In Time of War

The Weekly Machen

At an undisclosed location near the coast, we find Arthur Machen reporting on volunteers assisting the army as it prepares the English countryside for war. As the United Kingdom had only entered the First World War a few weeks earlier, the following article give some insight into the atmosphere of those early days of the conflict. The Great Retreat had just begun and the first blitz on Britain would begin less than four months after the publication of this piece.

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In Time of War
by
Arthur Machen
August 25, 1914

Somewhere-in-England, Tuesday afternoon.

We drove out of the town behind a mild and ambling horse, and, after going a couple of miles or so, we came into a pleasant shady lane, very brother to some thousands of such lanes that go up and down England. It was just the sort of by-way that is bound to lead to a quiet farmhouse, and so it happened. But we had to satisfy two sentries as to our business before we came to the farmhouse, and when we found that farm it was not at all quiet.

The lawn in front swarmed with soldiers. Two were resting in the shade of the ilex tree, by them were three or four rolls of barbed wire entanglement. And to right and to left and in front deep trenches had been cut. Above the trenches sandbags were piled high up, with proper openings for the rifles. Before some of the trenches the wire entanglements were already in position.

“And that passage at the bottom of the trench,” said the major, “is for the ambulance people to go along.”

It was all quite incredible, and there it was, at the end of the quiet English lane. An old barn in the farmyard had just been pulled down; it was the sort of barn to catch fire easily in an attack. Trees had been felled, more trenches were being dug, and here, there, and everywhere, in the farmyard and in the sheds the soldiers were eating their dinners and smoking their pipes. I had seen dozens of war pictures of just such scenes as this, but these had been pictures of things that had happened in foreign lands. I had never thought to have seen the actuality in England.

Cowshed as Club

But my attention was more particularly directed to a special corner of the farmyard. Here was an ancient cowshed, and in it, instead of cows, were more soldiers reading papers, smoking pipes, writing letters, and drinking “soft” drinks. The shed was the tent of the Y. M. C. A., and the officers of that body who had me in charge, explained to me how with the hearty goodwill and help of the major they had established themselves in this little fortified outpost of the defence of England. They had rigged up a few benches and tables, they had provided a free supply of writing paper and ink and envelopes, and journals and magazines, they sold here various small refreshments, and tobacco and cigarettes.

“Here,” said one of the Association people, “is the post office. We have arranged for so many collections a day, we sell postage stamps, we issue postal orders, we keep a savings bank. You find it handy, don’t you?” he said, turning to one of the men.

“Certainly we do,” he answered. “Before, people used to come out of the town to sell us things, and they seemed to think by their prices that we were made of money. I began to think it must be better to be a milkman than a soldier.”

The major took us a little apart, and expressed his warm sense of the benefit that cowshed had been to his men. Many of them were married, he said, and it seems that if Mr. Atkins or Mr. Terrier can jump out of his trench, as it were, and buy a postal order and a stamp on the spot, it is all the better for Mrs. Atkins and Mrs. Terrier and their families. Stamps and postal orders can be bought in the town; but then there are other things that are to be bought in the town, and the remittance home is apt to suffer.

A Town of Soldiers

The major said he would build the Y. M. C. A. an underground place of assembly when he has finished his defences. He poked a sandbag reflectively with his stick.

“If the raid comes at all, it will be by night,” he said. I believe he was looking forward with joyful relish to the rattle and crash of the rifles, to red gushes of flame issuing from his trenches in the thick darkness.

It will, perhaps, have been noticed that I have not indicated the position of the farmhouse on the map very exactly. I think it shall remain in the vague, and it may be as well not to enter into any detail as to the name of the town to which we drove back. On the way we passed through a number of small streets, and here again was an unfamiliar sight. There were khaki figures at the windows, men in khaki walking up and down the garden paths. Every house, they told me, has got soldiers billeted on it.

“We try to keep on the track of the men wherever they go,” said one of the Y. M. C. A. officials. “We have 300 tents in England now, and before long that number will be doubled. And a thousand of our people are at work among the soldiers, selling them buns and chocolate and strong coffee and picture postcards, giving them sensible advice when they ask for it, getting up smoking concerts for them in the evening, and helping some of them with their letters to their wives and mothers and sweethearts.

“The other night one of our people found a sentry near here in the agonies of neuralgia. He went over to the town a couple of miles away, got some stuff at a chemist’s, went back to the sentry—and cured him.”

The Y. M. C. A. Tents

And the chief of the party—a sort of Inspector-General from London, I gathered—began to discuss with the local workers the desirability of getting bicycles and going on scouting parties all about the country, of hunting out the small bands of soldiers posted by bridges and reservoirs and such places.

“We want to see what we can do for them,” he said.

We came now to a second tent of the Y. M. C. A., and it was no more a tent than the cowshed had been. It was a pavilion, newly built, and it had been handed over for the time to the society. Here they had been able to be more elaborate. Here were shelves full of “minerals” and cigarettes and cakes, and a regular bar on which the customers could lean in the regular manner, and no end of little tables on which games of draughts were being played. The Y. M. C. A. man who ruled here has a scheme for the pavilion; he told me that a big bath was one of the soldiers’ greatest luxuries.

Well, we drove on again, and here I will make a topographical admission. We came to the sea, or something that looked like it. And on it grim, black ships were passing, some coming in, some going out. And as one of these ships went awfully forth upon the water some one pointed, and used a phrase that sounded in my ears like a trumpet call.

“Look,” he said, “she is cleared for action.”

Ready!

“Cleared for action!” It is the word of the noble old sea stories of our ancient heroical annals; it sounded to me as splendid as the thin, reedy whistle of the boatswain’s pipe sounded when I first heard it.

We went to a broad grassy space crowded with tents, crowded with drilling soldiers, and were driving through a placid and genteel suburban quarter, a place of many villas. And I chanced to look up one of the side streets, and there, as I live, a trench, cut across the road from one side to another, and men with glittering bayonets on guard. We were threatened some time ago with the field of Waterloo given over to villadom, here it seems is the revenge, for here is the deadly apparatus of Waterloo in the heart of villadom itself.

Then we went in the Y. M. C. A. tent, which was a real tent this time, and a very gay one, with a piano and lots of bright flags, and a University man running the bar and the post office and the postcards with an excellent and cheerful zeal.

And we went further, to a place where raw recruits are being fiercely hammered and pounded into “Kitchener’s army.” But wherever we went and there were soldiers, we found the Y. M. C. A. there doing its very best for these soldiers, and putting good cheer, both of the body and the spirit, into them.

 

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The Weekly

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Introduction and supplementary material – Copyright 2024 by Christopher Tompkins. All rights reserved.