December 14, 1916 
LAND & WATER 
15 
The Faith of Tommy 
By a Line Officer 
NOW herein is matter for surprise. That you 
should take men pell-mell from the skilled 
heart of industry, from the routine of the 
oflice, from the small shop, the farm, the 
country estate — I have, for instance, in the first dittle 
unit of ten men on my list (no, you won't guess their 
job) two labourers, two miners, two skilled cooks, a milk- 
man, a regiilar, a carter, and a male attendant from a 
lunatic asylum : that hastily trained, hastily ofiTiccred, and 
flung into the field with and against the finest profes- 
sional soldiery in the world, the tradition of the service 
should descend upon and enwrap these men in the way 
it undoubtedly has done : that out of such various and 
unprecedented material, experiences equally various and 
unprecedented should reincarnate certain half-legendary 
ancient traits, characteristics, conditions of soul, and 
should recreate the fiower of an England in which it 
were liard to see the prototype of the England of to-day. 
^\'hat constant elements within, without, in the soil, in 
the blood, must have conspu'cd together in order to 
evoke this mar\-el ? 
I have been again in England after thirteen months of her 
various ser\ice elsewhere, and I suppose that is what has 
set me wondering : the discrepancy — the lack of accord- 
between the spoken, sung, or printed voice of England as 
it strikes one at home, and the voice of the army, as it 
strikes one out here. It is not a matter of \-iews or opinions 
—we know little enough of them (and, may I say, you 
will ha\-e a job to teach us) ; it is in the tone, the temper, 
with which that articulate England of the press and the 
platform, and this great khaki England of the field, 
speak and act and think about the war, and Fritz, and 
the world at large. 
Fritz is Serious 
Now Fritz is serious. It's true we're teaching him 
humour — he has learnt much in that respect, as anyone 
who has met him could testify. There is, for example, a 
certain vulgar rhythm of seven notes with which our M.G.'s, 
when the line is quiet, occasionally entertain him. He 
has learnt that, and you will often hear it ratthng about 
the cross-roads at night. And he was not abo^'e picking 
up, months ago, the English method of signalling shots 
on the range. There are many stories— most of them, 
and always the wildest, roughly true. But in the general 
routine of things, Fritz's emotions run the other way. 
There was a dug-out in Pozieres, for instance, in which 
a group of Germans had tacked up a large decorated 
calendar. Round the central picture was a big wreath 
of pansies, or some such flower ; and on every one of these 
a (lerman lover had inscribed the name of his girl^a 
thing no dozen British could have done, drunk or sober. 
And I recall, during a momentary halt in a recent push, 
picking up from the litter in a Bosch dug-out one of the 
Fcldgcsaniibuche —field songbooks —they all seem to have 
\yith them, and reading there in the doorway, with the 
(jeiTTian barrage yet pounding away outside, Korner's 
Vater, Ich rujc Dich—" Father, I call to Thee" — one of 
the things that taught me, years ago in Gower Street, to 
respect the Teuton soul. 
Such things are not our way, and the taste of Tommv 
doesn't run to sentiment and heroics ; but we are 
learning to understand them, and to like Fritz the better 
for them. They, like the laughter of the Bairnsfathcr 
people, are the expression of a wonderful faith— a faith 
in things that are common to both sides of No Man's 
Land, and that German and British, meet how they 
may, can respect each other for. Fritz is no doubt a bit 
more articulate — it's his forte : but nothing less can inspire 
that Homeric mirth of the British either. 
For it is not cheap or common. It takes a great 
occasion to evoke the downright laughter. When things 
are merely normal. Tommy grouses — though he does not 
complain, which is another and a technical affair, amount- 
ing to the height of bad form. When things are distinctly 
unpleasant, he swears as well ; but when they are too 
utterly awful for words, tlien he laughs and sings. 
There was a road in Gallipoli that deserves as well of 
fame as many a hill-road in India ; both from the fighting 
that went before it (as the loth and nth can tell) from 
the labour that went into it (as the sappers know) and 
the strange life it saw. It ran for two miles just under a 
600-foot ridge, with the sea below ; and it looked towards 
Samothrace and the shores of Macedonia. Above and 
below on the hillside, save at one point where the cliff 
had broken clean away and the road lield on by its eye- 
bro^\•s, were shelters- — for the place teemed with men : 
poor little affairs of a few sand bags and a waterproof 
sheet or two, but welcome enough after a spell of docking 
on the beach, and the best, in any case, there was. 
A Terrible Day 
Well, there came a day when the dreaded fate arrived, 
and it began to blow — a biting wind straight from the 
steppes of Russia, with all the cold of the Arctic in its 
teeth ; and the work on the shore was as nothing to the 
fatigue of the return, and a cheeiless nothing at that, 
since the transports, when fate was against them, might 
as well have lain in Alexandria. In the late afternoon 
men would look anxiously out to sea, in a vain hope the 
gale might fall with the. dark ; but each succeeding night 
it grew fiercer, and in the island harbom^s sliips were 
dragged at anchor and thrown ashore. And then came 
rain — icy drops of water at sixty miles an hour, not 
pleasant to the face ; and the hills began to grow dangerous 
and the road began to lose its pristine beauty, and the 
ration parties were not joj'ful. Next day the temperature 
fell, and the wind rose, and the air became a blinding chaos 
of salt spray, ice and snow ; streams of water hurtled down 
the hillside into the Ciulf of Saros, from which the steam 
rose as from a boiling cauldron ; and from time to time 
loose boulders crashed a path seawards, to the destruction 
of much fragile architecture. That night the storm broke . 
From nine o'clock onwards lightning, inconceivably 
brilliant, and of fantastically vivid colouring, flashed and 
dazzled about the summit of the hill, and you would ha\e 
thought the very roots of it were cracking. Wall after 
wall fell in, until where had been dug-outs was rushing 
water ; and as the night went on, the almost constant glare 
showed practically the whole battalion wading up and 
down for warmth along the road — and singing, if you 
please, its favourite ragtimes. 
Now it was the wont of the mules with their Indian 
drivers when dusk fell to begin their cHmb with rations ; 
and towards one in the morning, Ciod knows how, some 
one or two arrived. Suddenly between the peals of thunder 
a stentorian voice was heard along the hillside " A Com- 
pany, turn out for your water ! " ; and of all the jokes that 
ever amused a soVdier, that one went straightest home. 
Tommy cheered and laughed, and cheered and cheered 
again ; and then, having begun, he set in to be men-y in 
earnest. I, who have heard singing in many strange 
places, and from lips of many nations, ha\-e heard nothing 
so wonderful as that rough music on the hill at Suvla ; 
FLYING 
is the title of the new paper, dealing 
with the 7\ir, which is shortly to be 
published by Land & Water. The 
price will be Id. weekly and the first 
number will appear on Saturday, January 
20th, 1917. It will not • only be illu- 
minating from the technical standpoint, 
but will contain man}^ special features 
of interest to the general reader 
