NO MAN'S LAND (A WW1 Saga). H. C. McNeile / Sapper
Draycott took off his hat.
"Mon Colonel, vive la France." They shook hands; and having once again solemnly saluted one another, he took the Frenchman's advice and went in search of dinner.
In the restaurant itself everything seemed normal. To the close observer there was possibly an undue proportion of women who did not eat, but who watched with hungry, loving eyes the men who were with them. Now and again one would look round, and in her face was the pitiful look of the hunted animal; then he would speak, and with a smile on her lips and a jest on her tongue she would cover a heart that seemed like to burst with the agony of it. Inexorably the clock moved on: the finger of fate that was to take him from her. They had quarrelled, sans doute—who has not? there had been days when they had not spoken. He had not been to her all that he might have been, but . . . But—he was her man.
And now he was going; in half an hour her Pierre was going to leave her. For him the bustle and glamour of the unknown; for her—the empty chair, the lonely house, and her thoughts. Dear God! but war is a bad thing for the women who stop behind. . . .
And on Draycott's brain a tableau is stamped indelibly, just a little tableau he saw that night in the restaurant of the Gare de Lyon. They came, the three of them, up the flight of steps from the seething station below, into the peace and quiet of the room, and a roar of sound swept in with them as the doors swung open. Threading their way between the tables, they stopped just opposite to where he sat, and instinctively he turned his head away. For her the half-hour was over, her Pierre had gone; and it is not given to a man to look on a woman's grief save with a catching in the throat and a pricking in the eyes. It is so utterly terrible in its overwhelming agony at the moment, so absolutely final; one feels so helpless.
The little boy clambered on to a chair and sat watching his mother gravely; a grey-haired woman with anxious eyes held one of her hands clasped tight. And the girl—she was just a girl, that's all—sat dry-eyed and rigid, staring, staring, while every now and then she seemed to whisper something through lips that hardly moved.
"Maman," a childish voice piped out. "Maman." He solemnly extended a small and grubby hand towards her.
Slowly her head came round, her eyes took him in—almost uncomprehendingly; she saw the childish face, the little dirty hand, and suddenly there came to her the great gift of the Healer.
"Oh! mon bébé, mon pauv' p'tit bébé!" She picked him up off the chair and, clutching him in her arms, put her face on his head and sobbed out her heart.
"Come on." Draycott got up suddenly and turned to the man he was dining with. "Let's go." They passed close to the table, and the fat waiter, wiping his eyes on a dinner napkin, and the grey-haired woman leaning gently over her, were talking in low tones. They seemed satisfied as they watched the sobbing girl; and they were people of understanding. "Pauvre petite," muttered the waiter as they passed. "Mon Dieu! quelle vâche de guerre."
"My God!" said Draycott, as they went down the steps. "I didn't realise before what war meant to a woman. And we shall never realise what it means to our own women. We only see them before we go. Never after."
IV
Half an hour later he encountered Monsieur le Colonel once again, and suggested that they should split a bottle of wine together if he could spare the time. It was then nine o'clock, and the three hours till midnight loomed uninviting. His only hope, as he told him, was that the train at present standing at the platform was not going to be typical of the one he was to embark on. It seemed to be of endless length, and presented a most enticing spectacle. Four fortunates in each compartment had got the racks, otherwise the passengers stood: on the footboards, in the corridors, on the seats. If any one opened a door the pressure was such that at least six people fell on to the platform, and in one carriage a small poilu was being squeezed through the open window. In the end he went—suddenly like a cork out of a bottle, and the human mass closed up behind him.
Draycott laughed, the Colonel laughed, and went on laughing. He laughed unrestrainedly, even as a man who enjoys a secret jest. At last, with some difficulty, he controlled his mirth.
"Monsieur," he remarked gravely, but with twinkling eyes, "I fear your hopes are ill-founded. This is the midnight train."
"Under those circumstances," Draycott murmured, with a ghastly attempt at mirth, "the wine is off. I must go and secure my sleeping-berth."
Have you ever seen a fly-paper which has come "to the end of a perfect day"? Lumps of glutinous flies drop off on one's head, and still it seems as full as ever. It was the same with that train. Lumps of Frenchmen, permanently welded together, fell out periodically, unstuck themselves, and departed, only to return in a few moments with the long thin loaves of France and bottles of wine. Sometimes they got in again, sometimes they didn't—but they were happy, those poilus. What matter anything, bar killing the Boche? And that was the only thing in the air that night. . . .
In every carriage it was the same, until suddenly there came salvation. A horse-box, with two horses in it and some grooms singing the Marseillaise, loomed out of the darkness, and into it the fed-up wanderer hurled his bag. Yet again did he embrace every one, including the horses; and then, overcome with his labours, he sank into a corner and laughed. And it was only when they had been under way for two hours that he remembered his two other bags, sitting alone and forlorn at the Gare de Lyon. . . .
It was a great journey that. The heat was sweltering, and they stopped at every station between Paris and Marseilles—generally twice, because the train was too long for the platform. And at every station the same programme was repeated. Completely regardless of the infuriated whistles and toots of the French conductors, absolutely unmindful of the agonised shouts of "En voiture, en voiture! Montez, messieurs, le train part," the human freight unloaded itself and made merry. As far as they were concerned, let the train "part." It never did, and the immediate necessity was the inner man. But it was all very nerve-racking.
At times there were forty Frenchmen in the truck, at others none. Whether they fell off or were pushed Draycott knew not: they simply occurred—periodically. One man disappeared for five hours, and then came back again; possibly he was walking to stretch his legs; there was plenty of time. But to those who travel in trains de luxe, let me recommend a journey in a cattle-truck, where, if one is lucky, one gets a front seat, and sits on the floor with legs dangling over the side; a bottle of wine in one hand, a loaf of bread in the other, and a song when the spirit is in one. No breathless rushing through space: just a gentle amble through the ripening corn, with the poppies glinting red and the purple mountains in the distance; with a three days' growth on one's chin and an amalgamation of engine soots and dust on one's face that would give a dust storm off the desert points and a beating. That is the way to travel, even if the journey lasts from Sunday night to Tuesday evening, and a horse occasionally stamps on your face. And even so did Clive Draycott, Captain of "Feet," go to the great war. . . .
V
Marseilles has always been a town of mystery—the gateway of the East. Going from it one leaves European civilisation—if such a thing can be said to exist to-day—and steps into the unknown. Coming to it through that appalling Gulf of Lyons, beside which the dreaded Bay of Biscay seems like the proverbial duck-pond, Notre Dame de la Garde holds out a welcoming hand, and breathes of fast trains and restaurant cars, and London. It is the town of tongues, the city of nations. It is not French; it is universal.
And never can Marseilles have been so universal as in the early days of August 1914. Usually a port of call only, then it was a terminus. The ships came in, but did not leave: there seemed to be a concensus of opinion amongst skippers that the Goeben was a nasty thing to meet alone on a dark night. And so the overcrowded docks filled up with waiting vessels, while Lascars and Levantine Greeks, Cingalese