John Walters

by Sapper

  In the official communiqués it was known as a time of artillery activity in the neighbourhood of Ypres: in the communiqués of the battery it was known as a time of hell let loose; but especially was it so known among the ammunition limbers who nightly passed from west to east with full limbers and returned from east to west with empty ones. For, as may be seen by anyone who takes the trouble to procure an ordnance map, all roads from the west converge on Ypres, and having passed through the neck of the bottle diverge again to the east; which fact is not unknown to the Germans. So the limbers do not linger on the journey, but, at an interval of ten yards or so, they travel as fast as straining horseflesh and sweating drivers can make them. In many places a map is not necessary – even to a stranger. The road is clearly marked by what has been left at its side – the toll of previous journeys of limbers, who went out six in number and returned only four. And, should the stranger be blind, another of his senses will lead him unfailingly along the right road, for these derelict limbers and their horses have been there some time.

  The Germans were searching the road leading to Ypres from the crossroads where I sat waiting for an infantry working party that had gone astray, on the first of the two occasions on which I saw ’Erb: that is to say, they were plastering a bit of the road with shells in the hope of bagging anything living on that bit. In the distance the rumble of wagons up the road was becoming louder every minute. All around us – for it was a salient – green flares lit up the sky, showing where the front trenches lay, and occasional rolls of musketry, swelling to a crescendo and then dying fitfully away, came at intervals from different parts of the line. A few spent bullets pinged viciously overhead, and almost without cessation came the angry roar of high-explosive shrapnel bursting along the road or over the desolate plough on each side. Close to me, at the crossroads itself, stood the remnants of a village – perhaps ten houses in all. The flares shone through the ruined walls – the place stank of death. Save for the noise it was a Dead World – a no-man’s land. In the little village two motor-ambulances balanced themselves like drunken derelicts. Dead horses lay stiff and distended across the road, and a few over-turned wagons completed the scene of desolation.

  Then, suddenly, over a slight rise swung the ammunition limbers – grunting, cursing, bumping into shell holes and out again. I watched them pass and swing away right-handed. In the rear came six pairs of horses, spare – in case. And as the last one went by a man beside me said, “Hallo! there’s ’Erb.” It was then I got his history.

  An hour later I was back at that same place, having caught my wandering infantry party and placed them on a line with instructions to dig and continue digging till their arms dropped off. But when I got there I found it had changed a little in appearance, that dreary crossroads. Just opposite the bank where I had sat were two horses lying in the road and the legs of a man stuck out from underneath them, and they had not been there an hour before. The horses’ heads were turned towards Ypres, and it seemed to me that there was something familiar in the markings of one of them.

  With the help of my drivers we pulled out the man. It was no good – but one never knows.

  And the same voice said, “Why, it’s ’Erb.”

  Crashing back on the return journey, the limbers empty, ’Erb again bringing up the rear with the spares, one blinding flash, and–

  We laid him in the gutter.

  Did I not say that he came from the gutter? And to the gutter he returned in the fullness of time.

  Chapter 10

  The Sixth Drunk

  “No. 10379 Private Michael O’Flannigan, you are charged, first, with being absent from roll-call on the 21st instant until 3.30 am on the 22nd, a period of five hours and thirty minutes; second, being drunk; third, assaulting an NCO in the execution of his duty.”

  The colonel leant back in his chair in the orderly-room and gazed through his eyeglass at the huge bullet-headed Irishman standing on the other side of the table.

  The evidence was uninteresting, as such evidence usually is, the only humorous relief being afforded by the sergeant of the guard on the night of the 21st, who came in with an eye of cerulean hue which all the efforts of his painstaking wife with raw beefsteak had been unable to subdue. It appeared from his evidence that he and Private O’Flannigan had had a slight difference of opinion, and that the accused had struck him in the face with his fist.

  “What have you got to say, Private O’Flannigan?”

  “Shure, ’twas one of the boys from Waterford, sorr, I met in the town yonder, and we put away a bit of the shtuff. I would not be denying I was late, but I was not drunk at all. And as for the sergeant, sure ’twas messing me about he was and plaguing me, and I did but push him in the face. Would I be hitting him, and he a little one?”

  The colonel glanced at the conduct sheet in his hand; then he looked up at O’Flannigan.

  “Private O’Flannigan, this is your fifth drunk. In addition to that you have struck a non-commissioned officer in the execution of his duty, one of the most serious crimes a soldier can commit. I’m sick of you. You do nothing but give trouble. The next drunk you have I shall endeavour to get you discharged as incorrigible and worthless. As it is, I shall send you up for court-martial. Perhaps they will save me the trouble. March out.”

  “Prisoner and escort – right turn – quick march!” The sergeant-major piloted them through the door; the incident closed.

  Now all that happened eighteen months ago. The rest is concerning the sixth drunk of Michael O’Flannigan and what he did; and it will also explain why at the present moment, in a certain depot mess in England, there lies in the centre of the dinner-table, every guest night, a strange jagged-looking piece of brown earthenware. It was brought home one day in December by an officer on leave, and it was handed over by him to the officer commanding the depot. And once a week officers belonging to the 13th and 14th and other battalions gaze upon the strange relic and drink a toast to the Sixth Drunk.

  It seems that during November last the battalion was in the trenches round Ypres. Now, as all the world knows, at that time the trenches were scratchy, the weather was vile, and the Germans delivered infantry attacks without cessation. In fact, it was a most unpleasing and unsavoury period. In one of these scratchy trenches reposed the large bulk of Michael O’Flannigan. He did not like it at all – the permanent defensive which he and everyone else were forced into. It did not suit his character. Along with O’Flannigan there were a sergeant and three other men, and at certain periods of the day and night the huge Irishman would treat the world to an impromptu concert. He had a great deep bass voice, and when the mood was on him he would bellow out strange seditious songs – songs of the wilds of Ireland – and mingle with them taunts and jeers at the Germans opposite.

  Now these bursts of song were erratic, but there was one period which never varied. The arrival of the rum issue was invariably heralded by the most seditious song in O’Flannigan’s very seditious repertory.

  One evening it came about that the Huns tactlessly decided to deliver an attack just about the same time as the rum was usually issued. For some time O’Flannigan had been thirstily eyeing the traverse in his trench round which it would come – when suddenly the burst of firing all along the line proclaimed an attack. Moreover, it was an attack in earnest. The Huns reached the trenches and got into them, and, though they were twice driven out, bit by bit the battalion retired. O’Flannigan’s trench being at the end and more or less unconnected with the others, the Germans passed it by: though, as the sergeant in charge very rightly realised, it could only be a question of a very few minutes before it would be untenable.

  “Get out,” he ordered, “and join up with the regiment in the trenches behind.”

  “And phwat of the issue of rum?” demanded Michael O’Flannigan, whose rifle was too hot to hold.

  “You may think yourself lucky, my bucko, if you ever get another,” said the sergeant. “Get out.”

  O’Flanniga
n looked at him. “If you’re after thinking that I would be leaving the rum to them swine you are mistaken, sergeant.”

  “Are you going, O’Flannigan?”

  “Bedad, I’m not! Not if the King himself was asking me.”

  At that moment a Boche rounded the traverse. With a howl of joy O’Flannigan hit him with the butt of his rifle. From that moment he went mad. He hurled himself over the traverse and started. It was full of Germans – but this wild apparition finished them. Roaring like a bull and twisting his rifle round his head like a cane, the Irishman fell on them – and as they broke, he saw in the corner the well-beloved earthenware pot containing the rum. He seized the thing in his right hand and poured most of the liquid down his throat, while the rest of it ran over his face and clothes. And then Michael O’Flannigan ran amok. His great voice rose high above the roar of the rifles, as, with the empty rum jar in one hand and his clubbed rifle in the other he went down the trench.

  What he must have looked like with the red liquid pouring down his face, his hands covered with it, his clothes dripping with it in that eerie half-light, Heaven knows. He was shouting an old song of the Fenian days, and it is possible they thought he was the devil. He was no bad substitute anyway. And then of a sudden his regiment ceased to shoot from the trenches behind and a voice cried, “O’Flannigan.” It passed down the line, and, as one man, they came back howling, “O’Flannigan.” They drove the Germans out like chaff and fell back into the lost trenches – all save one little party, who paused at the sight in front of them. There stood O’Flannigan astride the Colonel, who was mortally wounded. They heard rather than saw the blow that fetched home on the head of a Prussian officer – almost simultaneously with the crack of his revolver. They saw him go down with a crushed skull, while the big earthenware jar shivered to pieces. They saw O’Flannigan stagger a little and then look round – still with the top of the rum jar in his hand.

  “You are back,” he cried. “It is well, but the rum is gone.”

  And then the Colonel spoke. He was near death and wandering. “The regiment has never yet lost a trench. Has it, O’Flannigan, you scoundrel?” And he peered at him.

  “It has not, sorr,” answered the Irishman.

  “I thought,” muttered the dying officer, “there were Prussians in here a moment ago.”

  “They were, sorr, but they were not liking it, so they went.”

  Suddenly the Colonel raised himself on his elbow. “What’s the matter with you, O’Flannigan? What’s that red on your face? It’s rum, you blackguard. You’re drunk again.” His voice was growing weaker. “Sixth time…discharged…incorrigible and worthless.” And with that he died.

  They looked at O’Flannigan, and he was sagging at the knees. “Bedad! ’tis not all rum, the red on me, Colonel, dear.”

  He slowly collapsed and lay still.

  And that is the story of the strange table adornment of the depot mess, the depot of the regiment who have never yet lost a trench.

  Chapter 11

  The Coward

  James Dawlish’s soul was sick within him. His tongue was cleaving to the roof of his mouth, parched and dry; his eyes gazed dully out of his white face at the pack of the man in front of him, who, like himself and fifty others, crouched huddled up in the ditch beside the road. Away in front stretched the pavé road, gleaming white in the dim light of dusk, the road that ran straight, as only French roads can, until, topping the rise three-quarters of a mile ahead, it merged into the darkness of the two lines of trees that guarded it. And twenty yards beyond that rise lay the German lines.

  Then suddenly it came again. Out of the silent evening air the sudden salvo of six sharp hisses and six deafening cracks, the angry zipping of high explosive shrapnel through the trees over his head, the little eddies of dust in the road, the little thuds in the banks of the ditch where he crouched. Put baldly – in the language of the army – the Germans were searching the road with whizz-bangs, and had been doing so for twenty minutes. And the soul of James Dawlish was sick within him.

  All around him men were muttering, laughing, cursing, each after his kind. In front an officer, very young, very new, was speaking to his sergeant-major. What he said is immaterial – which is perhaps as well, as he did nothing but repeat himself. The sergeant-major was a man of understanding, grown as used to shells as man may grow. For that matter so had the others – they were not a new regiment. James Dawlish was not new either. It was not his baptism of fire – he’d been shelled many times before; but for all that he was afraid – terribly, horribly afraid.

  The psychology of fear is a strange thing. It is perhaps paradoxical, but I venture to think that without fear there can be no bravery – bravery, that is, in the true sense of the word. There are, I believe, some men who are without fear – literally and absolutely fearless. Such a condition of mind may be induced by sincere fatalism, but I rather think in the majority of cases it is due to a peculiar and fortunate twist of the brain. Inasmuch as one man will without thought dive forty feet into the sea and enjoy it, so will another, whose limbs would tremble at such a thought, boldly enter a cage of lions. Temperament, temperament only, at the bottom of it. And so it may well be that, were the wonderful, soul-stirring heroism of some VC to be weighed in the balance of mind and soul rather than in the balance of deed, he would be found less worthy to hold that coveted ribbon than a man whose sole contribution to fame was that he didn’t run away.

  Not so James Dawlish. With him fear seemed to be cumulative. Each time he came under fire, his terror of it increased. With most of us, who lay no claim to be without fear, sooner or later a merciful callousness settles down. Not that, if we think about it, our dislike of the genus obus is any less – far from it. But as time goes on, and a man does not get hit, though one day the dug-out he had just left was flattened by a crump, and another the man he was talking to was killed before his eyes; though he may have had a hundred narrow escapes, yet in time it becomes to a greater or less extent his natural element – a part and parcel of his life – a thing of routine as much as breakfast, more so, in some cases. But that man is no braver now than he was: more fearless, perhaps, but no braver. It is, then, with most of us, the factor of custom that pulls us through the mill, and preserves our reason.

  But to James Dawlish that factor was denied. Fate had decreed that the brain of James Dawlish should be so fashioned that no immunity from death in the past should detract one iota from the hideous terror of death in the present. Every tour of duty in the trenches he died a thousand deaths. He saw himself left dying between the lines, stabbed in a sudden German rush, the recipient of the attentions of a Black Maria. He pictured to himself countless forms of death, each one more unpleasant than the last. Only the routine, the discipline of the army had held him up to date, that and the complete lack of opportunity to run away. It is easier said than done to run away from the front-line trenches, especially when things are quiet.

  Which all boils down to the one essential fact that James Dawlish was a coward in the true sense of the word. Hundreds of men have lost their nerve temporarily, hundreds of men, huddled in a scratch in the ground, with their senses deadened and crushed by an inferno of bursting shells, have done things which the thoughtless dub cowardly. Men suddenly exposed to gas with no means of protection, men waking to find the trench full of liquid fire, these and countless other cases no man may judge unless he has stood beside them in similar circumstances and not been found wanting. But James Dawlish was not one of these. To him every moment of his life was a living death, a torture worse than hell. If one looks back to the cause of things, it was, I suppose, his misfortune and not his fault. He had been made so. Fear was a part of him, and pity rather than contempt is perhaps the fairest feeling to entertain for him. He could no more help his state of permanent terror, than a cat can help its dislike of water.

  “Get up.” The word came down the line, the shelling seemed to have stopped. The men in front of him were moving of
f up the road, but still he remained. A man tripped over him and cursed, but James Dawlish sat fumbling with his putties. No scheme was in his head; he had no intention of not going up to the front line; but clear out of the jumble of thoughts in his brain was his feverish desire to postpone if only for five minutes his nearer acquaintance with those great green flares that lobbed into the sky so near him. He could almost hear the faint hiss as they fell burning to the ground. God! how he hated it! Then they started shelling a crossroads a hundred yards behind him, and he cowered still closer in the ditch, almost whimpering – for it had suddenly struck him that he was alone. His platoon had gone on and left him: he had not even got the faint comfort of another man beside him. He was alone, utterly alone on a shell-swept road with an occasional spare bullet pinging down it, and the trees throwing fantastic shadows around him.

  Then suddenly above his head he heard voices, and the soft thrumming of a motor.

  “They’ll stop hating in a moment and then we’ll rush it,” said a voice.

  James Dawlish looked up, and in that moment the idea was born in his bemused brain. Safety – away from those cursed shells – away from those hissing green flares! What matter the right or wrong – what matter the penalties? Nothing entered into his calculations, saving only the thought of escape. And so with infinite caution he got out of the ditch and approached the driver of the ambulance as if he had been coming down the road.