“If the Germans planned this war, they did it damned inefficiently,” said Slade, the red-faced, imperturbable bank-clerk.
Phillip was puzzled by the way the Germans attacked, always bunched up together, shouting—some said, singing—presenting targets that nobody could miss. None ever came as far as the new barbed-wire fence, two hundred yards away.
This fence was hung with empty bully-beef tins to give warning of wire-clipping at night. Then it seemed that the Germans were firing at the strands, to cut them. Or was it at the empty tins strung along the wire? Ping—they sent a tin dancing, again and again.
“They’re nearly all seventeen-year-old volunteers over there,” Phillip heard Captain Ogilby say. “Their best troops may have been transferred to the Russian front.”
The rumour went round that the Germans were given ether to drink before an attack; then that they had bombs in their pockets, to blow up their captors if they were captured. Certainly, now and again, a dead German lying out in front gave out a little puff of smoke when the body was hit by a bullet. Later, it was said that they had come over with jam-pot grenades; and it was these that were detonated by the bullets.
Someone had a newspaper. There were photographs of the Grand Duke Nicholas, Russian Commander-in-Chief, whose armies were well into East Prussia. Perhaps after all there would be peace by Christmas. Phillip held to the hope, as did all the soldiery of the line, in the dead weight and dark inertia of the night.
O, when would peace come?
Chapter 27
AT THE GUILDHALL
“THE GERMANS,” said the Prime Minister that night, in his peroration at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, “the Germans have retired baulked and frustrated by the immovable steadfastness and valour of the Allies!”
Cheers of the assembled guests beat down in waves from the rafters. The flags of the Allies moved with the heated air arising with perspiration. The French and Russian Ambassadors beat their hands on the cloth of the high table, causing extra bubbles to rise in champagne glasses standing on slim stems on either side of the big silver-gilt Loving Cup.
“But that is not enough!” cried the Mr. Asquith with controlled emphasis. “We shall never sheathe the sword, which we have not lightly drawn, until Belgium recovers in full measure all, and more than all, that she has sacrificed——”
Cheers swept up again; and Thomas Turney looked to the gallery where the wooden effigies of Gog and Magog seemed to stare down upon the assembly of uniforms in many styles and colours, on the ladies with their scintillating jewelry.
“—until France is adequately secured against the menace of aggression——”
The French Ambassador bowed his head, as once again massed cheering, odorous of turtle soup—the only course served hot at the banquet—roast beef carved from barons in temporary pulpits at each side of the Hall, mince-pies, ice-cream, and vintage champagne—interrupted the speaker.
“—until the rights of the smaller nationalities of Europe are placed upon an unassailable foundation, and until the military domination of Prussia is wholly and finally destroyed!”
Thomas Turney, sitting with an acquaintance of the shelter on the Hill, patted the table with one hand and pulled down the black waistcoat of his evening suit with the other. He had come, not as the invited Chairman of Mallard, Carter & Turney, Ltd., Printers & Wholesale Stationers of Sparhawk Street, High Holborn, as once before in the reign of Edward VII, but on a spare Press ticket. He found the place extremely hot, the applause raucous, as he thought of his friend Bolton. He had drunk modestly of the wine, having regard for his digestion.
“That is a great task worthy of a great nation! It needs for its accomplishment that every man among us, old or young, rich or poor, busy or leisurely, learned or simple, should give what he has and do what he can.”
Amidst a furore of applause the Right Honourable H. H. Asquith sat down.
Ah, for the pen of a Pepys, thought Thomas Turney, to do justice to the scene. Then, what a pity Hetty was not there with him to see it. He could have arranged an invitation for the two of them. Of all the historic scenes the Guildhall had seen, none could have been more important to European civilisation than the one he was witnessing. The thing that had moved him about Asquith’s speech was the news of the great battle for Ypres—the Germans “retiring baulked and frustrated”, his very words. They would bring comfort to Hetty and Dorrie.
“What is the uniform Asquith is wearing, can ye tell me? He looks like an Admiral, don’t he?” he asked his neighbour and companion, of The Morning Post, seeing that he had finished his short-hand notes. “What, are you writing in German?”
“Oh no, it’s an old system I learned long ago—Taylors. The P.M. is wearing the uniform of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House. Well, if you will excuse me, I must go to catch the late country edition. Wonderful sight, isn’t it? The ladies’ jewels alone would pay for the Expeditionary Force in France for a week! As for the City plate, shining so magnificently behind the chair of my Lord Mayor, what wouldn’t Asquith’s opposite number Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg give to get his hands on it! Well, I’ll be calling for you in about three-quarters of an hour’s time: but if by any chance I am delayed, you will find me at the Post. Are you sure that you won’t be too tired, in the meanwhile?”
“Never felt better!” replied Thomas Turney. It was his second visit to the City that day. He had come up with Hetty that morning, to see the Lord Mayor’s Show, mainly a khaki parade, giving Londoners their first sight of Dominion troops, strapping young fellows from Canada, Newfoundland, Australia and New Zealand.
But what had remained in his mind was the sight of kerbside hawkers offering German Iron Crosses for sale—“Kaiser Bill’s Iron Crosses—anyone can wear ’em—or stamp on ’em if he likes!”
They had come up by tram, on the twopenny midday ticket. Thomas Turney’s second visit, however, had been by taxicab: as homewards he and his journalist acquaintance of the Hill were going that night.
The City streets at eleven o’clock were dark, shadowy, chill, after the brilliant scene within the Guildhall. Most of the street-lamps were out. Those alight were masked by dark blue paint, so that a small square of light shone down upon pavement and gutter. No clocks struck behind unlighted dials. Big Ben of Westminster Palace was silent for the duration. A romantic scene, he remarked, as the cab’s steel-studded rear tyres made their regular scoring sound against the wooden blocks of the Embankment; a scene worthy of a Whistler with the mind of Rembrandt. Then the starry sky was pierced by thin sword-like beams of searchlights, reflected upon the tide of London river below the bridge.
Chapter 28
THE BROWN WOOD LINE—continued
DURING the misty Flemish night a deserter came across, crying out, “Do not shoot, Mister Herr Englander, do not shoot!” Rumour said that when he was taken to battalion headquarters in the wood, he told there was to be a great attack the next morning led by the Garde du Corps Prusse, the dreaded Prussian Guard, who never surrendered, and never took prisoners. The deserter said he had seen them in billets at Werwick and Komines. They had been brought from the French front at Arras.
The rumour came from the signallers’ bunker. Corporal Douglas said it was true.
The night, the chloral darkness tainted with the sweetness of decaying flesh, nauseating and thick as licorice-powder, the timeless blackness sprouting white lilies of corruption, was passed by Phillip in intermittent control of his death-fear. The Prussian Guard! It was a relief when, shortly after five o’clock, in the stand-to before dawn, the flares from the German trenches stopped rising, and a hurricane shrapnel shelling whistled and rattled down upon the wood.
Nothing fell near the Brown Wood Line at first. He knew that the shelling was to prevent supports coming up: his thoughts made him shake. Why had the Grenadiers gone away? Cranmer, he cried in his mind, as he fought annihilating truth.
Limp and palpitating, he pressed himself into the damp straw, hands over face to stop
the red-gold-black steel-fragmentation roars of five-nines now falling upon the Line, crashes breaking apart his head, to scatter brains through eyes and ears and mouth. He held the crucifix, next to the brown papier-mâché identity disc: but no words of prayer would form in his mind. Every time a word-thought came it was broken in rending flame-crash, golloped with saliva of black electric zig-zagging snakes scintillating out of retching saccharine brown stench of decaying flesh falling into the trench with lumps of clay and jagged ends of wood. He was sick, and became feeble.
Men were shouting. He was pulled violently by the collar. The black beard and black bitter eyes of Corporal Douglas stared at him. He got up and heard screaming; swaying he saw a man lying face up, his fixed eyes in green face bulging, his kilt in tatters by the stumps of blown-off legs.
He fumbled at the toeless sock covering rifle bolt against mud, and stared, mouth and head greasy-rotten, yellow with undigested bully beef in sour stomach, into dim dirty dark beyond cratered parapet and heard rapid short cheers, Hoch-hoch-hoch! in the distance. A calm-seeming figure appeared. Captain Ogilby, brass pistol in hand, stood ready to fire into the air.
Two Very pistols had been issued to the battalion the previous day. The light-balls were poor, half as bright as the Germans’: when they burned, if they burned, they soon dropped sizzling upon the ground. They had no parachutes, they were useless.
Why weren’t the Vickers guns firing? Two, purchased privately before the war, had at last come up with the transport. They were supposed to be sited on either flank of the battalion front, to give protecting cross fire. Why weren’t they firing?
With reports of his rifle ringing in ears, he fired into the gloom. Then, in the ghastly clear of dawn, he saw them, line behind line, moving slowly in regular order. Bloody thousands of them! Now it was started, he found himself aiming and firing steadily: squeeze trigger, reload, aim sights in line, squeeze again, conscious of other reddish-black gashes thumping on either side of him. Why weren’t the Vickers guns firing? Surely tripods had been set-up in sand-bag emplacements in the parapet the previous night; they had not fired, of course, to conceal their whereabouts until the attack. The only Vickers guns in the entire British Expeditionary Force! Yet they were not firing.
What was so terrifying, what the Magister would call awe-full, was the way the Prussians seemed to be coming forward at a jog trot, rifles at the porte. They were all big men, made taller by the brass spikes on their helmets. There was none of the running and jumping sideways of the Bavarians coming up to the road at Messines, after the singing. These came on in line, shoulder to shoulder, as though it were the battle of Waterloo. When they came nearer, he could see that they were in full marching order, with overcoats rolled around their packs. This made them look very big, massive. Nothing could stop them. Peter Wallace bayonetted, with Captain Mc Taggart. O Christ!
Panic gave way to a swearing rage, to hot anger of firing, reloading, shaking thumb pressing in clips, hair on back of head twitching. Other men were swearing, too; but he did not know this. The Prussians advanced on the right, though many tumbled in front. He could see the brown bullock hair on the outside of a square leather pack when one stumbled, shot.
There were shouts on the right.
“Back into the wood! Withdraw! Withdraw!”
They had over-run No. 3 Company, on the right. Sergeant Furrow was shouting to get out, over the open ground at the double, lie down inside the wood, give covering fire while the other half-section withdrew.
“Steady now, boys!”
Gibbering, wetting himself with fear, he scrambled out. Filled with leaden aching, he ran for the trees. He got there somehow, found himself behind a thick trunk, firing across the front, while the half-section ran hare-eyed, open-mouthed.
Calmer, still trembling, he went with them to the support position, a shallow trench hardly more than an outline. They lay down, facing the flank, until snouts and shots told them of the counter-attack. His shirt was cold with sweat. What a game it was, what a game. He slept.
In the afternoon they were relieved by French troops, whose blue overcoats and red trousers were covered with mud. The French had been fighting by the canal to the south. Meanwhile rumours had told how Fiery Forbes had led the counter-attack, with the acting-Adjutant and Headquarters staff, and stragglers of No. 2 Company which had been over-run on the right. They had cleared the Germans out of the wood with the bayonet, and taken some prisoners.
These came past the company sitting by the reserve line. Unarmed, the prisoners were marched back by their feld-webel who, seeing the Adjutant, halted his men and gave him a terrific salute. The Adjutant told one of the Orderly Room clerks, little Kirk of the tent party at Bleak Hill, to take them away to the M.P. post where the railway line crossed the Menin Road. So Kirk set off, walking beside the feld-webel, looking as though he had not the least idea where he was going. However, he said later, on his return, the German sergeant-major had been very helpful, handing him a nominal roll of his men to give the Military Police at Hell Fire Corner.
*
The French soldiers looked ill, with sunken eyes, and yellow hollow cheeks. Phillip felt dull, too. They were leaving the Bill Brown Line. Cranmer’s lucky fire-bucket was lost, left in the trench. The thought of Cranmer gone brought tears. Others were crying—overcome by the unendurable power of high explosive, the cold emptiness of life, the negation of the broken tangled wood, the thought of being lost for ever, belonging to death, life but heavy movement without purpose and death the end.
He slouched away with the remnants of No. 1 Company, hose over spats mud-balled, one among others straggling in loose order, slowly following the shambler in front, just able to keep himself from staggering wide, his eyes on the back of the shambler in front, vaguely aware that they were returning to the Menin Road, with its pavé hurtful to the feet; and rest.
But why had they turned not towards Ypres, but back to the line again? Not again, O Christ, not again? There was nothing to do but follow the shambler in front, one step forward after another since there was nothing to do about it.
The Menin road was crowded with traffic, going both ways. Red-cross motor ambulances, horse-drawn waggons, limbers, shell-caissons, walking wounded, some with pickelhauben slung on shoulders, arms and shoulders red-white bandages, convict-hair-cropped German prisoners in muddy leather boots, tunics cut away and hanging loose with blood-dripping arms, jaws bullet-skewed, dead mules and horses lying legs-up all along the roadside, limbers, waggons, field-guns, all broken by shell-fire. And ominous sight, most disheartening—heavy howitzers were trundling down towards Ypres.
Nobody spoke. They stopped, moved on, halted again. Marching was shuffling and loose: automatic movements of men with wills no longer active. The remaining coherencies of their minds were fixed upon the next step onwards; men moving from a moment of chaos into a moment of chaos.
Chapter 29
PAUSE
DURING the past few days and nights the London Highlanders had been lent to the Brigade holding what officially was known as the Brown Wood Line, but, among the troops, the Bill Brown Line. Now they were returning to their own Brigade, in the woods north-west of Gheluvelt. Here the fighting had been the most severe. At half-past nine in the morning, after four hours intensive shelling, fresh battalions of the Garde du Corps had made their first tremendous onslaught through the fog, piercing the line north and south of Gheluvelt in their original rush, and penetrating the Nonne Bosschen, the Nuns’ Wood.
Vorwärts Preussen, immer vorwärts! The Kaiser had addressed the senior officers of twenty-three Deutschland divisions—nearly a quarter of a million men—the day before: the war would be won if they took Ypres, which was the way to the sea, to the Pax Germanica, to a place in the sun I There were only nine Entente divisions between them and victory! Vorwärts!
*
The Kaiser made no reference then, or later—nor had he ever done so before—to ‘walking over the contemptible little British A
rmy.’ That supposed Order of the Day, alleged to have come from the All Highest’s General Headquarters at Aix-la-Chapelle during the previous August, had been faked in its entirety by a General officer at the London War Office named Frederick Maurice—later made a Knight of the Cross of St. Michael and St. George. The idea of the faking had been to give heart to tired British troops in retreat from Mons and Le Cateau.
Richard Maddison, when he read of the protest made by the young and pacifist-socialist Marquess of Husborne, heir to the dukedom of Gaultshire, of his public protest that the Kaiser never uttered such a remark, almost shouted to Hetty, at the breakfast table with his silent daughters, that the fellow was a traitor, and should go to the Tower!
The Old Contemptibles, as The Daily Trident and other newspapers were calling the defenders of Ypres, had been continuously in the line for nearly twelve weeks. On the front of Sir Douglas Haig’s 1st Corps the Prussians, by midday of November 11, had broken through to a depth of two and a half miles. In one place they had arrived within a hundred yards of a battery of howitzers, and a battery of field-guns. Rifle fire of mixed cooks, headquarter clerks and others, stopped them.
At half-past three in the afternoon of that dull and misty day the Garde du Corps came on again, marching between two enfilade fires, from north-east and south-west. So accurate was the rapid fire of the peace-time trained British soldiers that the attack wilted. The Oxfordshire Light Infantry and the Northamptons charged the survivors with the bayonet.
Farman biplanes, the ‘Longhorns’ of the Royal Flying Corps, Union Jack painted large under each lower wing, reported more German troops coming up the long straight poplar’d road from Menin, through Gheluwe, and lesser lanes and tracks to Terhand, Kruiseecke, Zuidhoek, Malenhoek, all leading from the plain of Flanders to the great woods dark upon the least of slopes above Ypres, the holding of which town meant eventual victory to one side, as its loss meant eventual defeat.
How Dear Is Life Page 37