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The mustard-coloured scouts of the Automobile Association; their natural enemies, the unjust police; our natural enemies, the deliberate market-day cattle, broadside-on at all corners, the bicycling butcher-boy a furlong behind; road-engines that pulled giddy-go-rounds, rifle galleries, and swings, and sucked snortingly from wayside ponds in defiance of the notice-board; traction-engines, their trailers piled high with road metal; uniformed village nurses, one per seven statute miles, flitting by on their wheels; governess-carts full of pink children jogging unconcernedly past roaring, brazen touring-cars; the wayside rector with virgins in attendance, their faces screwed up against our dust; motor-bicycles of every shape charging down at every angle; red flags of rifle-ranges; detachments of dusty-putteed Territorials; coveys of flagrant children playing in mid-street, and the wise, educated English dog safe and quite silent on the pavement if his fool-mistress would but cease from trying to save him, passed and repassed us in sunlit or shaded settings.
The sun was overhead, the heat was great, the odour was oppressive. Now and again the sound of the service within the church mingled with the crack of the toy rifle-ranges and the jabber of the cheap jacks. At length there was another sound a more portentous sound the sound of bands playing in the distance. It came from both south and west, from the direction of Peel, and from that of Port St.
After that had come bayonet charges against dummies, rifle-ranges and trench-digging all the industrious pretence at slaughter which prefaces the astounding actuality. We were far away from all that now; the brown figures had melted into the brownness of the hills. There might have been no war. Perhaps there wasn't. Never was there a world more grey and quiet. I grew sleepy. My head nodded.
The famous "Middle-class Music-halls" faded quickly into the limbo of forgotten failures, and the most popular of public performers were those and they were not a few who forsook grease-paint for khaki, and posturing on stages for exercising on rifle-ranges and drill-grounds.
I had to search round for suitable spots for rifle-ranges, and to agree with the owners for suitable compensation. Also I had to make some of the arrangements for a ferry boat to convey the troops across the Canal De L'Aa to a good training-ground between Watten and St. Momelin. On November 14 I paid my first visit to St. Omer, which is a nice town with plenty of good shops. Lieut.-Col.
I had news of this a little in advance of the public, for my work in connection with The Citizens' organization brought me now into frequent contact with the War Office, particularly with regard to supplies and general arrangements for our different village rifle-ranges.
Particularly brilliant were the shot-scarred trees that stood on the slopes forming the stop-butts of the rifle-ranges. These ranges are worthy of special mention, comprising as they did targets for fifteen hundred men. The method of construction was simplicity itself. A deep ditch had been dug and the earth thrown up like an ordinary trench to protect the marker.
Great names these all, and spreading still their soldier influence, perhaps insensibly, over the spirit of their old home and regiment. Out beyond the cavalry parade-ground is the Home Farm, and on each side of it run the cavalry and infantry rifle-ranges, skirted by fine avenues of trees.
Two railways had run their lines, hewing, blasting, boring, and tunnelling up the narrow valley, first to reach the mines and finally to merge in a "cut-off" to the great Transcontinental, so that now huge trains of Pullmans went straining slowly up-grade past the site of old Fort Reynolds, or came coasting down with smoking tires and fire-spitting brake-shoes, and between the loss of the water for his horses, and the hemming in of his rifle-ranges by rail right of way, Uncle Sam declared Fort Reynolds no longer tenable for cavalry.
The supplies were being hurried aboard. The general had his men all the livelong day at the rifle-ranges or drill-grounds, for most of the brigade were raw volunteers who had been rushed to the point of rendezvous with scant equipment and with less instruction. The camps were thronged with men in all manner of motley as to dress and no little variety as to dialect.
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