clean pillowslips after all?

‘There's a YMCA Ladies' Hostel,' said the RTO briefly, writing out the address for me. ‘It's just five minutes' walk from here. You go to it.'

My heart sank into my boots. Four days' leave and to spend them in a YMCA Ladies' Hostel! How boring it sounded! But I thanked him sweetly and departed.

The Hut Lady was waiting and I told her what had happened. We trudged down in the mud to the hostel – lugging our suitcases – heavy with our provisions. After a long time a ‘
bonne
' came to the door. No – there was no room in the Hostel, nor wouldn't be – it sounded like England at its worst – no – we couldn't sleep on the hall floor – there wasn't a hall anyway. The door banged. ‘I can't go another inch,' said the Hut Lady dejectedly. ‘I'm dead beat!' and she sat down on her suitcase in the street.

I was tired myself, but we had to get somewhere to go to. I spied a military policeman at the corner of the street. ‘You wait here,' I said. ‘I'll go and speak to him.' He was affable and encouraging. There was an Officers' Leave Club right in the middle of town – badly shelled, it had been – but when there was room it sometimes took in VADs. Yes, we could get a cab there. He hailed one. I flew to the Hut Lady. Our luck had turned. ‘Other ranks when you're in a corner,' I said to myself. The French cab rumbled down the Grande Rue, past one huge gaping shell hole that had been a bazaar, until we came face to face with the cathedral, sandbagged from top to bottom. We turned sharply off to the left, through any number of small winding streets until I began to despair of ever finding my way back to the station.

At last the cabby pulled up before a gloomy building like a prison. ‘It's in there,' he told us quite amiably. We paid him and walked into the courtyard – ankle deep in mud. After a bit we saw a flight of steps leading to what seemed a door in the wall. The windows were few and very high up. Not a person was about in the great courtyard, though there were tracks of recent motors in the mud. We climbed the steps and knocked at the door. To our joy, an English orderly answered promptly. He looked surprised, but delighted to see us. There was a Church Army lady in charge, he told us. We must see her. I was ready to see anybody by this time, but had very slight hopes of the Church Army lady showing favour to us. After all, we had no call on her – as they say at home. She was tall and gracious as she came forward to survey us. ‘I have no food,' she said thoughtfully.

‘Oh, we have plenty,' I put in eagerly. ‘It's only if we could get beds, or if you'd let us sleep on the floor. The RTO said we mustn't go to hotels.'

She brightened at the mention of his name. ‘Did the RTO send you here?' she enquired.

‘No,' I said rapidly, and as I hoped tactfully, ‘he sent us to the nearer place – the YMCA – but there was no room for us there.'

She sniffed. ‘There never is.' Then she made up her mind. ‘I will take you in,' she said.

I don't think I have ever been more thankful in my life. The place looked like a barracks, but had originally been some kind of a huge store. It had no light and no water, both having been cut off by the shells. She was leading the way upstairs through a large loft which had been made into a most charming sitting room, into a long dark corridor. A row of small rooms opened off it, separated from each other by wooden partitions. She looked at her list. ‘I will give you rooms with doors,' she told us, ‘the only two that have doors.' The others, it appeared, had sacking roughly nailed up.

In my room stood a bed – and my heart leapt at the sight – with a couple of army blankets and a pillow on it, a table with an enamel basin and ewer on it, a minute looking-glass on the wall and a candlestick. I was overjoyed, and plumped down on my heavy suitcase.

The Church Army lady surveyed me critically. ‘You look tired,' she said at length. ‘I can't give you any dinner, but if you like, the orderly will give you tea and bread and jam. We have plenty of those.'

Could anything be nicer? When she had gone I climbed on to the bed and simply sat and did nothing. In a minute or so my Hut Lady tapped at the door. ‘There aren't any sheets, have you noticed?' she said, in horrified tones. ‘And there isn't a chair in the place.'

I laughed. ‘No,' I said, ‘isn't it jolly? It isn't like England a bit.'

‘Not a little bit,' she said ruefully.

There was another tap at the door. ‘Come in,' I said in surprise, without getting off the bed. The orderly stood at the door with a steaming tin can in his hands.

‘I thort as 'ow yer'd like some 'ot water ter wash, Miss,' he said, dumping down the can. ‘An' yer tea'll be ready in about five minutes.'

‘Not like England a little bit, is it?' I said softly, when he had gone. We unpacked our provisions and took some of the sandwiches in with us. Tea was set in a small hall – the table-cloth was red-and-white French patterned – but the bread was English Army, white and real; so was the sugar – as the Church Army lady had said, there was heaps of it; the milk was our own, condensed, but never having tasted real milk in France, I had begun to like ‘Carnation' best of all; there were scones, home-baked, loads of jam, a brown teapot and flowers on the table. A warm stove purred at my side and there was a soft red cushion in the wicker chair behind my back. Every detail seemed a miracle after the prospect of the streets and the station platform.