III
TOMMY ATKINS IN AN AUDIENCE
"COME on, boys, let's have a sing-song! What shall it be?"
"Arizona! Tennessee! At my home in Kentucky! Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag!" There are a score of different suggestions. Then Jack selects what he pleases; he meant to, all along, anyway. He sits down to the piano; he is the only song leader in the Y. M. C. A. who doesn't look around for an accompanist; then he shouts:
"Come on! Let's go!" That's all that is necessary. The Tommies do the rest. The dust comes down off the rafters.
After a half hour of uproarious choruses, varied by solos from Jack, and one or two hymns or home songs, to lead up to the spoken word. Jack turns the meeting over to me. By this time the hut is jammed, men are standing crowded all around the windows. Sometimes they sit all over the platform and on the floor in the aisles.
Now when a speaker has a slippery audience like this delivered into his hand, it is like manipulating an eel. Fancy giving out a text and saying: "Now, brethren" One might deliver a moving sermon; it would move Tommy out of the door. No, no, all our American men have made a conscientious study of their opening sentences; for they know that with Tommies the whole thing is won or lost in the first two minutes. Hold that audience for five minutes in any way, by hook or crook, and you can swing into a moral or religious drive and make it as strong as you like; you couldn't shoo your audience away. They'll stay with you, glued to the benches, for an hour.
One of our men begins:
"If there's a man here homesicker than I am, he'd better beat it! I want to see my little kid at home!" Tommy yells with laughter and sympathy.
Another throws out this, like a shot from a 6-inch gun:
"Up till the other day you and I were cousins; now we are brothers-in-the-blood!"
For myself, I have evolved out of old borrowed witticisms something like this:
"Tell me, men, honor bright and on the square, if we hadn't been introduced as Americans you wouldn't have known it, would you?"
Groans, yells, catcalls and "Oh, no! Sure! G'wan!"
Then I add:
"A fellow said to me the other day: 'You can always tell an American, but you can't tell him much!'"
More groans, and an inquiring frame of mind. They don't know whether this is proverbial American boasting or not. Then: "I have heard, too, that the difference between an Englishman and an American is about this: An Englishman walks into a house as if he owned the whole damn place. An American walks in as if he didn't give a damn who owned the place."
We are now getting on. Tommy feels sure there is no firstly, secondly and thirdly coming along. I usually consult the secretary or the chaplain before introducing this unexpurgated, old thread-bare comparison which, I believe, was first made between a Harvard man and a Yale man; but I find it usually unnecessary to consult long at a time.
"Anyway, I hope that some day Englishman and American may walk, each in his own way, into certain houses in Potsdam and Berlin" And the trick is done. I now have Tommy by the ear; and better audience one need not desire on this earth, more appreciative, sensitive, quick to any appeal of humor, emotion, moral motive or spiritual idealism. You can talk about this war driving the people who are in it to atheism; it does, a few, but the vast majority are driven to their knees. The huts do not gather in simply the religious; they gather in, with their tea and cakes, old scarred veterans and soft-cheeked lads indiscriminately, all sorts and conditions, excellent cross-sections they are, of the entire British army.
In the first five minutes I generally drag in a reference to "Teddy" Roosevelt. It always takes fire. One night a man arose in the middle of the house and tossed a bronze cap-badge upon the platform at my feet. I have it before me now. It is the colonel's face surround with the words, "First Illinois, Chicago Rough Riders." I meet scores and scores of Americans, mostly in the Canadian battalions, but some in the other Imperials.
Then shortly I refer to President Woodrow Wilson and there is a hearty, generous round of applause. The average Englishman now looks upon our President as a very wise, careful, conservative man. An officer told me the past week that Lloyd George had said to him sometime ago that America ought not to have come in any sooner than she did; she was of more use as a neutral than as a belligerent until just now.
Viewed from outside, a Red Triangle hut in the British camps presents very much the appearance of a ranch house on our western plains. It is long, low, rectangular; built of rough boards and stained brown. There is a counter at one end where are sold cigarettes, chocolate, coffee, stamps and the various necessities and luxuries of Tommy Atkins' life. There are tables where tea, coffee, malted milk and soft bottled drinks are dispensed, together with biscuits and cakes. In some huts there are billiard tables; in all, checkers, chess and dominoes. At the other end of the room is a stage, with piano and an auditorium.
In the late afternoon, when drill is done, and the Tommies are tired, hungry and thirsty, the huts fairly swarm, like bee hives; and business is brisk. Your Englishman prizes his tea beyond measure; and the United Kingdom consumes more sugar than any other nation in the world. One day a Canadian Y. M. C. A. secretary was decorated by King George in Hyde Park with the Military Cross because, at Vimy Ridge, he kept up with the advancing line, and served chocolate and biscuits to the men, under shell fire.
The Canadian secretaries who first came out were commissioned as captains, later ones as lieutenants, and are under military orders; but as the authorities are distinctly favorable to the organization, these officers have wide discretion. The English secretaries are civilians, independent of military discipline, for the most part are dressed in "civies," and consider that they have an advantage in not being officers. The Canadians, too, prefer their own regime. In general, the Canadian huts are better manned and managed, and, so far as one can see, their secretaries get as close to the men as do the civilian secretaries among the English troops. Still it may be added, all Canadian officers are much more democratic with their men than are the English.
The huts furnish tons and tons of writing paper, free, to the men; and, as a consequence, the tables are full, in off hours, of busy writers. The Y. M. C. A. makes money in some of its canteens and loses in others; but, on the whole, does not pay expenses. Private subscriptions make up the deficit. Canadian secretaries are paid as officers; English are practically unpaid.
Certain Canadian officers are authority for the story that the other day all the officers in a certain command having fallen, the Y. M. secretary took charge, led the men, and was killed; he was blown to bits; he was not even found. The English secretaries are undersized, or over thin, or crippled, or too old for service. Some men, fairly fit, have been taken from the huts and hurried to the trenches. I met a little thin rector in a hut at Aldershot one day who has asked for and received an appointment in France to go right into the dugout huts in the trenches. He starts next week.
One of our favorite song leaders in the huts is a Canadian, Captain Pequegnot, familiarly known everywhere here as "Captain Peg," who was gassed in the very first gas attack in France. He has never entirely recovered, as the puffed look about the eyes indicates; but his singing voice is unimpaired, also his jovial smile, that made him once a successful commercial traveler all over the American continent. He understands all the Tommies, and they, him; he can make them roar like bulls of Bashan and render them wild with joy, like March hares, whatever they are. He "carries on" for half an hour before introducing a speaker. "Carry on" is a favorite word here for "perform," and is constantly in use.
My own steady sidepartner—for we usually travel in pairs, a singer and a speaker—is young Jack Barker, who hails from Gerard, Kas., and who has been the last five years in Chicago. He has just been graduated from Northwestern, president of his class, leader of the glee club, an athlete of great success, runs a hundred yards in ten seconds flat, has a baritone that gives him a steady job in a Chicago quartet choir, and a smile that draws young men to him like submarines to a net—blindly. He can play and sing more kinds of ragtime than even an Englishman ever dreamed of.
We go into a hut at about 7 p.m., usually; Jack goes to the piano on the platform, beats out a storm of pseudo-negro melody that sets shoulders to wriggling, feet to shuffling, eyes to dancing; and when he finishes with a bang like a bomb from a German aircraft, the Tom-mies yell. Then Jack just looks at them and grins, and they yell some more.
At the close of our meetings we sometimes give the men a chance to sign pledge cards of religious confession and allegiance—a card indorsed by the archbishop of Canterbury as well as by Free Church leaders. Any man may conscientiously sign it, no matter what his Christian denomination or predilection; and from thirty to a hundred and thirty usually sign every night. Some ask us to write and tell their wives or families what they have done.
The other night a Kansas City lad, in a Canadian battalion, whose parents did not know where he was, promised to write next day to his mother, while I wrote to his father.
Then, the last thing of all, comes the handshaking—Tommy loves to shake hands and Jack usually announces after we sing "The King," which closes every public meeting in the British army, that we shall be glad to shake hands with every man in the room. "Please come down this side and go out that side." And they come! It was hard on our muscles at first, but now we're used to it, for Tommy shakes hands as if he meant it. Then it's: "Thank you, Jack," "Glad you came, captain," "Come again," "God bless you."
And we answer as they file by: "Thanks, old man," "Mighty glad to be here," "God keep you, my lad," "Good luck to you all the way," and so on.
Sometimes one pauses and asks a question or presents a problem; then it is a word of quick answer and a hasty "God take care of you"; for they know and we know they have need enough of God's care; to-morrow they may be in the trenches; the day after, over the parapet; maybe over the dark river.
Then Jack stands by the piano and they gather round him like flies on a sugar lump; and I take a chair on the auditorium floor, and there are several files deep all around me, their faces pressed almost against my own, eager eyes straining and tongues going. Questions and comments come quick and fast. The American navy, the submarines, the air craft, the merits and possibilities of cavalry, and the old, old question, "How long do you think it will last, captain?" pour forth in a torrent.
"Yes, sir, this wound came from 'La Bassee.'" "I got mine at Vimy Ridge." "Yes, sir, wounded twice, and back to France next week." "How can I get a transfer to the American army?" "I got mine in the thigh. I can walk three miles as good as any man, but not thirty. I'm done. But I could teach bayonet work and bomb throwin', sir."
Sometimes your throat is full and choked.