How Dear Is Life

by Henry Williamson

  “Whatyer, Phil! Up ve ole Blood’arnds!!”

  *

  Down on the right small-arms fire had been hammering all the time; then it had died away; now it was growing again, crackling further backward, over their right shoulders, inside the wood. Had the attack got through there? An order was given to remain in a state of readiness, bayonets fixed.

  A runner pushed his way down the communication trench which had been dug to the edge of the wood the previous night, with a message for the officer.

  Soon afterwards the Grenadiers filed away into the wood, leaving them in the trench.

  “So long, Phil!”

  “Au revoir, Horace old man!”

  “Don’t you fret.”

  “Not likely!”

  It was not long before ‘B’ Company moved back through the trees, to where soldiers in khaki, breech’d and wearing puttees reversed, with leather bandoliers slung across chests, were waiting. They were Life Guards, who had galloped up from the reserve. These moustached and bearded men said the Froggies had been pushed out of their trenches by the canal, and had gone back to ‘Brandy Balls’, otherwise Verbranden Molen. After more talk and waiting about, the Life Guards went away through the wood. Phillip felt now the safety of numbers. They were all in it together!

  Rifle-firing increased. Bullets came from many directions, but chiefly from the canal. While they waited, he made a fire of green oak twigs and small branches, beside a fallen tree; and sitting there, fanned it with his glengarry. The sap was heavy in the wood. Hour after hour he kept the fire alight by fanning the hissing lengths of branch, his eyes stung with acrid smoke. Bully beef and biscuits were given out in the afternoon. He filled his water-bottle from a shell-hole; it was forbidden, but his tongue was aclack with thirst.

  *

  As he dozed on the log, while the others lay on the ground, some asleep, or dull with fatigue, a small group of Pomeranian Grenadiers, hatless and wearing only tunics, trousers, and boots, came through the wood, hands hovering over cropped heads as they hurried forward. One was bigger than the others. He had the silver-black ribbon of the Iron Cross twisted through his third button-hole. They halted, about a dozen in all with upheld hands before two British soldiers. Phillip saw one go forward to the big Pomeranian and undo the tunic button, to take the Iron Cross inside. The Pomeranian spat in his face, whereupon the other soldier upped with the butt of his rifle and caught him on the jaw. He fell backwards. While one soldier threatened the other prisoners with pointed rifle, the other knelt and ripped off the Iron Cross and put it in his pocket. After that they made the others empty their pockets. Then they went away, leaving the prisoners standing there.

  Later he wondered if he had dreamed it; for when he opened his eyes again there was no one there. But when he walked over, he saw the Pomeranian who had been struck lying among the wet leaves, dead.

  *

  Towards dusk the London Highlanders advanced in extended order through the trees in the direction of their old trenches by Klein Zillebeke. They were to cover the flank of the Guards Brigade when the counter-attack was made.

  During the day, and the long wait in the wood, the line had been restored north of the canal; but more German attacks had driven the weary French troops back again. Dismounted Life Guards, deployed across the Verbranden Molen road, had reinforced them. The Germans had come on again; there was a mêlée, French, English, Germans, all mixed up; then new mass assaults had caused retirement to the reserve trenches. So the Guards were once again going into the attack at midnight; the, London Highlanders, on the flank, were in support.

  Wearily Phillip moved with No. 1 Company to the edge of the wood. It was cold. Flares were rising. They fixed bayonets. He looked once again to see that his magazine was loaded, then lay in line with others.

  Major Forbes came along. “Bruce, will you send out a patrol to find out if the trench is held in strength? Send a corporal and two men, and warn the others not to fire.”

  Phillip turned his face to the leaf-mould. He hardly dared to breathe. Corporal Collins’ name was called. With relief he heard two men being detailed. Then from the distance came hoarse screaming shouts, followed by a terrible racket of machine-gun fire. The Guards were attacking, poor devils. He hoped Cranmer would be all right.

  The patrol came back. The trench was unoccupied. They re-occupied it without a casualty, and waited, listening to the racket down by the unseen canal. A runner came to say that the counter-attack of the Guards was successful. It was two hours after midnight.

  *

  Later, No. 1 Company was relieved by dismounted Life Guards. They filed back into the wood, to a line of bunkers which the Engineers had made, thick with sleep. The bunkers were oak branches laid on posts about three feet out of the ground, covered by two layers of sandbags, while the back, facing the enemy lines, was heaped with mounded earth. They crept in and slept. In the morning of the yellow-tongued, thick-fingered damp grey day, Phillip saw Cranmer looking for him.

  “I’m too wicked to die yet, Phil.”

  They went among the trees to cook breakfast together. Cranmer had a small white loaf, slightly damp and soiled, but still, it was bread. He cut it in two. Each had his ration of mixed tea and sugar, rasher of bacon, and tin of Tickler plum-and-apple jam. Plum-and-apple was by now a joke; hundreds of tins lay about unopened, with boxes of bully beef and large bright cubes of biscuits. Nobody wanted them. Fatigue parties chucked away boxes of Tickler and Fray Bentos bully.

  It was like the old days in Whitefoot Lane—except that these were not the woods of Kent. Still, he and dear old Horace were together, that was the main thing. As in Bloodhound patrol days, he knelt to make a little fire, twig by twig, while Cranmer collected sticks, putting them in a heap beside the fire. Then he cut two forked sticks, stuck them in the ground, well clear of the little hut on fire, and laid a straight green stick across them, upon which to hang the canteens, as Cranmer called the mess-tins.

  There was yellow-clouded water at the bottom of older shell-holes; they dipped their canteens, and hung them for boiling. Then, crouching on their heels, they fried their rashers, mopping up the fat with bread and eating every scrap hungrily. Soon the water in the canteens was pricked with bubbles, seething at the edges, swirling at the boil. In went the speckled mixture of tea and sugar; and then a fag while the ‘char’ cooled off, a Red Hussar, of which two packets were the daily ration. The crack of a shell bursting tree-top height, followed by the rattle of its shrapnel bullets, was almost a jolly reminder of fireworknight on the Hill, looking towards the Crystal Palace. Crouching behind the trunk of a big oak, Cranmer played his jew’s-harp, vibrating the steel tongue against his teeth. Swannee Ribber followed We all came in this world with nothing. Phillip pretended to enjoy the music, as he thought that he and Cranmer were together again. Then Cranmer sang a song called The Old Battalion, a grim ballad made up, he said, by one of the Bill Browns.

  “There’ll be some souvenir watches and automatic pistols goin’ tonight, Phil! Cor, talk about robbin’ the dead, some of these ’ere blokes’d cut their muvvers’ froats fer a tanner.”

  This information having been given, Cranmer hummed out The Old Battalion once more on his jew’s-harp.

  Afterwards, they explored part of the wood. Cranmer showed Phillip where he had a coke-bucket hidden, with a sandbag of ‘black eggs’, or coal boulets, ‘won’ from a Keep Off Slaveys’ Bellies, who had half-inched it from a Froggie’s cottage. What was a Keep Off Slaveys’ Belly? asked Phillip, to be told that it was a K.O.S.B., otherwise King’s Own Scottish Borderer. “The name was give ’m in Dublin, you know what the Jocks is, quick as greased lightnin’, wiv them kilts,” grinned Cranmer. Then, “It’s me lucky ole bucket, it’s me mascot like, I wouldn’t lose it for somethink.”

  The black compressed eggs of coal-dust were extremely valuable; for a fire of sticks, showing flame, was not allowed in the trench at night. You could burn biscuits in the little old bucket, though they made a bit
of a niff until they was charred, said Cranmer, then they turned red if you fanned ’em. A fire was a necessity, explained Cranmer, to ward off rheumatics. Rheumatics never yet got a bloke his ticket: no use working rheumatics. A coke bucket give a bloke a hot cup o’ char when he come off sentry at night, a bit of all-right.

  “You take it, Phil, I ain’t got no kilt, you take it. Go on!”

  “But how d’you know you won’t need it, Horace? It’s your bucket.”

  “That’s why I’d like you to ’ave it, Phil, straight I would. We might go away anytime. It’s a present,” said Cranmer, in his hoarse voice.

  “Well, let’s leave it here, Horace.”

  “All right, but it’s yours when you want it, Phil.”

  “Well, thanks very much.”

  Having drunk their tea, they said goodbye. Phillip went back to the trench, having marked where the fire-bucket was concealed. It was an ordinary pail, perforated by bayonet-stabs.

  On his return, he was told off for filling sandbags for a Trained Soldier to build up the broken parapets. The Trained Soldier did it with almost mathematical neatness, explaining that it was done first with a header, then with a stretcher, to tie the bags in, like bricks.

  A sniper was active in that part of the trench. Phillip heard a Grenadier sergeant say that any guardsman hit in the head would, after recovery in hospital, be court-martialled for unsoldierly conduct in the face of the enemy. One of the Bill Browns, not a Trained Soldier, along a length of trench a couple of yards or so inside the wood was hit through the head, while sitting across a pole and winding barbed-wire on a stick; his pals swore revenge. He died; but that was not enough to wipe out the stain. They swore to go out after dark and get the sniper, who was thought to be lying out in front behind some stiffies this side of the wire. Someone had seen the flash. They would bring him in, and after interrogation before the officer, they would take him into the wood and brain him with entrenching tool handles.

  Phillip was surprised, and a little abashed, by the dark bitter anger in the pre-war soldiers: the dark compression of peace-time urban destitution, the low mind-strata of starvation in slums, when the taunt of soldier was an insult on a level with street-walkers. But the abashment was momentary; the warm and comradely strength, and the security it gave to be among the regulars, was what kept him going.

  Three of the Bill Browns went out that night, after the whispered word was passed round, “No firing—listening patrol out.” They did not get the sniper; but they did get several sandbags of loot, including watches, small black automatic pistols, Iron Grosses, cigar cases, money, brandy flasks, and about a dozen gold rings, cut off the fingers of the dead. Phillip tried to buy a pistol, offering five francs and a ten-shilling note, all the money he had on him; but the guardsman, wrapping the automatic in his red bandana handkerchief, said he would not sell under fifty francs.

  *

  There were still hares in the wood; and the grating koch-karr, followed by wing-flutters, of crowing cock pheasants sometimes answered the whistle and crack of a shrapnel shell. Cranmer stalked a cock, and shot it, early one morning; the problem was, how to cook it? Phillip suggested spitting it on a green stick, and turning it over a fire; Cranmer did this, for a surprise, while Phillip was ‘up’ at sentry; and when Phillip went into the wood, along the little track to the place where the fire-bucket was hidden, there was Cranmer regarding a blackened object, with burned head and claws, tied with wire to a stick.

  “Why didn’t you pluck it first, Horace?”

  “Cor, I knew there was suthin’ I forgot, Phil!”

  However, it was voted a very good meal by Phillip, to Cranmer’s anxious satisfaction.

  “Blime, like th’ ole Blood’ound days, when we roasted a ’edge’og, ’n it went pop in th’ middle, remember, Phil?”

  *

  Phillip’s wish to be lousy was fulfilled. He wore, as part of active-service equipment of the British infantryman, a cholera or body belt. This was a closely knitted woollen band enclosing kidneys and belly, about three inches wide. It was supposed to protect against chill; but in practice it became a trap for the small grey parasites, their centres blood-pointed after feeding and black-pointed during relaxation.

  After scratching for two days, he burned the cholera belt on Cranmer’s coke-bucket at night, causing various remarks to be made down the trench where the smoke drifted.

  The guardsmen exterminated lice in the crutches of their trousers, and the tails of their grey shirts, by an interesting method. A man sat on the trench floor, trousers down for inspection around the crutch; and when he spotted an itchy-koo, he touched one end of a thin yellow stalk of cordite, got by opening a cartridge, on the burning tobacco of his pipe, and charred the louse with the fizzing end.

  Phillip opened a German cartridge: it was full of black glittering grains. He opened an English round, and burned one of the thin sticks, like doll’s-house macaroni, watching it fizzing with a small dull yellow flame. He learned, too, that one of the ways to work your ticket was to chew cordite. It gave you symptoms of heart disease, making the beats irregular, and a temperature. But it did not pay to go sick in war-time; all a bloke got was a No.9 pill, and duty. Another way was to eat soap, to give you dysentery; but this could be detected in hospital, if they wiped your forehead with a hot flannel, when a lather came. Then you would get a court-martial, and jankers—up to twenty s year if you didn’t get the death penalty for cowardice in face of the enemy.

  “Twenty years’ hard labour? My God!”

  “Yus, and you stops in the line when your company goes in support, and gits Field Punishment No. 1 when the company is in billets. Then, after the war, you serves the rest o’ your time in the Glass House.”

  “What’s the Glass House?”

  “Jankers, the so’jer’s prison.”

  “And what is Field Punishment No. 1?”

  “You parades in full marching order wiv defaulters every hour, buttons clean, boots polished sole an’ all, khaki blanco on equipment. Then for two hours a day they tie you to a transport waggon wheel by your wrists, yer toes just off’r ground, a’rter which back to the old spud-’ole, and all sanitary fatigues, as well as defaulters.”

  “What’s a spud-hole?”

  “Guard room.”

  “Good lord! How long do you get Field Punishment for?”

  “Thirty days, per’aps.”

  “Good God! What a way to serve a Mons hero!”

  Phillip was shocked. How different everything was from what people at home thought it was!

  “That’s nuffink,” said Cranmer. “There wor a bloke on the Aisne what fell out wi’ blisters and tiredness, in another lot, not our’n, and the Froggies cotched ’im and ’anded ’im over to our lot, and they give ’im a court-martial and shot ’im next mornin’, and what’s more I know where they buried ’im, in a orchard what the Alleymans cut the trees round like, you know, they cut the bark and the trees die, for the sap of a tree is its blood, like.”

  “What did the Alleyman want to hurt the trees for?”

  “Devilment, so’s the ole ooman what lived in the ’ouse wouldn’t ’ave no more apples. They’re proper sods, the Alleymans, they shoot at kids and ole people, as you might shoot a dog.”

  “I wouldn’t shoot a dog, would you?”

  “Not bleedin’ likely, but in a manner o’ speaking, like a dog is treated sometimes, suthin’ cruel, see?”

  “Yes, I know what you mean, Horace. The world’s a funny place, in my opinion. For instance, there was a chap in the old ‘H’ Company, of our lot, who reported sick, with pains in his guts, and was given a No. 9 pill, and sent back to duty. He was carried to hospital the next night; and died of peritonitis the next day, in the Field Hospital at Dickebusch, from a burst appendix.”

  “Go hon!” said Cranmer, awed by the educated words. Then, to change an awkward subject, “R bart a lit’l’ old toon, Phil? I’ll say the words fust-like.” Whereupon Cranmer crooned,


  “We all come in vis worl’

  Viv nothin’, no cloes to wear.

  All your life, bear in mind

  All your money you must leave be’ind

  Finish up, wivout the slightest doubt

  The same as you began, for

  We all come in vis worl’ viv nothin’

  And we can’t take anyfing aht.”

  “Jolly good, Horace,” said Phillip, when the little concert was over. He thought he would buy a jew’s-harp when he had the chance.

  *

  When the Grenadiers handed over, to go where fighting was severe, north of the Menin Road, the London Highlanders held their line of trenches with one man about every six yards.

  By night and by day working parties, fatigues, digging, carrying, revetting. There was no time, no energy, for letter-writing. Sleep, sleep, sleep. Shells fell in the trench; digging was continuous. Snipers out in front. Even a spade-end copped it. Crack! dirt-spirt, ringing ear-drums, ragged iron hole. But the worst sniping came from a fixed rifle enfilading the communication trench. Crack! and a man was lying on his back, mouth open, snoring, piteous rough hair, bright red blood trilling, trilling, trilling.

  By now he was indifferent to lack of latrine. The custom was to use empty Maconochie tins and chuck them over the parapet, present for the Alleyman.

  Every night, and again before each dawn, there were attacks to right and left of the canal, judging by the roar and racket of small-arms fire.

  One morning the Germans came over on the left of the Highlanders’ front, in broad daylight. There they were, crossing a space in the plantations where tobacco had been grown. Rows of tarred wooden shelters stood there, long brown tobacco leaves hanging inside. And there the attack stopped. Survivors tried to hide, until shrapnel smashed the wooden shelters and they ran out, and were bowled over like rabbits.