Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places by Archibald Forbes

A >> Archibald Forbes >> Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21

Just then a cheer was raised by some Heavies who had lately formed in
front of "C" Troop. Cardigan, so the chronicler tells, looked backward to
see the occasion, and saw the cheer was in compliment to the 8th Hussars
coming back with Colonel Sewell in front and Colonel Mayow, the
brigade-major, behind on the left. Cardigan wheeled, trotted back towards
the 8th, turned round in front of Colonel Sewell, and took up the "walk."
Then occurred something "painful to witness. It was seen from the left of
'C' Troop that the moment Cardigan's back was toward the 8th as he headed
them, Colonel Mayow pointed toward him, shook his head, and made signs to
the officers on the left of the Heavies as much as to say, 'See him; he
has taken care of himself.'" Men in the ranks of the 8th also pointed and
made signs to the troopers of the Heavies as they were passing left to
left. There was, as well, a little excited undertalk from one corps to the
other. Colonel Sewell neither saw nor took part in this wretched business;
and of course Cardigan did not know that he was being thus ridiculed and
disparaged while he was smiling and raising his sword to the cheers of the
Heavies and the gunners.

Immediately after this episode the returning 4th Light Dragoons came
obliquely across the North valley at a sharp pace, but fell into the
"walk" as they came within a hundred yards of "C" Troop. Lord George
Paget, who led what remained of the regiment, rode up to the flank of "C"
Troop and halted on the very spot where Cardigan had stood a few minutes
earlier. Lord George had the look of a man who had ridden hard, and was
heated and excited. He exclaimed in rather a loud tone, "It's a d----d
shame; there we had a lot of their guns and carriages taken, and received
no support, and yet there's all this infantry about--it's a shame!"
Meanwhile Lord Cardigan had come back and was close behind Lord George
while he was speaking, without the other knowing it. He called out, "Lord
George Paget!"; and on the latter turning round said to him in an
undertone, "I am surprised!"; and "tossing his head in the air added some
other remark which was not heard." Lord George lowered his sword to the
salute, and, without speaking turned his horse and rode on after his men.
The "C" Troop chronicler is positive that both officers visited "C" Troop
before going to any general or to any other command, and that they met
there for the first time after the combat.

When Lord Raglan came down from the upland after all was over, the "C"
Troop chronicler says that he went straight for Lucan then in front of the
Heavy Cavalry brigade, having first sent for Cardigan to meet him. After a
few moments the latter repassed the troop on his way toward the remnant of
his brigade. "Then Lord Raglan took Lucan a little forward by himself out
of hearing of the group of staff officers, and his gesticulations of head
and arm were so suggestive of passionate anger, that the onlookers did not
need to be told that the Commander-in-Chief did not charge the blame
chiefly on Cardigan." Lord Raglan's subsequent interview with General
Scarlett, which occurred in the hearing of "C" Troop, was of a different
character. After complimenting the gallant old warrior his lordship said,
"Now tell me all about yourself." Scarlett replied, "When the Russian
column was moving down on me, sir, I began by sending first a squadron of
the Greys at them, and--" but at the word "and" Lord Raglan struck in,
saying, "And they knocked them over like the devil!" He then turned his
horse away, as if he did not need to hear any more.

HOW I "SAVED FRANCE"

These be big words, my masters! I can only say they are not mine,--I am
far too modest to utter any such high-sounding phrase on my own
responsibility,--but they are the exact terms used by a high municipal
dignitary in characterising the result of what he was pleased to term my
"chivalrous conduct." My sardonic chum, on the contrary,--an individual
wholly abandoned to the ignoble vice of punning,--asserts that my conduct
was simply "barbarous." It will be for the reader to judge.

St. Meuse--let us call it St. Meuse--is a town of what is still French
Lorraine; and to St. Meuse I came drifting up the Marne Valley, over the
flat expanse of the plain of Châlons, and by St. Menehould, the proud
stronghold of pickled pigs' feet, in the second week of September 1873.
St. Meuse was one of the last of the French cities held in pawn by the
Germans for the payment of the milliards. The last instalment of
blood-money had been paid and the _Pickelhaubes_ were about to evacuate
St. Meuse as soon as the cash had been methodically counted, and after
they should have leisurely filled their baggage trains and packed their
portmanteaus. My intention in going to St. Meuse was to witness this
evacuation scene, and to be a spectator of the return of light-heartedness
to the French population of the place, on the withdrawal of the Teuton
incubus which for three years had lain upon the safety-valve of their
constitutional sprightliness. I had been a little out of my reckoning of
time, and when I reached St. Meuse I found that I had a week to stay there
before the event should occur which I had come to witness; but the
interval could not be regarded as lost time, for St. Meuse is a very
pleasant city and the conditions which were so soon to terminate presented
a most interesting field of study.

You must know that St. Meuse is a fortress. It has a citadel or at least
such fragments of a citadel as the bombardment had left, and the quaint
old town is surrounded with bastions which are linked by curtains and
flanked by lunettes, the whole being girdled by a ditch, beyond the
counterscarp of which spreads a sloping glacis which makes a very pleasant
promenade. The defensive strength of the place is reduced to zero in these
days of far-reaching rifled siege artillery, for it lies in a cup and is
surrounded on all sides by hills the summits of which easily command the
fortifications. But the consciousness that it is obsolete as a fortress
has not yet come home to St. Meuse. It has, in truth, a very good opinion
of itself as a valorous, not to say heroic, place; nor can it be denied
that its title to this self-complacency has been fairly earned. In the
Franco-German war, spite of its defects, it stood a siege of over two
months and succumbed only after a severe bombardment which lasted for
several days. And while as yet it was not wholly beleaguered, it was very
active in making itself disagreeable to the foreign invader. It was a
patrolling party from St. Meuse that intercepted the courier on his way
from the battlefield of Sedan to Germany, carrying the hurried lines to
his wife which the Crown Prince of Prussia scrawled on the fly-leaf of an
orderly book while as yet the last shots of the combat were dropping in
the distance; carrying too the notes of the momentous battle which William
Howard-Russell had jotted down in the heat of the action and had taken the
same opportunity of despatching. St. Meuse, then, had balked the Princess
of the first tidings of her husband's safety, and the great English
newspaper of the earliest details of the most sensational battle of the
age. It had fallen at last, but not ingloriously; and the iron of defeat
had not entered so deeply into its soul as had been the case with some
French fortresses, of which it could not well be said that they had done
their honest best to resist their fate. Its self-respect, at least, was
left to it, and it was something to know that when the German garrison
should march away, it was bound to leave to St. Meuse the artillery and
munitions of war of the fortress just as they had been found on the day of
the surrender.

I came to like St. Meuse immensely in the course of the days I spent in it
waiting for the great event of the evacuation. The company at the _table
d'hôte_ of the Trois Maures was varied and amusing. The Germans ate in a
room by themselves, so that the obnoxious element was not present overtly
at the general _table d'hôte._ But we had a few German officials in plain
clothes--clerks in General Manteuffel's bureau, contractors, cigar
merchants, etc., who spoke French even among themselves, and were
painfully polite to the French habitués who were as painfully polite in
return. There was a batch of Parisian journalists who had come to St.
Meuse to watch the evacuation, and who wrote their letters in the café
over the way to the accompaniment of _verres_ of absinthe and bocks of
beer. Then there was the gallant captain of gendarmes, who had arrived in
St. Meuse with a trusty band of twenty-five subordinates to take over from
the Germans the municipal superintendence of the place, and, later, the
occupation of the fortress. He was the most polite man I ever knew, this
captain of gendarmes, with a clever knack of turning you outside in in the
course of half an hour's conversation, and the peculiar attribute of
having, to all appearance, eyes in the back of his head. To him, as he
placidly ate his food, there came, from time to time, quiet and rather
bashful-looking men in civilian attire of a slightly seedy description.
Sometimes they merely caught his eye and went out again without speaking;
sometimes they handed to him little notes; sometimes they held with him a
brief whispered conversation during which the captain's nonchalance was
imperturbable. These respectable individuals who, if they saw you once in
conversation with their chief, ever after bowed to you with the greatest
empressement, were members of the secret police.

As for the inhabitants of St. Meuse, they appeared to await the hour of
their delivery with considerable philosophy. Physically they are the
finest race I ever saw in France; their men, tall, square, and muscular,
their women handsome and comely. Numbers of both sexes are fair-haired,
and the sandiness of hair which we are wont to associate with the Scottish
Celt is by no means uncommon. A sardonic companion whom I had picked up by
the way, attributed those characteristics to the fact that in the great
war St. Meuse was a depôt for British prisoners of war who had in some way
contrived to imbue the native population with some of their own physical
attributes. He further prophesied a wave of Teuton characteristics as the
result of the German occupation which was about to terminate; but his
insinuations seemed to me to partake of the scurrilous, especially as he
instanced Lewes, once a British depôt for prisoners of war, as a field in
which similar phenomena were to be discerned. But, nevertheless, I
unquestionably found a good deal of what may be called national hybridism
in St. Meuse. I used to buy photographs of a shopkeeper over whose door
was blazoned the Scottish name Macfarlane. Outwardly Macfarlane was a
"hielanman" all over. He had a shock-head of bright red hair such as might
have thatched the poll of the "Dougal cratur;" his cheek-bones were high,
his nose of the Captain of Knockdunder pattern, and his mouth of true
Celtic amplitude. One felt instinctively as if Macfarlane were bound to
know Gaelic, and that the times were out of joint when he evinced greater
fondness for _eau sucrée_ than for Talisker. It was with quite a sense of
dislocation of the fitness of things that I found Macfarlane could talk
nothing but French. But although he had torn up the ancient landmarks, or
rather suffered them to lapse, he yet was proud of his ancestry. His
grandfather, it appeared, was a soldier of the "Black Watch" who had been
a prisoner of war in St. Meuse, and who, when the peace came, preferred
taking unto himself a daughter of the Amalekite and settling in St. Meuse,
to going home to a pension of sevenpence a day and liberty to ply as an
Edinburgh caddie.

As for the German "men in possession," they pursued the even tenor of
their way in the precise yet phlegmatic German manner. Their guards kept
the gates and bridges as if they meant to hold the place till the crack of
doom, instead of being under orders to clear out within the week. The
recruits drilled on the citadel esplanade, straightening their legs and
pointing their toes as if their sole ambition in life was to kick their
feet away into space, down to the very eve of evacuation. Their battalions
practised skirmishing on the glacis with that routine assiduity which is
the secret of the German military success. Old Manteuffel was living in
the prefecture holding his levees and giving his stiff ceremonious
dinner-parties, as if he had done despite to Dr. Cumming's warnings and
taken a lease of the place. The German officers thronged their café, each
man, after the manner of German officers, shouting at the pitch of his
voice; and at the café of the under-officers tough old _Wachtmeisters_ and
grizzled sergeants with many medals played long quiet games at cards, or
knocked the balls about on the chubby little pocketless tables with cues
the tips of which were as large as the base of a six-pounder shell.

The French journalists insisted I should accept it as an article of faith,
that these two races dwelling together in St. Meuse hated each other like
poison. They would have it that while discipline alone prevented the
Germans from massacring every Frenchman in the place, it was only a
humiliating sense of weakness that hindered the Frenchmen from rising in
hot fury against the Germans who were their temporary masters. I am afraid
the gentlemen of the Parisian press came rather to dislike me on account
of my obdurate scepticism in such matters. That there was no great
cordiality was obvious and natural. Some of the Germans were arrogant and
domineering. For instance, having a respect for the Germans, it pained and
indeed disgusted me to hear a colonel of the German staff, in answer to my
question whether the evacuating force would march out with a rearguard as
in war time, reply, "Pho, a field gendarme with a whip is rearguard enough
against such _canaille!_" But in the mouths of Hans and Carl and Johann,
the stout _Kerle_ of the ranks, there were no such words of bitter scorn
for their compulsory hosts. The honest fellows drew water for the
goodwives on whom they were billeted, did a good deal of stolid
love-making with the girls, and nursed the babies with a solicitude that
put to shame the male parents of these youthful hopes of Troy. I take
leave, as a reasonable person, to doubt whether it can lie in the heart of
a family to hate a man who has dandled its baby and whether a man can be
rancorous against a family whose baby he has nursed. But fashion's sway is
omnipotent in emotion as in dress. Ever since the war, journalists,
authors, and public opinion generally had hammered it into the French
nation that if it were not to be a traitor to its patriotism, the first
article of its creed must be hatred against the Germans; and that the
bitterer this hate the more fervent the patriotism. It was not indeed
incumbent on Frenchmen and Frenchwomen to accept this creed, but it
behoved them at least to profess it; and it must be admitted that they did
this for the most part with an intensity and vigour which seemed to prove
that with many profession had deepened into conviction.

While as yet the evacuation had been a thing of the remote future, the
people of St. Meuse had borne the yoke lightly, and indeed had, I believe,
privily congratulated themselves on the substantial advantages in the way
of money spent in the place and the immunity from taxation which were
incidental to the foreign occupation. But as the day for the evacuation
drew closer and closer, one became dimly conscious of an electrical
condition of the social atmosphere which any trifle might stimulate into a
thunderstorm. Blouses gathered and muttered about the street-corners,
scowling at and elbowing the German soldiers as they strode to buy
sausages to stay them in the homeward march. The gamins, always covertly
insolent, no longer cloaked their insolence, and wagged little tricolour
flags under the nose of the stolid German sentry on the Pont St. Croix. At
the _table d'hôte_ the painful politeness of the German civilians had no
effect in thawing the studied coldness of the French habitués.

As for myself, I was a neutral, and professing to take no side, flattered
myself that I could keep out of the vortex of the soreness. Soon after my
arrival at St. Meuse I had called upon the Mayor at his official quarters
in the Hôtel de Ville, and had received civil speeches in return for civil
speeches. Then I had left my card on General Manteuffel, with whom I
happened to have a previous acquaintance; and those formal duties of a
benevolent neutral having been performed I had held myself free to choose
my own company. Circumstances had some time before brought me into
familiar contact with very many German officers, and I had imbibed a
liking for their ways and conversation, noisy as the latter is. Several of
the officers then in St. Meuse had been personal acquaintances in other
days and it was at once natural and pleasant for me to renew the
intercourse. I was made an honorary member of the mess; I spent many hours
in the officers' casino; I rode out with the officers of the squadron of
Uhlans. All this was very pleasant; but as the day of the evacuation
became close I noticed that the civility of the French captain of
gendarmes grew colder, that the cordiality of the French habitués of the
_table d'hôte_ visibly diminished, and that I encountered not a few
unfriendly looks when I walked through the streets by myself. It began to
dawn upon me that St. Meuse was getting to reckon me a German sympathiser,
and as there was no half-way house, therefore not in accord with the
emotions of France and St. Meuse.

On the afternoon immediately preceding the morning that had been fixed for
the evacuation, there came to me a polite request that I should visit M.
le Maire at the Hôtel de Ville. His worship was elaborately civil but
obviously troubled in mind. He coughed nervously several times after the
initiatory compliments had passed, and then he began to speak. "Monsieur,
you are aware that the Germans are going to-morrow morning?"

I replied that I had cognisance of this fact. "Do you also know that the
last of the German officials depart by the 5 A.M. train, not caring to
remain here after the troops are gone?"

Of this also I was aware.

"Let me hope," continued the Mayor, "that you are going along with them,
or at all events will ride away with Messieurs the officers?"

On the contrary, was my reply, I had come not only to witness the
evacuation but to note how St. Meuse should bear herself in the hour of
her liberation; I desired to witness the rejoicings; I was not less
anxious to be a spectator of any disturbance if such unhappily should
occur. Why should M. le Maire have conceived this desire to balk my
natural curiosity?

M. le Maire was obviously not a little embarrassed; but he persevered and
was candid. This deplorable occupation was now so nearly finished and
happily, as yet, everything had been so tranquil, that it would be a
thousand pities if any untoward event should occur to detract from the
dignified attitude which the territory now to be evacuated had maintained.
It was of critical importance in every sense that St. Meuse should not
give way to riot or disorder on that occasion. He hoped and believed it
would not--here M. le Maire laid his hand on his heart--but a spark, as I
knew, fired tinder, and the St. Meuse populace were at present figurative
tinder. I might be that spark.

"You much resemble a German," said M. le Maire, "with that great yellow
beard of yours, and your broad shoulders, as if you had carried arms. Our
citizens have seen you much in the society of Messieurs the German
officers; they are not in a temper to draw fine distinctions of
nationality; and, dear sir, I ask you to go away with the Germans lest
perchance our blouses, reckoning you for a German, should not be very
tender with you when the spiked helmets are out of the place. The truth
is," said the worthy Maire with a burst of plain speaking, "I'm afraid
that you will be mobbed and that there will be a row, and that then the
Germans may come back and the evacuation be postponed, and I'll get wigged
by the Prefect and the Minister of the Interior and bully-ragged in the
newspapers, and St. Meuse will get abused and the fat will be generally in
the fire!"

Here was an awkward fix. I could not comply with the Mayor's request; that
was not to be thought of for reasons I need not mention here. I had no
particular desire to be mobbed. Once before I had experienced the tender
mercies of a French mob and I knew that they were very cruel. But stronger
than the personal feeling was my sincere sympathy with the Mayor's
critical position; and also my anxiety, by what means might be within my
power, to contribute to the maintenance of a tranquillity so desirable.
But, then, what means were within my power? I could not go; I could not
promise to stop indoors, for it was incumbent on me to see everything that
was to be seen. And if through me trouble came I should be responsible
heaven knows for what!--with a skinful of sore bones into the bargain.

"If Monsieur cannot go,"--the Mayor broke in upon my cogitation,--"if
Monsieur cannot go, will he pardon the exigency of the occasion if I
suggest one other alternative? It is,"--here the Mayor hesitated--"it is
the yellow beard which gives to Monsieur the aspect of a German. With only
whiskers nobody could take Monsieur for anything but an Englishman. If
Monsieur would only have the complaisance and charity to--to--"

Cut off my beard! Great powers! shear that mane that had been growing for
years!--that cataract of hair that has been, so to speak, my oriflamme;
the only physical belonging of which I ever was proud, the only thing, so
far as I know, that I have ever been envied! For the moment the suggestion
knocked me all of a heap. There came into my head some confused
reminiscence of a story about a girl who cut off her hair and sold it to
keep her mother from starving, or redeem her lover from captivity, or
something of the kind. But that must have been before the epoch of parish
relief, and kidnapping is now punishable by statute. What was St. Meuse to
me that for her I should mow my hirsute glories? But then, if people grew
savage, they might pull my beard out by the roots. And there had been
lately dawning on me the dire truth that its tawny hue was becoming
somewhat freely streaked with gray, a colour I abhor, except in eyes. I
made up my mind.

"I'll do it, sir," said I to the Mayor, with a manly curtness. My heart
was too full for many words.

He respected my emotion, bowed in silence over the hand which he had
grasped, and only spoke to give me the address of his own barber.

This barber was a patriot of unquestioned zeal; but I am inclined to think
his extraction was similar to that of Macfarlane, for he combined
patriotism with profit in a most edifying manner. He shaved the German
officers during the whole of their stay in St. Meuse; he accompanied them
on their march to the frontier; he earned the last centime in Conflans;
and then, driving forward to the frontier line, he unfurled the tricolour
as the last German soldier stepped over it. It is seldom that one in this
world sees his way to being so adroitly ambidextrous.

But this is a digression. In twenty minutes, shorn and shaven, I was back
again in the Mayor's parlour. The tears of gratitude stood in his eyes. I
learned afterwards that a decoration was contingent on his preservation of
the public peace on the occasion of the evacuation.

Started by the Mayor, the report rapidly circulated through St. Meuse that
I had cut off my beard rather than that it should be possible that any one
should mistake me for a German. From being a suspect I became a popular
idol. The French journalists entertained me to a banquet at night at which
in libations of champagne eternal amity between France and England was
pledged. Next morning the Germans went away and then St. Meuse kicked up
its heels and burst into exuberant joy. The Mayor took me up to the
station in his own carriage to meet the French troops, and introduced me
to the colonel of the battalion as a man who had made sacrifices for _la
belle France_. The colonel shook me cordially by the hand and I was
embraced by the robust vivandière, who struck me as being in the practice
of sustaining life on a diet of garlic. When we emerged from the station I
was cheered almost as loudly as was the colonel, and a man waved a
tricolour over my head all the way back to the town, treading at frequent
intervals on my heels. In the course of the afternoon I happened to
approach the civic band which was performing patriotic music in the Place
St. Croix. When the bandmaster saw me he broke off the programme and
struck up "Rule Britannia!" in my honour, to the clamorous joy of the
audience, who were thwarted in their aim of carrying me round the Place
shoulder-high only by the constancy with which I clung to the railings
which surround Chevert's statue. But the crowning recognition of my
sacrifice came at the banquet which the town gave to the French officers.
The Mayor proposed the toast of "our English friend." "We had all," he
said, "made sacrifices for _la Patrie_--he himself had sustained the loss
of a wooden outhouse burned down in the bombardment; the gallant colonel
on his right had spilt his blood at St. Privat. Them it behoved to suffer
and they would do it again cheerfully, for it was, as he had said, for _la
Patrie_. But what was to be said of an honourable gentleman who had
sacrificed the most distinguishing ornament of his physical aspect without
the holy stimulus of patriotism, and simply that there might be obviated
the risk of an embroilment to the possible consequence of which he would
not further allude? Would it be called the language of extravagant
hyperbole, or would they not rather be words justified by facts, when he
ventured before this honourable company to assert that his respected
English friend had by his self-sacrifice saved France from a great peril?"
The Mayor's question was replied to by a perfect whirlwind of cheering.
Everybody in the room insisted upon shaking hands with me and I was forced
to get on my legs and make a reply. Later in the evening I heard the Mayor
and the town clerk discussing the project of conferring upon me the
freedom of the city.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21