Project Gutenberg's Fragments From France, by Captain Bruce Bairnsfather This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Fragments From France Author: Captain Bruce Bairnsfather Release Date: July 2, 2008 [EBook #25951] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRAGMENTS FROM FRANCE *** Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Emmy and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
I fear the enemy will be even more infuriated when he turns over the pages of this book. In it the spirit of the British citizen soldier, who, hating war as he hated hell, flocked to the colours to have his whack at the apostles of blood and iron, is translated to cold and permanent print. Here is the great war reduced to grim and gruesome absurdity. It is not fun poked by a mere looker-on, it is the fun felt in the war by one who has been through it.
CAPTAIN BRUCE BAIRNSFATHER.
Captain Bruce Bairnsfather has stayed at that "farm" which is portrayed in the double page of the book;[4] he has endured that shell-swept "'ole" that is depicted on the cover; he has watched the disappearance of that "blinkin' parapet" shown on one page; has had his hair cut under fire as shown on another. And having been through it all, he has just put down what he has seen and heard and felt and smelt and—laughed at.
Captain Bairnsfather went to the front in no mood of a "chiel takin' notes." It was the notes that took him. Before the war, some time a regular soldier, some time an engineer, he had little other idea than to sketch for mischief, on walls and shirt cuffs, and tablecloths. Without the war he might never have put pencil to paper for publication. But the war insisted.
It is not for his mere editor to forecast his vogue in posterity. Naturally I hope it will be a lasting one, but I am prejudiced. Let me, however, quote a letter which reached Captain Bairnsfather from somewhere in France:
"Twenty years after peace has been declared there will be no more potent stimulus to the recollections of an old soldier than your admirable sketches of trench life. May I, with all deference, congratulate you on your humour, your fidelity, your something-else not easily defined—I mean your power of expressing in black and white a condition of mind."
I hope that this forecast is a true one. If this sketch book is worthy to outlast the days of the war, and to be kept for remembrance on the shelves of those who have lived through it, it will have done its bit. For will it not be a standing reminder of the ingloriousness of war, its preposterous absurdity, and of its futility as a means of settling the affairs of nations?[5]
CAPTAIN BRUCE BAIRNSFATHERWhen the ardent Jingo of the day after to-morrow rattles the sabre, let there be somewhere handy a copy of "Fragments from France" that can be opened in front of him, at any page, just to remind him of what war is really like as it is fought in "civilised" times.
Captain Bairnsfather has become a household word—or perhaps one should say a trench-hold word. Who is ever the worse for a laugh? Certainly not the soldier in trench or dug-out or shell-swept billet. Rather may it be said that the Bairnsfather laughter has acted in thousands of cases as an antidote to the bane of depression. It is the good fortune of the British Army to possess such an antidote, and the ill-fortune of the other belligerents that they do not possess its equivalent.
A Scots officer, writing in the Edinburgh Evening News, hits the true sentiment towards Bairnsfather of the Army in France when he writes:
"To us out here the 'Fragments' are the very quintessence of life. We sit moping over a smoky charcoal fire in a dug-out. Suddenly someone, more wide-awake than others remembers the 'Fragments.' Out it comes, and we laugh[6] uproariously over each picture. For are these not the very things we are witnessing every day, incidents full of tragic humour? The fed-up spirit you see on the faces of Bairnsfather's pictures is a sham—a mask beneath which there lies something that is essentially British."
In a communication received by Captain Bairnsfather an eminent Member of Parliament writes: "You are rising to be a factor in the situation, just as Gillray was a factor in the Napoleonic wars." The difference is, however, that instead of turning his satire exclusively upon the enemy, as did Gillray, Captain Bairnsfather turns his—good-humouredly always—on his fellow-warriors. This habit of ours of making fun of ourselves has come by now to be fairly well understood by even the most sensitive and serious-minded of our continental friends and neighbours. It hardly needs nowadays to be pointed out that it is a fixed condition of the national life that wherever Britons are working together in any common object, whether in school, college, profession, or even warfare, they must never appear to be regarding their occupation too seriously. Those who know us—and who, nowadays, has the excuse for not knowing us, seeing how very much we have been discussed?—understand that our frivolity is apparent and not real. Because we have the gift of laughter, we are no less appreciative of grim realities than are our scowling enemies, and nobody knows that better in these days than those scowling enemies themselves.
Their hymns of hate and prayers for punishment have been impotent expressions of exasperation at our coolness, deliberation,[7] and inflexible determination—qualities they had deluded themselves before the war into believing would prove all a sham before the first blast of frightfulness. They told themselves that, a war once actually begun, the imperturbable pipe-smoking John Bull would be transformed into a cowering craven. More complete confusion of this false belief is nowhere to be found than in these "Fragments." It ranks as a colossal German defeat that successive bloodthirsty assaults upon us by land, sea, and air should produce a Bairnsfather, depicting the "contemptible little Army," swollen out of all recognition, settling humorously down to war as though it were the normal business of life.
"Fed up"? Yes, that is the word by which to describe, if you like, the prevalent Bairnsfather expression of countenance. But the kind of weariness he depicts is the reverse of the kind that implies "give up." Au contraire, mes amis! The "fed-up" Bairnsfather man is a fixture. "J'y suis," he might exclaim, if he spoke French, "et il m'embête que j'y suis. Je voudrais que je n'y sois pas. Mais j'y suis, et, mes bons camarades, par tous les dieux, j'y reste!"
If the enemy should read in the words "fed up" a sign that our tenacity is giving out, he reads it wrong; grim will be the disillusionment of any hopes he may build upon his misreading, and even grimmer the anger of those whom he may have deluded.
These verdammte Engländer are never what they seem, but are always something unpleasantly different. We are the Great Enigma of the war, and in our mystery lies our greatest strength. Let us be careful not to lose it. Those who would have us simplify ourselves upon the continental model, and present to the world a picture of sombre seriousness, are asking us to change our[8] national character. Cromwell asked the painter to paint him, "warts and all." Bairnsfather sketches us—smiles and all. And who would take the smiles off the "dials" of the figures you will see on the pages that follow?
![Where to Live—[ADVT.]](images/illus009.jpg "Where to Live—[ADVT.]")
"Where did that one go to?"
That Evening Star-shell.
"They've evidently seen me."
Situation Shortly Vacant.
The Tactless Teuton.
"Well, if you knows of a better 'ole, go to it."
A Proposal in Flanders.
No Possible Doubt Whatever.
"Gott strafe this barbed wire."
So Obvious.
The Fatalist.
A Maxim Maxim.
Our Adaptable Armies.
A.D. Nineteen Fifty.
Frustrated Ingenuity.
Keeping His Hand In.
"—— —— these —— —— rations."
Dear ——
The Eternal Question.
Directing the Way at the Front.
The Late Comer.
The Innocent Abroad.
"There goes our blinkin' parapet again."
"The Spirit of our Troops is Excellent."
The Things that Matter.
The Soldier's Dream.
The Thirst for Reprisals.
The Ideal and the Real.
"Watch me make a fire-bucket of 'is 'elmet."
"That 16-inch Sensation."
That Sword.
What It Really Feels Like.
"My dream for years to come."
Coiffure in the Trenches.
Another Maxim Maxim.
Our Democratic Army.
Never Again!
Thoroughness.
That Hat.
Springtime in Flanders.
The Dud Shell—Or the Fuse-Top Collector.
"What's all this about unmarried men?"
The Historical Touch.
His Initiation.
When One Would Like to Start an Offensive on One's Own.
Trouble With One of the Souvenirs.
The Conscientious Exhilarator.
The Nest.
Those Superstitions.
The Professional Touch.
Happy Memories of the Zoo.
Observation.
Immediate and Important!
His Dual Obsession.
The Communication Trench.
Letting Himself Down.
Old Saws and New Meanings——By Bairnsfather.
Nobbled.
The Intelligence Department.
Valuable Fragment from Flanders: It All Comes to This in Time.
In Nineteen Something: General Sir Ian Jelloid at Home.
In and Out (I).
In and Out (II).
Pushfulness at Plug Street.
His Secret Sorrow.
The Hard Lines of Communication.
The New Submarine Danger.
War!
A Matter of Moment.
The Saint.
Those Tubular Trenches.
Con Moto Perpetuo.
Real Sympathy.
Entanglements.
"LEAVE."
There are times when Private Lightfoot feels absolutely convinced that it's going to be a War of Exhaustion.
Chat on 'Change.
The Whip Hand.
Christmas Day: How it dawned for many.
"Under the spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands."
Augusts Three.
Overheard in an Orchard.
The Offensive.
"The Imminent, Deadly Breach."
Telepathy.
Trouville-sur-Somme.
Omar the Optimist.
"Where do yer want this put, Sargint?"
Coming to the Point.
A Castle in the Air.
The Freedom of the Seas.
In Dixie-Land.
Alas! Poor Herr Von Yorick!
Those Signals.
His Christmas Goose.
Urgent.
The Candid Friend.
The Long and the Short of It.
"Old Moore" at the Front.
Supra-Normal.
That "Out Wiring" Sensation.
Natural History of the War
Things that Irritate.
Still Keeping His Hand In.
Those —— Mouth-Organs.
Those Raiders at the Seat of War.
Romance, 1917.
Modern Topography.
"There Was a Young Man of Cologne."
In the Support Trench.
It's the Little Things that Worry.
That Periscope Sensation.
At the Brewery Baths.
A Miner Success.
Birds of Ill Omen.
If Only They'd Make "Old Bill" President of Those Tribunals.
Down at the Ration Dump.
The Glorious Fifth.
This Muddy War.
Unappetising.
The Tourists, 19..?
Alas! My poor Brother!
Can-Tank-erous.
Curfew.
Getting the Local Colour.
The Ghost of Dead Pig Farm—19..?
George versus Germany.
A Puzzle for Paderewski.
"Substitutes" in the Field.
Leave.
Merely a Warning.
With the three noted exceptions, punctuation anomalies were retained to match the original drawings. The exceptions are in the books printed explanations, not in any cartoon.
Page 5, period added to illustration caption ("Jack Johnson" shell.)
Page 112, single opening quote changed to double. ("You wait till I)
Page 125, period added to title of picture to match rest of format (That Provost-Marshal Feeling.)
Pages 92 and 97 were halves of the same comic. They were reattached to aid readability.
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Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
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