Driver Robert Brown
Four or five years ago, in the dim, hazy time when Europe lay at peace, there arrived at the station in England where I was fortunate enough to be serving a batch of eight recruits. They were very raw and very untrained, and it was the doubtful pleasure of the unit in which I was, to undertake periodically the training of such batches in order to relieve a somewhat overtaxed depot elsewhere. This batch – like unto other similar batches – aspired to become drivers in His Majesty’s Corps of Royal Engineers. Occasionally their aspirations were realised – more often not, for the terms of their service were two years with the colours and ten with the reserve, and at the end of two years the average man may just about be considered capable of looking after two horses and a set of harness – really looking after them – and not before. Then they go, or most of them, and the service knows them no more. However, all that is beside the point.
Wandering dispassionately round the stables one day, I perceived the eight, mounted on blankets, sitting on their horses, while a satirical and somewhat livery rough-riding corporal commented on the defects of their figures, their general appearance, and their doubtful claim to existence at all, in a way that is not uncommon with rough-riders. Then for the first time I saw Brown – Driver Robert Brown, to give him his full name.
“I ’ad a harnt once, No. 3. She was sixty-four, and weighed twenty stone. And if she’d ’a been sitting on that there ’orse of yours she’d have looked just like you: only ’er chest grew in front and not be’ind like yours.”
No. 3 was Driver Robert Brown. I passed on. The presence of an officer sometimes tends to check the airy persiflage which flows so gracefully from the lips of riding instructors.
A week after I inquired of the corporal as to the progress of his charges. “Not bad, sir,” he said – “not bad. The best of them easy is that there Brown. He don’t look much on a horse – in fact, he looks like a sack o’ potatoes – but ’e’s a tryer, and we’ll turn ’im into something before we’ve done.”
Then one day – about four in the afternoon – I happened to wander through the stables. They were deserted apparently save for the stableman – until, in a corner, I came upon Driver Brown. He was giving his horse sugar, and making much of him – to use the riding-school phrase. We had a talk, and he told me things, when he got over his shyness – about his parents and where he lived, and that he loved animals, and a lot else besides. From then on I kept my eye on Brown, and the more I did so, the more I liked him. He was no beauty – he was not particularly smart – but he was one of the best. His NCOs swore by him – his two horses had never looked better – his harness was spotless. In addition to that he played back in the football eleven, if not with great skill, at any rate with immense keenness. He had exactly the figure for a zealous full back, and was of the type who kicked with such vim that when he missed the ball – which he generally did – he invariably fell heavily to the ground. Thus Robert Brown – recruit.
When his two years were up, Brown elected to stay on in the service. The service consisting in this case of his commanding officer, his NCOs and myself, it could find no reason why he shouldn’t – in fact, and on the contrary, many very excellent reasons why he should. So Brown took on for his seven. Shortly afterwards, owing to a marked propensity of my servant to combine the delights of old Scotch with the reprehensible custom of sleeping off those delights in my best easy chair – one bought on the hire system, not the Government issue, where sleep under any circumstances is completely out of the question – owing, as I say, to this unpleasant propensity, I approached my commanding officer. NCOs were annoyed – they entreated, they implored, and the issue was in doubt, till a providential attack of influenza laid my CO low for the time, and the senior subaltern – myself – reigned in his stead. Then the sergeant-major laughed, and resigned himself to the inevitable. Driver Robert Brown became my servant, and the desecrator of my padded armchair retired – after a short period of durance vile – to seek repose on stable buckets.
During the forthcoming six months I am bound to admit I suffered – dreadfully. You do not make a servant in a day; but he tried his level best. We had shirt parades, in which I instructed him in the art of studding shirts, with little hints thrown in as to the advisability of wreaking his will on the shirt for dinner before he cleaned my parade boots for the following morning – not after. We delved into the intricacies of washing lists, and he waxed indignant over the prices charged. They seemed to me quite ordinary, but Brown would have none of it. I did not often study them – bills were never one of my hobbies; but one day it suddenly struck me the month’s bill was smaller than usual. That was the awful occasion when changing quickly for cricket. I thought something was wrong with the shirt; it seemed rather stiffer in front than the average flannel – moreover, it had no buttons. Howls for Brown. Vituperation for lack of buttons.
“But, sir, that’s an evening shirt you’ve got on. One I washed myself to save the washing bill.” Tableau.
Then I prepared lists on pieces of paper as to the exact things I required packed in my suitcase when I departed for weekends. There was the hunting weekend, and the ball-dance weekend, and the weekend when I stayed ’neath the parental roof, and – er – other weekends too numerous to mention. I would grunt Dance, or Home, or Brighton at him when he brought me my tea on Friday morning, and then during the morning he would, with the aid of the correct list, pack the necessary. There were occasional lapses. Once I remember – it was lunchtime on Friday, and we were being inspected. The mess was full of brass hats, and my train was 2.45. I had howled Dance at Brown as I passed my room before lunch, and was hoping for the best, when the mess waiter told me my servant wanted me for a moment. I went outside.
“Please, sir, them thin ones of yours is full of holes and the other three are at the wash.” His voice like himself was good and big. “Shall I run down and buy a pair and meet you at the station?”
All the general said when I returned was, “Did he mean socks?”
Then there was a dreadful occasion when he sent me away one weekend with one of his dickies in my bag – he had been promoted to mufti – instead of a dress shirt; and another even more awful when he sent me to an austere household – prayers at eight, etc. – from the owner of which I had hopes, with my boots wrapped in a paper of orange hue which had better be nameless. I could continue indefinitely – the mistakes that lad made would have built a church; but withal I never wish for a better servant – a truer-hearted friend. And all this happened in the long dim ages way back before we started – he and I – with thousands of others for the land across the water; where for a space he remained my servant, until in the fullness of time he passed down that Long Valley from which there is no return. Many have passed down it these last months – many will pass down it before Finis is written on this World War; but none deserve a gentler crossing over the Great Divide than Robert Brown, Driver, RE, and sometime batman.
Now should there be any who, having read as far as this, hopefully continue in the belief that they are getting near the motto – in the shape of some wonderful deed of heroism and daring – they will, I am afraid, be disappointed. I have no startling pegs on which to hang the tale of his life. Like thousands of others, he never did anything very wonderful – he never did anything at all wonderful. He was just one of the big army of Browns out here of whom no one has ever heard. One of that big army who have done their bit unrewarded, unknown – because it was the thing to do; a feeling unknown to some of those at home – I allude to the genus Maidenhead Maggot still seen in large quantities – er – resting. And yet for each of those Browns – their death recorded so tersely in the paper – some heart-broken woman has sobbed through the long night, watching the paling dawn with tear-stained eyes, aching for the sound of footsteps for ever still, conjuring up again the last time she saw her man, now lying in a nameless grave. Would the Maggot get as much? I wonder.
As I have said, I’m afraid I haven’t got anything very wonderful to describe. You can’t make a deathless epic out of a man being sick – dreadfully sick beside the road – and an hour afterwards getting your food for you. It doesn’t sound very romantic, I admit, and yet – It was in the morning, I remember, about three o’clock, that we first smelt it, and we were lying about half a mile behind the line. That first sweet smell of chlorine turning gradually into the gasping, throat-racking fumes. Respirators weren’t regarded with the same importance then as they are now, but we all had them. Of course I’d lost mine. Since early childhood I have invariably lost everything. Brown found it, and I put it on – and then he disappeared. Some two hours later, when the shelling had abated a little, and the gas had long since passed, I found him again. He was white and sweating, and the gas was in him – not badly, you understand, not badly – but the gas was in him. For three or four hours he was sick, very sick – and his head was bursting. I know what he felt like.
And I said to the major, “I’m sorry it’s Brown, but it’ll teach him a lesson not to lose his respirator again,” for, that is the way with Thomas Atkins – he is apt to lose most things that are not attached to him by chains.
It doesn’t sound at all romantic all this, does it? – and yet, well, I found my respirator in the pocket of another coat. And as Brown came in with some food – he’d recovered about an hour – I handed him back his respirator, and I asked him why he’d done it.
“Well, I thought as ’ow you might ’ave to be giving orders like, and would want it more than me.” He spoke quite naturally.
I didn’t thank him – I couldn’t have spoken to save my life – but the lad knew what I thought. There are some things for which thanks are an insult.
There was another thing which comes to me too, as I write – nothing very wonderful again, and yet – In the course of our wanderings we were engaged upon a job of work that caused us to make nightly a pilgrimage through Wipers. At the time Wipers was not healthy. That stage of the war of attrition – I understand that many of the great thinkers call it a war of attrition, though personally I wish they could be here when the Hun is attriting, or whatever the verb is – that stage, then, known as the second battle of Ypres was in progress. And, though all of that modern Pompeii was unhealthy at the time, there were certain marked places particularly so. One such was the Devil’s Corner. There, nightly, a large number of things – men and horses – were killed; and the road was littered with – well, fragments.
Now it chanced one night that I had taken Brown with me to a point inside the salient, and at midnight I had sent him away – back to the field the other side of Ypres, where for the time we were lying. Two or three hours after I followed him, and my way led me past the Devil’s Corner. All was quite quiet – the night’s hate there was over, at any rate for the moment. One house was burning fiercely just at the corner, and the only sounds that broke the silence were the crackling of the flames and the occasional clatter of a limbered wagon travelling fast down a neighbouring road. And then suddenly I heard another sound – clear above my own footsteps. It was the voice of a man singing – at least, when I say singing – it was a noise of sorts. Also there was no mistaking the owner of the voice. Too often had I heard that same voice apostrophising “a beautiful picture, in a beautiful golden fraime.” I stopped surprised – for what in the name of fortune Brown was doing in such an unsavoury spot was beyond me! In fact, I felt distinctly angry. The practice of remaining in needlessly dangerous places is not one to be encouraged. I traced that noise; it came from behind an overturned limber, with two defunct horses lying in the ditch. I crossed the road and peered over.
Sitting in the ditch was Robert Brown, and on his knees rested the head of the limber driver. In the breaking dawn you could see that the end was very near – the driver had driven for the last time. From the limp sag of his back I thought it was broken, and a bit of shell had removed – well, no matter, but one could hear the beating of the wings. Brown didn’t see me, but occasionally, gentle as a woman, he bent over him and wiped the death sweat from his forehead; while all the time, under his breath, mechanically, he hummed his dirge. Then the man, lying half under the limber, stirred feebly.
“What is it, mate?” said Brown, leaning forward.
“Take the letters out of my pocket, matey,” he muttered. “Them blokes at the War Office takes so long – and send ’em to – to–” The lips framed the words feebly, but no sound came.
“Who to, pal?” whispered Brown; but even as he spoke the poor maimed form quivered and lay still. And as I watched Brown lay his head gently down, and closed his eyes, the road, the houses seemed to grow a trifle misty. When I next looked up I saw him stumping away down the road, and, as he rounded the corner, a dreadful noise stating that, with regard to a lady named Thora, “he had loved ’er in life too little, ’e ’ad loved ’er in death too well,” came floating back in the still air.
Yet methinks no great man’s soul, speeded on its way by organ and anthem, ever had a nobler farewell than that limber driver, if the spirit of the singer has anything to do with it.
But, as I said before, I could continue indefinitely. Was there not the terrible occasion when I found him standing guard over a perfectly harmless Belgian interpreter, with a pick in his hand and the light of battle in his eye, under the impression that he had caught a German spy? The wretched man had lain on the ground for three hours – every movement being greeted with a growl of warning from Brown and a playful flourish of his pick. Also the awful moment when in an excess of zeal he built the Major a canvas chair, which collapsed immediately he sat in it, thereby condemning my irate commanding officer to walk in a bent-up position with the framework attached to his person, till his howls of rage produced deliverance. But time is short, and the pegs are small. He was just one of the Robert Browns, that’s all; and the last peg in the lad’s life is perhaps the smallest of all.
It was wet two or three days ago, very wet; and I, as usual, had gone out without a macintosh. We were away back west of Ypres, in a region generally considered safe. It is safe as a matter of fact by comparison, but occasionally the Hun treats us to an obus or two – lest we forget his existence. I got back very wet, very angry, and very bored, and howled for Brown. There was no answer, save only from the doctor’s orderly, and he it was who told me. Brown had started out when the rain came on, six or seven hours before, with my macintosh, and, not returning, they had gone to look for him.
In a ditch they found him with the water dyed crimson, a few minutes before he died. It was just a stray shell that found its mark on the lad. I can see him in my mind stumping along the road, humming his song – and then, without warning, the sudden screech close on top of him, the pitiful, sagging knees, the glazing film of death, with none to aid him through as he had helped that other, for the road was little used.
Thank God! they found him before the end, but he only made one remark. “I couldn’t get no farther, Dick,” he muttered, “but the mack ain’t stained.”
I went up to see him in the brewery where they’d carried him, and I looked on his honest, ugly face for the last time. “The mack ain’t stained.” No, lad, it isn’t. May I, when I come to the last fence, be able to say the same.
Though he spoke it literally, there is, methinks, a man’s religion in those last words of Robert Brown, Driver, RE, and sometime batman.