Hornung Ernest William - Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front стр 21.

Memorable was the night they first swarmed into my first hut. 'Debouched,' I daresay, would be the more becoming word; but at any rate they duly marched upon the counter, in close order at that, and (as the correspondents have it) 'as though they had been on parade.' Few of them had anything less than a five-franc note; all required change; soon there was not a coin in the till. I wish the patronesses of Grand Clearance Sales could have seen how the Guards behaved that night. Not one of them showed impatience; not one of them was inconsiderate, much less impolite; the sanctity of the queue could not have been more scrupulously observed had our Labour boy been there to see to nothing else. He was not there, and I sighed for him when there was time to sigh; for it was easily the hardest night's work I had in France. But the Guards did their best to help us; they were always buying more than they wanted, 'to make it even money'; continually prepared to present the Y.M.C.A. with the change we could not give them. Never was a body of men in better case calmer, more immaculate, better-set-up, more dignified and splendid to behold. They might have walked across from Wellington Barracks; they were actually fresh from what I have heard them call 'the Cambrai do.'

There was a bitterly cold night a little later on; it was also later in the night. My young chief was already a breathing pillar of blankets. I was still cowering over a reddish stove, thinking of the old hot-water bottle which was even then preparing a place for my swaddled feet: from outer darkness came the peculiar crunch of heavy boots many pairs of them rhythmically planting themselves in many inches of frozen snow. I went out and interviewed a Guards' Corporal with eighteen eager, silent file behind him, all off a leave train and shelterless for the night, unless we took them in. I pointed out that we had no accommodation except benches and trestle-tables, and the bare boards of the hut, where the stove had long been black and the clean mugs were freezing to their shelf.

'We shall be very satisfied,' replied the Corporal, 'to have a roof over us.'

I can hear him now: the precise note of his appreciation, candid yet not oppressive: the dignified, unembittered tone of a man too proud to make much of a minor misfortune of war. Yet for fighting-men just back from Christmas leave, howsoever it may have come about, what a welcome! I never felt a greater brute than lying warm in my bed, within a yard of the stove that still blushed for me, and listening to those silent men taking off their accoutrements with as little noise as possible, preparing for a miserable night without a murmur. Later in the winter, it was said that men were coming back from leave disgruntled and depressed. My answer was this story of the Corporal and the eighteen freezing file. But they were Guardsmen nearly all.

Not the least interesting of individual Guardsmen was one who across our counter nicely and politely declared himself an anarchist. It was the slack hour towards closing-time, before the National Anthem at the cinema prepared us for the final influx, and I am glad I happened to be free to have that chat. It was most instructive. My Guardsman, who was accompanied by the inevitable Achates, was not a temporary soldier; both were fine, seasoned men of twelve or thirteen years' service, who had been through all the war, with such breaks as their tale of wounds had necessitated. The anarchist did all the talking, beginning (most attractively to me) about cricket. He was a keen watcher of the game, an old habitué of Burton Court and intense admirer of certain distinguished performers for the Household Brigade. 'A great man!' was his concise encomium for more than one. How the anarchy came in I have forgotten. It was decked in dark sayings of a rather homely cut, concerning the real war to follow present preliminaries; but I thought the real warrior was himself rather in the dark as to what it was all to be about. At any rate he failed to enlighten me, as perhaps I failed to enlighten him on the common acceptation of the term 'anarchy.' Reassure me he did, however, by several parenthetical observations, which seemed to fall from the inveterate soldier rather than the soi-disant

revolutionary.

'But of course we shall see this war through first,' he kept interrupting himself to impress on me. 'Nothing will be done till we have beaten Germany.'

On balance I was no wiser about the anarchist point of view, but all the richer for this peep into a Guardsman's mind. It was like a good sanitary cubicle filled with second-hand gimcrackery, but still the same good cubicle, still in essentials exactly like a few thousand more. The meretricious jumble was kept within rigid bounds of discipline and good manners, and not as a temporary measure either; for I was solemnly assured that the 'real war,' when it came, would be a bloodless one. Let us hope other incendiaries will adopt my friend's somewhat difficult ideal of an ordered anarchy! As for his manners, I can only say I have heard views with which I was in full personal agreement made more offensive by a dogmatic advocate than were these monstrous but quite amiable nebulosities. If anarchy is to come, I know which anarchist I want to 'ride in the whirlwind and direct the storm'; he will spare Burton Court, I do believe; and even catch himself saluting, with true Guards' élan , the 'great men' who are still permitted to hit out of it.