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MUSTERING MEN

CHAPTER I

MUSTERING MEN

I

The War Office built Maryhill Barracks, Glasgow, to look exactly like a gaol, but these gaunt unlovely buildings, packed beyond endurance with men of the new army, were at least in some way in touch with what was happening elsewhere. Even in that first month of the war it seemed callous to be breathing the sweet, clear air of Braemar, or to let one's eyes linger on the matchless beauty of mountain and glen. The grey spire of my church rising gracefully among the silver birches and the dark firs, bosomed deep in purple hills, pointed to some harder way than that. Stevenson, who wrote part of Treasure Island here, called it 'the wale (pick) of Scotland,' but just because it was so we saw more clearly the agony of Belgium and the men of our heroic little Regular Army dying to keep us inviolate.

Up to the 10th of September recruits poured in in such numbers that it was hard to cope with the situation in the most superficial way. On that date the standard was raised, and, as though a sluice had been dropped across a mill dam, the stream stopped suddenly and completely. I suppose that was the object of the new regulation, but it caused misunderstanding, and to this day the spontaneous rush of the first month of the war has never been repeated. Beyond doubt the numbers were too great to be properly handled. Men slept in the garrison church, in the riding school, on the floor in over-crowded barrack-rooms, in leaky tents without bottoms to them. There were no recreation rooms. It rained a great deal, and once wet a man with no change of clothing or underclothing remained wet for days in his meagre civilian suit. There were too few blankets, no braziers, and the cheap black shoes of civil life were soon in tatters. Everybody became abominably verminous, and though the food was good enough in its way the cooks were overwhelmed, and it was often uneatable. Nobody was to blame, and in an astonishingly short time order began to emerge, but in those early days one enormous 'grouse' went up continually from the new army that was not yet an army, and those conditions were partly responsible for the fact that when the standard was lowered again the flow of recruits was so much less than before. This, the faculty for hearty grousing, in the army whimsical, humorous, shrewd, sometimes biting, never down-hearted, is evidently an old national custom, for Chaucer uses the word half a dozen times. But the aggravated discomfort of men soft from indoor life was really pitiful.

Before long all recruits except those for the Royal Field Artillery were sent elsewhere, and the barracks became a great depot for this arm of the service, with Colonel Forde in command. What marvels were done in those early days, and how hard pushed the country was, will be realised when it is understood that for months a body of men numbering never less than two thousand, and sometimes as many as three times that number, had only two field guns for training purposes, and that officers had to be sent out to the Expeditionary Force who had worn a uniform only for three, four, or five weeks.

II

The first hundred thousand had some characteristics of their own compared with their successors. They contained a large number of men who do things on the spur of the moment, the born seekers after adventure, men to whom war had its attractions. Many a man who had never found his place in life, because his was the restless, roving spirit which could not settle, or that chafed against ordered conventional ways, found his happiness at last in August 1914. Alongside those were the men who were passionately patriotic and saw very clearly and quickly the long issues involved to the country they loved. The fate of Belgium had a far more moving influence with the ranks of the new army than the officer class, I think, quite realised. Indeed, with the later recruits I gathered the impression that indignation at the German atrocities in Belgium was the prevailing motive in their enlistment. There can be no question in the mind of any one who worked intimately among the men of the new armies in the autumn and winter of 1914 that the invasion of Belgium was the one shocking stroke that rallied the country as one man, and that nothing else in the situation, as it was known, would have done this. The people as a whole did not grasp the imminence of the German menace. Of the torturing pressure on the thin khaki line that barred the pass to the sea we knew nothing. Day by day and night by night we were regaled with stories of 'heavy German losses' and futile tales of the deaths of German princes; neither our manhood nor our imagination was fully captured, for of the almost unbelievable heroism of our brothers we were never told. Perhaps the silence was justified; the enemy might have learned how near they were to victory, and with a supreme effort have broken through. At all events, unavoidably or not, the youth of the country as a whole was never, throughout this winter, really roused to its best. All the more honour to the first hundred thousand!

III

After this war is over no soldier can ask 'What does the Christian Church do for me?' The members of the Church, acting through its organisation, or more frequently through other organisations of which its members were the moving spirits, rose to the occasion nobly all over the country. Glasgow was no exception. It did the Churches, too, much good, teaching them to work together. Here is an example. The men were lodged all over the city, two or three hundred in one hall, more than that in another. In every instance arrangements were made for their recreation and comfort. In a given district one congregation gave its hall as a recreation room, another paid all expenses, a third supplied a church officer for daily cleaning, the members joined in giving magazines and papers, and in providing tea and coffee; the missionary of one congregation held services, and all united in giving concerts. The Y.M.C.A., which does not accept workers unless they are members of the Christian Church, came on the scene and built a hut, through the generosity of Mrs. Hunter Craig, in the barrack square.

On this, in the early months of 1915, there followed a revival of religion among the Maryhill Barracks men, whose centre was the Y.M.C.A. hut. This revival had the marks in it which we younger men had been told were the marks of a true revival, but from which many had shrunk because they were associated in our days with flaming advertisement, noise, and ostentation.

A wise old Scots minister was once asked, 'How are we to bring about a revival?' 'It is God who gives