In the morning, washing and shaving in an open yard before the usual burnt bacon and bread and tea for breakfast; and then they were marched to the junction of a hundred shining converging rails, above a revolting litter of tins, paper, faeces, where swarms of fat blue and green flies besieged their faces and necks for the salty sweat as they were told off into squads, each under a French Sous-officier, to make orderly piles of rusty shells which had been tipped out of trucks all anyhow. It was hard work, for each shell weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds. They were painted with pale blue or yellow bands.
“Old stock, if you ask me,” said Baldwin. “Drop one, and the whole shoot might go up.”
“You volunteered for this, old son,” remarked Elliott, two of whose left-hand fingers had been crushed already. Elliott, a fairly quiet chap at Bleak Hill, seemed to have taken on the sardonic rôle of Mortimore, without Morty’s gaiety.
“Honest work never harmed anyone,” said Tommy Atkins, cheerfully. “And it’s helping to win the war.”
“In what way, old son?”
“That is not for us to say. The sooner we’ve done the job, the sooner we shall be free to stop.”
“You’ve got some hopes, old son.”
“I have hope, Elliott, and I have faith, two things that cannot be taken away,” replied Tommy Atkins, his apple-face glistening.
“And I have two purple fingernails, old son, so let’s call it quits.”
At the end of a week, just as they were getting into the way of handling the shells, they were sent to another siding, to unload French wounded who had come down from the Aisne, and carry them on stretchers to horse ambulances. They lay on straw in the familiar grey trucks, some groaning, others deathly still. The stench was sickening; the straw was wet with urine and faeces; flies crawled on open wounds which ran with pus, or were slippery with twisting maggots. Eyes stared wild and fixed above the straw, hair and beards dishevelled; they muttered, groaned, sometimes screamed when being shifted on to stretchers. One man’s feet were splintered bone through broken boots; another’s arm was a bloody stump into which a brown bandage cut, twisted by a stick, the end of which he held dog-like in his teeth. The flesh of the shoulder was a blackish blue. A retching smell came from it. When accidentally he touched the soldier’s cheek, it felt sickly hot. The man’s head did not move.
“Dear man,” said Tommy Atkins. “He’s got gangrene. Or lockjaw. Don’t take it to heart, Maddison, help me get him on to the stretcher. Only God should be taken to heart.”
When the trucks had been cleared he had washed his hands; but still the smell remained. He tried to force himself not to sniff his fingers; but again and again the hand came up, and he had to swallow to stop himself from being sick.
“The French never were exactly famous for their sanitation,” said Baldwin. “Every well in Villeneuve, despite its name, is probably crawling with typhoid, and no wonder, when you see that there are no drains, or if there are any, they just empty out beside the wells.”
They had been forbidden to drink any water except that drawn from the water-cart, saturated with chloride of lime.
The medical officer, Captain McTaggart, organised a temporary hospital in a factory building closed since the war. Volunteers were called for orderlies. Tommy Atkins was the first to volunteer. Phillip and Baldwin preferred to work on the loading of trucks, the shells having all been stacked.
There was an odd bearded old soldier living in the yards, who called himself Mad Jack, with a row of dirty ribbons which he said were got in thirty years’ service. He appeared to have no unit, and tried to attach himself to the Highlanders, and get put on their nominal roll. Baldwin said he was probably a deserter and was playing mad, to avoid being shot when caught. Mad Jack did no work, he slept in a hay store, and played pitch-and-toss with anyone, including what he called the “’eathen French frogs”, for sous, to get red wine. Another practice of his was to pinch bully beef, and ‘fog’ it in the buvettes. Then one day military policemen appeared in the yards; and Mad Jack was last seen crossing the tracks at a fast pace, a sack of stolen rations over his shoulder.
Upon an evening soon afterwards they all entrained for Orleans, where a railhead camp was being made for troops of the Lahore and Meerut Divisions, on their way from India.
After a week at Orleans he thought of himself and Baldwin as old sweats, a term learned from some regular soldiers who, having recovered from slight wounds, were there on light duty before being sent back to the front. The light duty was putting up tents in rows; digging latrines, and trenches for water pipes to fill canvas drinking troughs for horses; and erecting a barbed-wire fence around the camp.
After 5 p.m. each day they went into the town, having to report back at the guard tent at 9 p.m. They went to the Poisson d’Or for steaks and sliced potatoes, excellent with the local mustard, and red wine, twice a week; they were paid five francs every Friday, when their brown pay-books were initialled by Mr. Ogilby. Phillip had written half a dozen letters home, saying that no post had come to him so far, but he was well and enjoying himself, and the war would be over by Christmas.
*
The swallows had gone from the reeds by the river; mists lay over the water at night; leaves broke from the trees. Fishermen stood on the bridge over the Loire unspeaking, their long poles before them. Sometimes one caught a very small fish, slightly bigger than a sardine. Was it a gudgeon, or a bleak? He did not really want to know. It was not an English river.
In the second week of October they read that the Germans had captured Antwerp. Many prisoners of the Naval Division, sent by Winston Churchill, had been captured. The Germans were losing thousands of men in their mass attacks, but in spite of enormous losses, they were advancing. The old sweats in the camp were darkly pessimistic.
“The Ally-mands will be feeling the benefit of all we’re doing here,” said one. Some of them were court-martial cases, serving sentences often and twelve years’ hard labour for insubordination, the sentences to begin after the war. They were supervised by military policemen armed with revolvers—they did all the worst jobs, like emptying latrine buckets into wheeled carts. When they were fit for duty, they would be sent back up the line.
He was shocked to think that some of the heroes ol Mons could be treated like that. Ten years’ hard labour for answering back a sergeant! But all regular soldiers appeared to be treated harshly, quite differently from Territorials.
One night in the Poisson d’Or an old French soldier of ’Soixante-dix—the war of 1870—told them that Lille had fallen. Les sales boches were advancing, to the ports of la Manche. Coupez les gorges! he cried, drawing his finger across his throat, and pointing to the north.
“Vous!” he shouted, spitting between his sabots. “Vous! Soldats anglais! Allez! Allez!” He flipped a hand angrily towards the north. Growled agreement supported his words.
“I suppose they think we’re letting the French do all the fighting,” said Baldwin, quietly.
Suddenly, in the fourth week of October, the order came for the detachment to entrain the next morning. Mr. Ogilby told them that all the other detachments were being recalled at the same time, to reassemble as a battalion. The Germans were making a supreme effort to capture the Channel ports, he said; news which they had already gathered from the smudgy-printed local paper in the Goldfish estaminet.
*
The London Highlanders were about to be flung into the battle.
PART THREE
‘THE RED LITTLE, DEAD LITTLE ARMY’
‘It seems to me that we have never realised what we asked these men to do. They were quite different to professional soldiers … I wonder, sometimes, if the eyes of the country will ever be opened to what these Territorial soldiers of ours have done.’
by F-M. Viscount French
of Ypres, K.P., O.M., etc.
‘The British Expeditionary Force was the finest of its kind that ever took the field in Europe.’
General Oberst von Klu
ck,
Commanding st German
Army in .
Chapter 19
ALARUMS
ALL NIGHT the train moved north, halting and shunting in sidings under spluttering purple arc-lamps. At each stop there were shouts, the stamp of horses, and often a jabber of argument outside the truck wherein they were trying to sleep on one another’s legs, thighs, even boots. Some were sitting up, others a row of bent backs and heads on arms along the one bench. The door rolled open to excited French talk. Wearily he thought that French troops were joining the train. At last the feeble toot of the engine-driver’s horn announced the en avant, to the accompaniment of more ringing jolts of buffers striking, clank of chains, and the wheels underneath the floor began to grind again.
An increase of lights, jolts, stops, and shakings across points was vaguely noticeable in the small dispiriting hours. With the first pallor of dawn came relief from vain attempts to sleep. Rising into the mist above grey roofs and walls was the Eiffel Tower.
“I wish I hadn’t drunk that red wine.”
“So do I.”
Collins gave a loud belch, without putting his hand up. He was a lout, thought Phillip.
Once clear of the capital, the train seemed to be making up for lost time. It puffed steadily through the misty countryside, which passed by slowly.
“We’re in no hurry, so we may as well ride.”
Their iron rations, six hard thick biscuits in small cloth bag, and blue tin of bully beef, were still uneaten. The sergeant’s face looked in at the window space, and told them to open a tin between two men, for breakfast.
“Hurray!” cried Phillip, thinking of Mortimore. “English cooking! Vive la France!”
“Sergeant, what about the lats? Where are they?” asked Tommy Atkins.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do, my bonny lads! Only don’t go dropping yourselves off by mistake,” and the sergeant walked to the next truck along the running-board.
The sun was rising up and they felt more cheerful. Looking out of the open window space, he saw several French soldiers crouched down on the running-board, holding to the rail, red trousers down. It was rather fun that way. He rejoiced that he had kept a newspaper. All along beside the track was a litter of paper and empty ragged ration tins, extending as far as he could see. Thousands of troops must have passed that way.
The journey became tedious. They passed slowly through another large station, marked Beauvais. At midday they were at Amiens, where the train stopped. No one was allowed to leave the truck. The bully beef had made him feel rather sick. Then someone said tea was coming; and soon afterwards two men were told off to go to where smoke arose near a signal-box. They returned carrying the familiar black dixie between them. Who cared that the tea tasted of skilly? It was hot, that was all that mattered.
Soon the old familiar song was rising from the truck,
We don’t give a damn for Will-i-am,
We know the Crown Prince is barmy!
but now von Kluck was properly rhymed, as in the original composition.
Walk over the contemptible little British Army! had been the Kaiser’s Order of the Day to his troops at Aix-la-Chapelle, according to The Daily Trident, while they had been in London. Let all the Allemands come, the London Highlanders would show them! That was the mood of the moment.
In the darkness of that night, after twenty-two hours in the truck, the train stopped at a station lit by arc-lamps subdued by the mist. On the top of the iron posts—St. Omer.
Shadowy cavalrymen on the platform told them it was the headquarters of Sir John French. Among them was a familiar hodden grey kilt. The scout saluted Mr. Ogilby,
“All London Highlanders form up on the platform!”
Following the scout and Mr. Ogilby, the detachment was marched to French cavalry barracks where the rest of the battalion was said to be. They marched under an arch, seeing flames against a wall. “Fall out for a meal!” Two black-faced cooks stood by steaming dixies, cursing French coal. “Here you are, laddy, a hot meal!” It was bully beef stew with lumps of biscuit, but it brought a glow to life. Carrying half-filled steaming mess-tins to the strawed loft over the stables, they sat and ate with their spoons. The straw was damp, but who cared?
Elliott sat next to Phillip. Phillip rather liked him. He envied him, in a way, for having a girl of his own. She had come to see him with her parents every Sunday at Bleak Hill. All he had noticed about Elliott’s girl was that she had a very white skin, and Cambridge-blue eyes the same colour as her dress; and she had smiled at him. He had wondered how Elliott had seen anything in her; but still, she was his girl.
“Letters! Letters!!”
The wonderful, life-giving moment when the post-corporal appeared with letters and parcels, hundreds of letters and parcels carried in sacks up the wooden steps. In the candle-lit loft men were soon living in the past. He saw that Elliott had a thick wad of letters from his girl.
He himself had two parcels from home, each containing a cake, a tin of café au lait, chocolate, some soap, a pair of socks, and a packet of Hignett’s Cavalier. An almost formal note in one of the parcels informed him that the enclosed tobacco had been paid for, in accordance with his declared wish, out of the money Your Affectionate Father had in trust for him.
There were four letters from Mother. He read them in a happy feeling of aloneness shared by the haze of his wavering little candle-flame beside him on his mess-tin lid. The letters were more or less identical, feeling as though Mother was always in a hurry, each beginning My dearest Boy, and ending, Ever your loving, Mother. There had been a moment in the loft, before the hot meal, when he had felt that he must tell his officer he could not face the unthinkable gap between present and future: that he was lost in darkness for ever and ever; but now, as the pages shone in the candle-light, he re-entered the world which lived in Mother’s handwriting.
The sentences said little in themselves; but in them was all happiness, all life, all safety.
They were all well at home, and hoped he was, too. Father was working long hours, as more younger men from the Moon had left to join up. Mavis had begun work at Head Office, in the Country Department. Willie had stayed with them for his first leave, after inoculation, and sent his love. He was such a kind boy, so sympathetic and helpful, Father thought very highly of him. Of course Father was very proud, too, of his own son. Gran’pa sent love, and asked him especially to keep his feet dry, and not to run unnecessary risks. He was going to send him a red chest-protector, for his lungs. Mrs. Neville sent her love. She had promised to write to him, so had Mrs. Bigge. Mrs. Rolls had enquired after him, and sent her very good wishes. Ah! she was knitting a pair of socks for him! He must not forget his prayers, God would always answer his prayers. He had answered her prayers when her little son was such a long time in coming into the world. There was one sentence underlined. Do write when you have a moment to spare, dear, and don’t forget to mention Father, will you, lest he feel that you do not care about him. Mavis and Doris both sent their love, and would write to him. Aunt Marian also sent fondest love. Timmy Rat was well. Father had hung a mutton bone on the tree in the garden for the titmice. He asked her to say that he would not forget to repair the nesting boxes.
*
Phillip cut a slice of cake and ate it, after closing the tin and hiding it under his valise. It was Mother’s own cake, the wellknown flavour of raisins, currants, and beef-dripping, with the usual burnt paper on the bottom. He hesitated several times before putting the segment of burnt paper, from which he had gnawn every hard fragment of cake, into the sack provided for waste-paper. Many times he had seen Mother put paper in the baking tin after smearing it with margarine, then the cake into the oven. And perhaps, as she was playing chess opposite Father, “Oh dear, I had almost forgotten my cake!” and then hurrying footfalls along the passage and up the steps to the kitchen. He could see her now, her head bent down to look inside the oven.
After a pause he rose and put the
burnt paper in the sack, to reassure himself when he sat down again by a touch of the letters in his breast pocket.
Then down the ladder into the yard to brush teeth and wash, up again to arrange bed, blow out candle, lie down, immediately to induce before closed eyes pictures of his home, scenes and faces in the silence of the corridors of the mind.
One by one the candles died out, until only Elliott’s shone in the dark dusty loft, as he sat up writing. At ten o’clock he blew out his flame, and settled down with the muttered remark, “God bless the man who first invented sleep.”
*
In the morning they marched out of St. Omer along a road lined with poplars, turning off into a lane which led to rolling hedgeless fields of stubble whereon grass and clover were growing, and plowland extended to the skyline where teams of large grey dappled horses were at work. There were copses in the hollows and lanchetts, and against the sky a clump of beech trees. It was rather like the Kent country on the way to the Salt Box.
Across this land the battalion carried out an exercise, advancing in companies in line to a distant objective: first in artillery formation of half-sections at each point of a diamond; then at a signal from the Company Commander to his subaltern officers, into extended order. It began to rain as the advance took place up the gradual slope to the ridge, on which a group of staff-officers was standing. After the charge, with cheers, and the position captured, a line of trenches had to be dug in the brown loamy soil, which became stickier as rain fell steadily. It was slow work with the short-handled entrenching tools. About four o’clock, when they were wet to the skin, water squelching in muddy shoes, the exercise was stopped; and the trenches ordered to be filled again. There was no grumbling, although they had had no food since breakfast at seven o’clock that morning.
As ‘B’ Company marched at ease over the stubbles, and Captain Forbes was walking beside his section, Phillip saw a mouse running and jumping away through the big wet clover leaves. Captain Forbes saw it at the same time; and Phillip saw his eyes bulge as, raising his walking stick, he ran after it, striking at it again and again as it darted sideways, until a final heavy thwack like the stroke of a cane, stopped it. Captain Forbes hit it several times, making sure the mouse was dead before returning to walk beside the company once more, a satisfied look upon his face. Phillip recalled the poem of Burns he had read, about the mouse’s nest turned up by the plow, and wondered vaguely why Captain Forbes had been so determined to kill a stray mouse.
How Dear Is Life Page 26