by F. W. Harvey
He aided them in remaking their trench, and the levelled trench in front. ‘My brother is there alive, or dead,’ was the thought that ran in his mind. But furious digging did not reveal his brother, and he fell asleep exhausted on the soft wet earth which lay around his spade.
In the morning people recognised him. His brother was on leave – lucky bounder! His brother’s pals were mostly dead, or wounded. He was welcomed by the rest, and put on the roll.
‘You’ll meet him to-morrow night’ said the sergeant, ‘and then we’re going to give ‘Jerry’ what for over this, and he’ll help us to: don’t you forget it. Who’s your friend in the shining buttons?’ pointing to the foreigner.
‘That’s Private Gain. He was buried last night and hasn’t been so clean since.’
‘He dug me out, Sergeant.’
‘Good lad! So now you’re a Private Gain ’stead of a public loss, eh?’ replied that great man, and departed to take the names of the other newcomers. But of thirty-five that had sailed from England a couple of days before only fifteen had arrived in the front line.
CHAPTER VI
Viewed with the eye of imagination, or even photographed from an aeroplane, the countryside appeared very differently than to the eye of an infantryman in trenches.
That eye when was not glued to a periscope was exploring some twenty to fifty yards of heaped-up dirt and sand-bags – The radius of his particular section to whom the trench was a village street: home: a temporary shelter from death. He might know a little of the villages beyond, held by the next section, or platoon. Curiosity as to the general lie of the land, or even the bends of the hostile trench was repaid instantly with death: a bullet through the head.
The periscope showed a tangle of enemy wire. The naked eye saw besides walls of riveted earth, nothing save flowers of sleep – the plentiful red poppies which crept even to the brink of this hiding place – a double symbol, of bloodshed by their hue; of sleep by extract and significance. Beside this, the strip of blue or sodden sky that bent above, earth underfoot; these and faces that would ere long gaze upon all mysteries and symbols of life and death with greater understanding: faces which would be trampled, polluted into dark dirt, lit with spirit which would shine serenely with the stars in purple skies, or grieve in rain beholding the betrayal of their dreams: which would eat of the soul of the poppy, and rest, yet not unconsciously of such things as they had loved.
Poppies, a strip of sky, and dirt in a protecting wall, was for their eyes: a sickening stench of unburied flesh for their smell: flesh that no longer bore semblance of humanity: rat-gnawed, green, distended with corruption: bladders of foulness from which the hair rotted in rain and wind: bones and stink in particles dug up and put into sand-bags for a weak wall against the bullet that had pierced them.
Sleep-flowers, a ribbon of sky; and sodden earth for their eyes, stink for their nostrils; terror for their hearing – the scream and bursting of shell, the whizz and whine of the bullet. This in a narrow area of fifty yards, was that each man knew. This was his home – the home of the infantry in two armies.
But from the air, a mere photograph gives unity to a larger scene, showing miles of trenches like scratches upon a pock-marked surface, bending, following one another in lines more or less parallel – A the German front line: B the British.
Behind these, hundreds of intersecting scratches like forked lightning where action has been caught, and stamped upon the plate of a camera – the communication trenches, and those of supporting troops. And between them always the same bald, scarred and pitted face of death, dignified by the name of French: her wide war zone blasted, shorn, pimpled and disfigured with every scab and boil of murder.
To such a place had come Eric and his companions when poppies were dead, the skies hard with the first cold. In such sheltering they were rejoined by Willie on his return to the front some twenty-four hours after.
The trench had been consolidated (a good word!) and preparations were in full swing for the return attack, raid, or whatever it might turn out to be – that is, for a new slaughtering of men.
Willie was slopping up the trench looking for his brother when our guns started in a hubbub of explosions like the rather bad start of drunken giants in a sprint. The race went by in a scream to the tape – or rather the enemy entanglements. One or two missed their footing as they ran and fell with a crash dangerously near our own trenches. Scraps of iron torn like tissue paper came whizzing back, causing new arrived heads to duck (as if that were any use!) Then immediately more races were run by the giants. So the Germans started theirs, retaliating not upon the guilty artillery responsible for all this, but upon our reserve and front-line trenches.
This continued for half an hour. Meanwhile Willie had found Eric. Speech was impossible in that hellish din. They gripped hands, and waited side by side upon the fire-step for ‘zero’ when the assault would be made. And with them, waited ‘the foreigner’, whom Eric had dug out the day before.
‘We’d be a sight safer in ‘no-man’s-land than here’ yelled Willie to the Sergeant who was passing. He guessed rather than heard the words, and passed on the saying to the officer. He agreed, but his instructions were to remain where enemy shells were falling rather than where they would pass over head. He could give no orders other than those we had received. Yet the mere instinct of self-preservation caused that manoeuvre to be carried out. As their trench crumbled and fell in men crept gradually in ones and twos into shell holes, and when zero was signalled three parts of what remained of two assaulting battalions were already half way across No-man’s-land, and within twenty yards of the enemy wire.
They were first through it and into the enemy trench which was of course empty save for a few machine gunners who surrendered or were bayonetted. Then in a wave the British passed on to the trenches beyond, but found them strongly held, and their protecting were almost intact.
The assault upon these continued through the night and was a complete failure. The order for retirement when given was heard only by about half of those who remained alive, and dawn saw the remainder firing in small scattered bodies from holes, or hung up on wire entanglements. They were enfiladed from two sides and all but surrounded since the Germans had pushed troops along the old front-line trench, a great part of which was already repaired, and occupied.
The enemy had, in fact, succeeded in bombing our troops from all but a short stretch in the centre; which was now doomed to be squeezed out by pressure on its flanks.
But the scattered fighters between the first and second German lines, had no knowledge of this. They supposed that their own reserves were occupying the old German line, over which they had passed the night before.
Light showed clearly enough that their present attack upon the German reserve lines was over, and had failed. Light showed the mud-smeared faces of Willie, Eric, and the foreigner gazing at one another in a great shell-hole, which was half full of icy water. They lapped it occasionally, for though their limbs were sodden enough their throats were parched, and water bottles had not been filled for twenty-four hours. Light spread, gilding the surface of pools which had long since drowned the wounded. It revealed thick bushes of enemy wire heavy with their fruit of death – men caught and hanging, shot through and through: men without arms: men without heads: and one who faintly moved in spasms, and squeaked – no more than that!
It was Willie who first spoke. ‘We must get back at once. What a mess! What a hopeless, dreadful …’ He stopped, seeing the face of Private Gain raised to the light. ‘I’ve seen you before’ he said. ‘Now where was it?’
‘In the Forest of Dean’ came the whispered answer. ‘And again in Cotswold.’
‘Good God!’ cried Willie. ‘It is my gypsy girl!’
Eric gave an exclamation of surprise, and stared fixedly upon the pale dishevelled foreigner before him. Then, ‘And I never guessed it!’ muttered he. ‘But how? … Why?’ …
‘We must go!’ she said, and crawled ove
r the edge of the shell-hole. Willie wriggled after her. Eric lifted his head and then sprawled back into the hole having taken the bullet meant for his brother. In a flash both were beside him, lifting his poor head and speaking to him in vain. ‘He is dead’ said the girl. ‘It is (weeping) as it was to be.’
‘I’ll have blood for this!’ shouted he. And at that moment spiked helmets appeared above the rim of sheltering earth and a voice bade them in guttural tones to surrender.
Will raised his rifle. His companion sprang upon it. He wrenched it savagely away to aim, but her weight was upon it, directing the muzzle downward. He dropped the weapon and struck her with his fist full on the forehead. Germans tumbled in upon what was apparently a madman and two dead companions. The madman was quickly reduced to quiet insensibility with the butt of a rifle.
PART VI
CAPTURED
CHAPTER I
That the butt of a German rifle is harder than any naked fist, was a thought which occurred to Willie when he woke again in a dug out of wounded prisoners upon whom ‘Private Gain’ had been detailed to wait as an orderly.
The gypsy girl went to and fro with water and bandages. Her forehead carried a bruise as big as a hen’s egg. Willie’s had been laid by a much larger bird – a swan at least!
He opened his lids and watched her walking towards him dressed in a muddy British uniform of a private soldier. Thoughts crowded his brain. Visions arose before him of Jean Foust, a gypsy fire, a girl of arresting beauty, a visit with Eric and that swarthy man – her father – to the cave of Christ a-weeping. He saw steep windy Cotswold; on it himself a wanderer; then suddenly a sacred vision of beauty in the moonlight; a wide-blown dress moulding the shape of a mortal girl who talked to him in splintered shade and light of woodlands. He beheld the dawn-gilded horrors of No-man’s-land where recognition had taken place – he, and she, and Eric, in a shell-hole half full of icy water; death around: the final scene: Eric dead beside him: Madness! …
His lids closed. He drank water from a bottle she held to his lips; hearing the few words she spoke, but understanding nothing. How? and Why? were circles of fire that blazed in his head. Wheels of flame, they turned, and left him in darkness.
A German feldwebel came round, raking down in a little book the names, numbers, and regiments, which were printed upon their identification disks.
After that a German officer of the medical corps examined them hastily, and pronounced Willie and some others including ‘the foreigner’ fit to walk. They were helped up with rifle butts, and given in charge of two armed soldiers, one of whom marched before, and one behind the party, as it filed down the deep and muddy communication trench.
Willie’s next neighbour in the march was a private in the Berkshires who had been captured in the same manner as himself – islanded as it were, in seas of hostile and friendly bullets.
‘It wasn’t fighting one way. The sods was all round. Only a human corkscrew could manage ‘em – and his flesh turned steel armour. Our own chaps was firing on us as hard as they:– blast their silly eyes!’
‘They didn’t know they were hitting us,’ apologised Willie.
‘No,’ said his neighbour thoughtfully, ‘and how the hell we got there I don’t know.’
It was a summary of that day’s military situation.
‘What funny uniforms these German do wear!’ he remarked later, jerking a thumb at the grey-clad figure behind.
Reaching the main road, they were herded into the court-yard of a great French mansion. ‘Achtung!’ They were kicked to attention. A German officer, or more accurately OFFICER, inspected them. His rank may have been anything from lieutenant to general. He was fat. His chin bulged in a pink slab over his collar. His age was about forty.
Willie felt a momentary touch on his arm, and heard a quick whisper in his ear – ‘Farm labourer!’ – as ‘the foreigner’ passed to take her place in the line.
The OFFICER (followed by an officer) then checked the names, numbers, and regiments of the prisoners, and enquired of each his civilian occupation.
‘Farm-labourer’ answered Willie obediently.
The farm-labourers were divided off from the rest and marched away.
That night was spent in a guarded loft above stables of a farm house which was occupied by German artillery.
Six British soldiers listened to the crunch-munching of horses which was the night’s most continuous sound only broken by irregular explosions of falling shells, and the reply of adjacent cannon. Horses are the same all over the world over.
To Willie (and doubtless to the rest) it was music which breathed of home – this sleepy munch of mouths, and occasional movement of hoofs beneath. But thoughts kept him awake. Thoughts, and possibly hunger, kept awake also his companions, long after their first German meal of malodorous vegetable soup, and brown sticky bread had been swallowed, and the basins handed back to the sentry standing outside.
It was four o’clock and a finger of faint wire-barred moonlight withdrawing from the loft, when someone moving stealthily among uneasy sleepers came to his side. He guessed who. But, heavy with memories of Eric’s unavenged death, he made no answer to her whispers. It was no fit of sulkiness. He felt simply that he could not speak to her. Yet he felt shame at having struck her, and a devouring curiosity as to her presence. – ‘Go away!’ he said. And she obeyed, as he had previously obeyed her, in answering the Germans as to his occupation.
But next morning she stood next to him in the line that was formed outside in the yard. She also it was who asked the German OFFICER that the prisoners should be permitted to write home. The request was refused. But Willie was grateful to her, guessing that she would have no need of such permission but was reminding him of a duty to his mother which grief had made him forget.
It was early morning. The mist-wet roofs of house, barn, and stables, had turned to some precious metal under sunrise. the buildings stood in a square enfolding the yard, French fashion. In the middle of the square upon the heaped-up midden, a cock stood up, crowed, and flapped glittering wings like a herald of something or somebody mysterious and unknown. A dog tread-milled round and round a great wheel whose axle worked – a churn perhaps – inside the adjoining wall of the house. A small Madonna and Child set high in a little glass-covered niche on the same building was caught and coloured by early sunbeams.
German soldiers, washing without enthusiasm around the pump, turned mockingly to grin at the khaki-clad man – or shouted insults.
Orders were given by a feldwebel who strutted up and down the line: each man was supplied with a slice of bread: the party was marched off under charge of armed guards to a railway station. Then, as marked off by the feldwebel the prisoners were separated into couples, Willie and his accomplice being made mates.
They were bound for German farms whose owners had applied for labour: such help being granted by the Government in cases where additional aid was necessary owing to sons or employers having been called to the war.
For many hours the party travelled together. First to break off was our friend of the Berkshires and his mate. Willie and his companion were given in charge of a landsturm soldier at the next station. The following night, after another train journey, they arrived, almost famished, at the gefangenenlager which supplied British labour to that district of German farms.
The prison was a rectangular wind-in space containing four long huts made of match-boarding covered with tarred felt. Sentries and electric lamps were stationed at intervals outside the wire. The new arrivals were detailed to hut number four, where they received a kindly and hospitable welcome from seven older prisoners – four English soldiers, two Scottish, and one Irish; all except one, ‘privates’, and infantrymen. Food was shared out generously to supplement the German ration of soup, and this was not only satisfying to the famished body but also to the curious mind. It consisted of tinned meat and biscuits which had come from England in prisoners’ parcels; which parcels arrived (they were informe
d) with a regularly accountable only by a surprising honesty among people not universally famed for it.
‘Well, that’s one good mark we must give to Jerry!’ exclaimed Willie, remembering the many opportunities there must be pilfering upon a long railway journey through enemy country.
‘Divil a one at all,’ was the reply of Paddy, ‘only, regulations says they mustn’t, and devil a one has the guts to disobey ’em, though they’d pinch the shirt off their own grandmothers!’
The laughter which followed this declaration was mixed with serious approval of its sentiments.
’Tis their deescipline only,’ agreed Jock. ‘When that breaks, we’ll get no parcels through, but we shan’t mind that – for why, we’ll have won the warr. It’s not honesty ye ken. ’Tis deescipline and a habit of it, that’s the strongest in the worrld!’
This also received common assent.
‘It’s discipline,’ said another, ‘and yet ’tisn’t discipline. It’s fear.’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Willie. ‘the same thing that keeps them honest, makes them murder women.’
‘That’s right, mate. I’ve known plenty o’ decent Germans since I come here in September 1914. I’ve done ’em good turns, and they’ve done me some too but any of ’em would turn the kick for nothing, and kill me in cold blood, if he was told to. An Englishman keeps his blinkin’ soul even when he is disciplined, but a German don’t. And that’s why them and me don’t get on.’
Then with a grin of kindness the speaker turned to the lining of his great coat – ‘You thank Mike, I ain’t honest mate!’ he said, and produced two eggs. ‘Pinched ’em off the farm today, so they’ll be all right,’ he said, and handed one to each of the new comers, with a request to ‘swaller ’em down!’ Almost with tears they refused. The ready generosity of the act touched deep chords (as kindness must) and its humour brimmed the cup.
‘Thank God, we’re here with English – I mean British – pals!’ exclaimed Willie. ‘Amen,’ quaintly concluded his companion: whereat all laughed.