LAND AND WATER. 
Julv 3, 1915. 
SEEN AT THE FRONT. 
II. -LONDON TO THE FIRING LINE. 
By An Officer. 
OKE has grown used to seeing people off to the front. 
It is a disagreeable business, accompanied by a 
great deal of handshaking and some tears. They 
vanish— this friend or that; and the next we hear 
of them is that they are fighting or in the trenches 
or wounded or killed. The long, roundabout journey to the 
front, full of first i.-npressions, full of strange scenes, has 
rarely been described. Nevertheless, it is a road that every 
draft and every unit has to (ravel, a phase which, accord- 
ing to circum.stances. may last three days or as many weeks. 
Wo left London one brilliant sunny morning in mid- 
winter. It v/as ten o'clock. The blue mists had scarce lifted 
from the river, and the station was nearly empty save 
for the friends and relations of the two hundred men of our 
draft. Handkerchiefs were waved and the train steamed 
out just as a hundred other trains steam out week by week. 
We rattled through the smiling English countryside, through 
the commons and dark green pinewoods. through the open 
uplands and snug valleys, past a score of well-known, well- 
loved places. 
Port was reached about two o'clock. The business 
of detraining and embarking took but a short time, for 
there was practically no baggage. But there were formalities 
and already other troops aboard the little paddle-boat. All 
afternoon we waited for the last draft to arrive. It came on 
board about four o'clock. And in the early hours of a grey 
evening we glided down the harbour. The sun had long 
since disappeared and a nasty wind had begun to play 
with the sea. Past the bell-buoy, v.'luch rocks and tolls amid 
the rising waves, bidding farewell to every outward-going 
ship, and so we leave the shore lights behind. The forts and 
the lightship disappear. The dim, swift-moving outline of 
a destroyer takes their place against the darkening sea. There 
is a more than perceptible swell. Soon it becomes almost an 
obligation to feel sick. And presently five melancholy 
oSicers sit around a cabin — a veritable biscuit-box of a cabin 
— awaiting the end ! 
What a night ! What sheets of rain ! What a violent 
wind ! What a relief at last, after sleepless hours, to ride 
at anchor in port again ! A hulk of a French steamer, very 
low in the water, is towed slowly in through the driving 
rain and drifting sea-sand. She was torpedoed the night 
"jefore last. By degrees, and as we edge in towards the quay- 
«ide, the men recover their spirits — poor wretches who have 
been spending the night on deck, on the stairs, in the gang- 
i^ays down below, everywhere in extremis ! 
We land about the middle of the morning ajid march 
ihrough the crowded streets to the camp on the hills 
behind the town. Past crowded wharves and yards and 
docks, great mountains of stores and lines of A.S.C. wagons; 
past Prench Territorials, who present arms; past smoky, 
hideous factories, whence the workpeople are thronging to 
their midday meal. So through divers difficult streets to the 
straight French pave read lined with poplars, which leads by 
way of various suburbs to the base camp. 
Such a bran-new town of canvas huts and white tents 
clinging to the hillside ! None would believe that so vast ati 
accumulation of dwellings could spring up in so short a time. 
The officers sleep in canvas huts, comfortable enough with 
our warm sleeping-bags and a canvas bucket that does dutv 
for a bath between the two of us. The men are in tents'. 
The officers' mess — a rare draughty place with a tin roof and 
a long table on trestles, where one scrambles, nay, begs and 
prays for food. Next day there is an inspection. Ammuni- 
tion iias to be issued and deficiencies of kit made good. We 
are very busy. Afterwards we work all day at censoring 
the men's letters. At night there is a concert in the bif tin 
Y.M.C.A. hut. The concert-party consists of five well- 
known "stars," whom a few woeks ago I saw behind the 
brilliant footlights of the London stags. Now they are in 
gum-boots and rough country clothes, muddy and somewhat 
dishevelled. They sing popular and old-fashioned senti- 
mental airs which bring down a " house " crammed from 
end to end with khaki. 
For five days we lead a life of censoring, inspecting, and 
being inspected. Then — it is a Saturday — the order "comes 
to be off. On a sunny winter's afternoon we march with 
ethers drafts to the number of 3,000 nien four miles alon^ the 
pretty valley road which leads to thS wayside entrafnin» 
station. Somehow that afternoon remains among my most" 
vivid impressions: the cheering, shouting, singing march 
through the frosty sunlight, the tiny French town nestling at 
the end of its own valley, the quiet evening sky, the bluo 
smoke lazily rising from the houses — these last things I re- 
marked as we waited for the train to start. There v/as, I re- 
m.ember, a buffet managed by two friendly ladies from York- 
shire, who doled out coffee and bread to the men. Then the 
troop train — at least half a mile long — moved off very slowly, 
very cautiously, and, having proceeded about four miles, 
halted for as many hours. We slept along the seats. Once, 
about midnight, the train stopped on a bridge virith a terrific 
jerk and some French Territorial guards shouted incompre- 
hensible observations from the road beneath. The morning, 
brilliantly fine, found us at Abbeville. And all day long we 
rolled on and on, moving, stopping, jolting. Now by the 
seaside, now by the sandhills about Calais, now through illi- 
mitable marshes, then through the ordinary undulating 
countryside, with its grey farms and green fields and vener- 
able church towers, and at last among the flat, cold lands of 
Picardy. Nor was tiiere any sign of war except an occasional 
Red Cross train and an uncommon military activity along 
the main road that ran beside the railway. Even at rail- 
head, ten miles from the front, there was no sound of guns, 
no particular stir in the air, except in the station yard where 
the 3,000 troops detrained. It was aft-er dark. A guide led 
us through the narrow streets of the little French town, ill-lit 
and cobbled. We filed into a disused and dilapidated tobacco 
factory, where on the hard floor of lofts and storage-house 
the men were to billet. It was a place of rats and shadows 
and creaking boards. Having made the necessary arrange- 
ments, we adjourned to our own billet in the house of a 
worthy citizen of the town. The old couple, wizened and 
bent and shy, having doubtless spent all their years iu that 
backwater of civilisation until the war came, showed us 
politely to room — and beds. We slept snugly that night, but 
not before I had repaired to the headquarters of the Army 
Corps on a matter of urgency. Unlike the traditional head- 
quarters of an army, the atmosphere of the litvl? inn, before 
which a sentry stood and a red flag hung, was essentially 
tranquil. Only the sound of typing machines and the pre- 
sence of a few waiting orderlies indicated that anything was 
astir. I was ushered before the general. Brisk and business- 
like, he was seated at a table, smokins: a cigar. His chief of 
staff and aides-de-camp stood in front cf the fire, doing like- 
wise. All had just finished dinner. No time v.'as wasted. 
My business finished, I went out into the dark street. Not 
a sound. A silvery moon shone down upon the little sleeping 
town. Could this be war, I asked myself, this calm and 
tranquil atmosphere ? So, puzzling, I went to bed. 
Morning found us lined along a road leading out of the 
town — a variegated column 1,500 strong, for at nine o'clock 
we were to be inspected by the general. He spoke a few 
words, and the column moved off through a dense grey mist 
that hid the fields on either hand. The highway was of pave 
and trying to the feet. A staff officer rode iu front, and after 
an ho.jr's trudging call.?d a halt. The men were glad enough 
to fall out. It was thf ir first march, carrying packs and full 
weight of equipment. Oppo-ite the halting-place was a house 
with a gaping hole in the roof where, a few days before, a 
German shell had burst. That was our first taste of the war. 
Henceforward many of the houses by the roadside were simi- 
larly damaged, albeit they seemed to be occupied, for besides 
soldiers, women and children swarmed in the streets. And 
the first impression, the one and only impression, was one of 
unutterable squalidity. They were so dingy, these towns, 
with their mud and their smoke-stains and their depraved- 
looking inhabitants. We halted once again in a dirty street. 
By nov/ our limbs were aching and tired. Then, turning off 
along a lane, wo struck out into the open country. Presently 
we came upon a line of guns — 4.7's — cleverly concealed. The 
whole thing, the whole journey until we halted before the 
farmhouse where the staff of the battalion was awaiting us, 
conveyed to the mind a sense of hopeless unreality. Surely 
tills could not be real war, one thought repeatedly. Surely 
this must be a dream or an exhibition or some kind of excur- 
sion, or a moving picture such as one sees at the music-halls ! 
Yet, no — it was war right enough— the trenches were only a 
mile awav. 
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