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This undercurrent of suffering, which increased week by week as the writing on the wall grew longer, was in pitiful contrast to the enthusiasm with which the women sent their men and sons away to war. More than once I watched troops drilling at Spandau Hof, the great barracks and training-grounds, a few kilometers west of the city.
If we ask what was the state of the Universities, which ought to be the centres of light diffusing itself throughout the whole nation, the training-grounds of those who are to be the trainers of their fellow men, we have the evidence of such different kinds of men as Swift, Defoe, Gray, Gibbon, Johnson, John Wesley, Lord Eldon, and Lord Chesterfield all agreeing on this point, that both the great Universities were neglectful and inefficient in the performance of their proper work.
The amateur of the tap-room or the club looks down a list of horses and chooses one which he fancies; perhaps he has received private advice from one of the beings who haunt the training-grounds and watch the thoroughbreds at exercise; perhaps he is influenced by some enthusiast who bids him risk all he has on certain private information.
We agreed that they were ideal training-grounds for character, and that our public-schools were the envy of the civilised world. In such profound and suggestive interchange of ideas the time sped rapidly away. Then we were gathered into a big hall.
Now the sandy slopes, whence the pines, alack, have been cut away, are occupied by a British reinforcement camp, by long lines of hospitals, by a convalescent depot, and by the training-grounds, where, as at other bases, the newly arrived troops are put through their last instruction before going to the front.
Long rows of wooden buildings stretched in every direction barracks, dining-rooms, study-rooms, offices, store-houses with great stretches of exercise and training-grounds between.
Thus, Chantilly, with its Derby Day and its training-grounds, may be called at once the Epsom and the Newmarket of France. There is hardly a horse, with the exception of those of the comte de Lagrange and of M. Lupin, and those of Henry Jennings, the public trainer, that is not "worked" in the Alley of the Lions.
And there were moments when she would walk blindly along the sea beach with Cicely, finding a stimulus to endure in the sharpness of the winter wind, or looking in vague wonder at the great distant camp, with its streets of hospitals, its long lines of huts, its training-grounds, and the bodies of men at work upon them.
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