'Well, that's that. I'm going down there, to find out where the new front line is now. Would you like to come with me?'
I expressed my desire to find myself at the the side of my commanding officer.
'We shall have to fix on a new O. Pip.'
That, I agreed, would undoubtedly be one of the disagreeable things we should have to do.
'Yes, I think I'll go and see what's happening. Besides, I should like to have a look!'
'I should, too,' I answered.
'You're sure you'd like to come? God knows what it's like. There may be no Front Line.'
'In that case we shan't be able to find it,' said I, circum-specdy.
'If there's one there I'll find it!' said he with great soldierly resolution, as he got up. So we started off, first returning to the battery to explain what we intended to do.
This O.C. was more alive than most—a small commercial gent (perhaps a garage proprietor, I thought, or employee in a Shipping Office) blossomed suddenly into a Major, R.A. Slight in build, about thirty, lightly moustached, he was able and very collected when other people were the reverse. I concluded from what I saw of him that he had set his mind upon taking back a Military Gross to Balham. I was under the impression that he would deserve it, if he could extract it from the donors of such things. Not exactly the man for an unambitious subaltern, more interested in blasting than in bombardiering—and whose most coveted crosses were not military—to go hunting for the Front Line with, in a new No Man's Land, upon a morning of attack.
But I laid it down for myself that two principles should coexist for me, in my conduct of this war-game. As a 'crowd-master', it was my business not to succumb to the lure of a transitory military laurel: it was on the other hand my business to observe at first-hand all of war's bag-of-tricks. Therefore I allowed myself a pinch of inquisitive pleasure at the prospect of a trip to this problematical place of battle.
Going through the lines of 'the Field' the shelling was heavy—though on the whole there was every evidence that the enemy were not replying with their customary aggressiveness. Their artillery was being moved back.
A Field Battery beside which we were making our way was having a rough time, however. There were several casualties while we were passing its guns, but my little O.G. might have been taking a walk with his dog for all the notice he took. Good boy, I thought! He knew his stuff.
But at this point civilization ended. At least so far, we could be sure of our bearings. Beyond this battery was a short stretch of shell-pitted nothingness—for we had entered upon that arid and blistering vacuum; the lunar landscape, so often described in the war-novels and represented by dozens of painters and draughtsmen, myself among them, but the particular quality of which it is so difficult to convey. Those grinning skeletons in field-grey, the skull still protected by the metal helmet: those festoons of mud-caked wire, those miniature mountain-ranges of saffron earth, and trees like gibbets—these were the properties only of those titanic casts of dying and shell-shocked actors, who charged this stage with a romantic electricity.
Picking our way across the first hundred yards of rugged wilderness, we reached a little ridge and stopped. What had we expected to see? Something, at all events. Whereas we gazed out over a solitary and uninhabited steppe. There was nothing. It was entirely empty and silent, except for a slight movement away to our left in the middle distance and the occasional door-banging effect of a shell-burst.
The battery behind us clamoured, as in duty bound. The thunder of the hammering artillery never stopped at our backs, and for miles on either hand. But before us stretched, terrible in its emptiness, the land we had come to explore.
What we were standing on the edge of was in the nature of a hollow, of cratered nothingness. For it was a hillside, terminating eventually in another ridge, which, with the ridge on which we stood, shut it in, whereas immediately in front of us the ground fell away somewhat. So it was a sort of one-sided valley.
From beyond the opposite ridge came the distant banging of the German artillery. Otherwise this was the most thrilling solitude that the most particular of explorers could have wished for. No valley in a tropical steppe could have been better, from that point of view. The inner fastnesses of the Sahara could not have developed a more inacessible air of unearthly remoteness. Give this wilderness a palm, and make-believe that the artillery outside was some strange mirage-effect of desert-thunder— an aural in place of an optical phenomenon—and this could have been the bleak centre of Africa.
But the O.G. battery pointed a little way ahead of us.
'Our old Front Line,' he said.
'Where is our new one?' I asked him, for I knew he wanted me to ask that.
'God knows!' he answered. 'Let's see if we can find it. There's a barrage on that ridge. It's somewhere there I expect.'
Some distance to our right, upon the skyline, there was a succession of shell-bursts. That would doubtless be it.
For some time we stumbled and leapt, advancing into this extremely debatable ruin of what was until an hour or two before an underground fortress, under a rain of shells. We crossed what had been our own Front Line and entered the German. It was profusely lined with fresh corpses. We picked our way amid scores of green-clad bodies. Newspapers in Gothic type were a feature of this scene, and I put one into my pocket, to see what Berlin said about these events.
We got out of this—I hated all these bodies, but put that impression away, to be pondered at a later time—and were hurrying forward when my companion dropped into a trench with the suddenness of a collapsing Jack-in-the-box. Simultaneously I heard a sharp tap-tapping—unfamiliar then, but I guessed its import: and dropped too, with a creditable celerity.
'Machine-guns,' he said, as we hurried along—keeping for some time now to the trenches. 'They've left machine-gun posts I expect, or perhaps redoubts. They always do that. I doubt if we've got a proper line yet.'
We continued our breathless and sweaty tramp, always along the abandoned German trench-system, bearing to our right all the time. We were moving over till we got before the line of bursts upon the ridge, a matter of a quarter of a mile. At last my leader stopped. He mopped his brow, and I mopped mine. Then we came once more to the surface and looked round. No machine gun chattered at us this time. We were at the foot of the gradient which led up to the line of bursts.
Now we were in the heart of this sinister little desert. Despite the angry hammering from the world of batteries we had left, and that from the world of batteries whose frontiers lay not so far ahead, but still not near enough to sound very loud—in spite of that agitated framework to our 'mystery land', nothing could have been more solitary. I should not have been surprised to see an Atlas vulture or some desiccated African goat. For it was definitely a red desert, more African than lunar in appearance.
Most of the explorers who have trod those deserts have either left their bones there, or if they have come back to tell the tale, never have told it. For in restrospect they mostly have believed that they must have been dreaming. But a new war is probably near at hand. A new generation will be setting out for that
Never-never Land. So it is that these dreams become topical, alas!
To make a reconstruction of this landscape for a millionaire-sightseer, say, would be impossible. The sightseer would be the difficulty—for the reasons I have given already in my dissection of romance. This is a museum of sensations, not a collection of objects. For your reconstruction you would have to admit Death there as well, and he would never put in an appearance, upon those terms. You would have to line the trenches with bodies guaranteed freshly killed that morning. No hospital could provide it. And unless people were mad they would not want— apart from the cost—to assemble the necessary ordnance, the engines required for this stunt landscape-gardening.—Except that they were mad, they would not have wanted ever to assemble it.
To obtain this parched, hollow, breathless desert you have to postulate madmen.—It was the
hollow centre of a madman's dream we had got into. As our feet struck the ground they seemed to be echoing faintly from end to end of this mysterious place of death.
Two men were brewing an inky coffee over a brazier—I have always regarded it as an odd occupation. They half-sat, half-crouched, behind a fragment of wall—a wall borrowed from that other system of domestic peace to be a stunted property of this inferno. The barrage began a few yards away from their blackened nook.
They were the only human beings we had encountered so far. In an exhausted lassitude they attended to their brazier. We had reached the summit of the incline. Along this crest or ridge went a road, terminating in this fragment of wall, behind which we now stood. For fifty yards the road was visible and every inch of it was being shelled.
There was no regular front line yet, the two men thought. There were Germans just the other side of the crest, or they just thought there were. They'd heard a machine gun just now but to whom it belonged they didn't know Meanwhile Battalion Headquarters was a wee bit along theroad. Yes, where that shell was bursting.
'I'm going to Battalion Headquarters,' said the O.C. pointing towards the shell-burst, but every two seconds others were coming down in between. 'You stop here.'
I obeyed. There was nothing I wanted this dark game could give, but my O.C. had his plans. He was not a romantic person. What he did was methodic and in pursuance I am sure of business—plus patriotism, that is understood. Every step of that walk he took was a gamble with death, and he was a hardy gambler to whom I wished luck.
I call it a walk, but it was quite different to a walk. No sooner had he stepped on what was left of the road, than a shell rushed at him, and only just in time he flung himself upon his face. He got another two or three yards at most, and down crashed two more; and down he went for the count. But he was only lying low and resting. I would see his alert little figure rise from the dust of one shellburst, step briskly along and disappear in the spouting of the next. At last with a rush he made what was apparently the entrance to the subterranean headquarters of some invisible battalion.
He stayed down there a while. I sat drowsily nodding in the lee of the fragment of wall, only half-conscious of the whooping and thumping of the shells. The two men and myself became a wax-work trio in this wilderness. I suppose they continued to brew their infernal chicory, at my back. Suddenly I became aware of the imminence of my commanding officer's return. I stood up and after a half-dozen imperative prostrations, and as many headlong rushes, there he was before me, as cool and collected as ever, pointing back over his shoulder.
'As soon as they've got the front-line fixed, there's an old German dugout there,' he pointed to the roadside, between us and Battalion Headquarters, 'which would make an excellent O. Pip. I'll come up to-morrow again with some signallers— there may be something better, but if not that will do.'
Our return journey was less peaceful. More German batteries were firing now, and a number of shells intercepted us. We met an infantry party coming up, about ten men, with earthen faces and heads bowed, their eyes turned inward as it seemed, to shut out this too-familiar scene. As a shell came rushing down beside them, they did not notice it. There was no sidestepping death if this was where you lived. It was worth our while to prostrate ourselves, when death came over-near. We might escape, in spite of death. But they were its servants. Death would not tolerate that optimistic obeisance from them!
I heard that our commanding officer got into hot water about this expedition. He sent reports in at once, but they were ill-received. Artillery officers going down before the Front Line was organized—what next! What, to select observation-posts before the 'mopping-up' was over—before anyone knew where we were going to be, or where the Germans were going to be! Preposterous! Supposing, sir, you had run into a German counter-attack! What then, sir!
One can imagine the dudgeon of the staff, at so much officious zeal, the true motives of which they would not be slow to detect.
Whether my O.C. got his M.C. in the end or not I do not know. He was a man it would be difficult to stop. He would probably have contrived to have me hit, and have carried me into the nearest approach to a front line he could find, if the two coffee-makers had not been there.—But I daresay they gave him an M.C. anyway, just to keep him quiet.
CHAPTER V
Trench-fever and 'Hell-Fire Corner'
My days with this battery came to a close when I contracted trench-fever—whatever that may be. All I knew was that suddenly I felt exceedingly unwell, was advised to go and lie down, and was accommodated with a couch upon a clay shelf in a dugout next to the Mess. I got no better. The O.G. came in and looked at me suspiciously once or twice. Had I been a mere gunner I should probably have been sent back to duty; though I doubt if I could have got upon my legs. At length a doctor turned up. Luckily by this time my neck and face were so swollen, in a mump-like magnification, and my tongue was so green, that it was obvious something was the matter with me. Even the doctor could see that.
The side-car was sent for, to take me to Bailleul. It was a gala-day in the sky. All the way along, before my swimming eyes, a futile agitation was in progress up aloft. I watched what was passing idly: from my horizontal position my field of vision was naturally overhead. British sausage-balloons were being brought down in droves. Their occupants, the 'Blimps', would take to their parachutes. But the German airman would plunge under the expiring balloon, and hunt the parachutists with his tracer-bullets. I was in no mood for fun in the air. But I never saw such a massacre of Blimps.
After many vicissitudes I reached the fever hospital at Etaples, near Boulogne. For three days I was the star case in my part of it. My condition was regarded as so critical, that in the morning the doctor directed his steps to my bed first. So I was told, when I recovered consciousness.
Later I went to the convalescent hotel for officers at Dieppe. From this paradise I was prematurely expelled. Trainloads of gassed officers arrived. I was sent back to duty, to recuperate in the Line. And as a matter of fact it was not such a bad idea. Of course I was pretty weak, but the infection seemed to have left me. In this state I reached Dunkerque; for I was now to rejoin my own battery—the one with which I had originally come to France.
Dunkerque, as you may know, is the last big coast-town in France before you get to Belgium. The next big coast-town is Ostend. Half-way between these two places is Nieuport (a bit inland) and that was where we were. Behind Nieuport.
I know nothing about this war—I am writing blind, as it were. I know what caused it—I know who got what they wanted out of it. But it was too vast and dull a dogfight to be technically interesting, I have found.
I have not the slightest idea why my battery should have found itself where it did, except that both the German and the English were always toying with the notion of outflanking movements along the Coast—the English because amphibious warfare is their speciality; the Germans because they are so used to being 'encircled' themselves, that they naturally always hope for a change, to be able to encircle somebody else.
We were told that there was going to be an Attack. Guns were being massed for a big Attack along the coast; and four naval guns, of large calibre, had been landed and brought up as far forward as possible, and it was left for us to do the rest.
As a result of the nautical nature of these guns—or of the semi-nautical nature of this proposed coastal operation—we were handed over to the Navy. And a very breezy period of my military history this was.
With considerable difficulty, and after many wayside diversions, I found my way to Naval Group Headquarters. I was amazed to find myself in the presence of a type of man I had never set eyes on before—pukka navy captains, or commanders, or whatever they were, resplendent in blue and gold, and conducting land warfare in a manner all their own. With a fine disregard for the fact that they were no longer on the deck of a ship, but instead in the 'cockpit of Europe', they deviated very little from what must be their habits when afl
oat.
They had succeeded in giving the appearance of a sort of ark to their Mess-hut. It shared the characteristics of a house and a
boat. Flanders is, as you know, a mere drain. It's about a foot above sea-level. This hut did not wallow in the water, but was lifted into the air a little way, like a boat before it is launched. An immense log-fire roared at the end of it, in an open fireplace, before which an equally huge land-animal—a wolfhound I think—lay stretched upon a rug; while a bright side-table glittered with glasses, bottles and decanters, cigarette boxes, revolvers, cutlasses, sextants, and new" baccy tins.
It would be quite out of the question to give you any idea of the spotlessness of this place. A dozen naval ratings must have scrubbed it every morning. Compared to our noisesome dugouts it was a Ritz.
Much dazzled and considerably perplexed by all this, I asked for the whereabouts of my battery. With royal (naval) hospitality I was given a bumper of navy-rum. I was blown about by the breeziness of my host—a little off my course, I think. Then I was despatched in a trim little side-car to the Battery position.
Have you ever tasted navy-rum? If it has not deteriorated, in these days of Potato Jones, it is stronger than any brandy. It is brandy, only 100 over proof. In my weakened condition, I entered the sidecar with the air of a Bulldog Drummond who had taken the wrong turning, my cap at a Beatty angle and my chest stuck out. I have never felt so fine. And when the adjutant sang out in parting, 'Easy, round Hell-fire Corner!' I said, 'To hell with Hell-fire Corner!' and we sailed away—it was sailing —with a flourish from the boatswain's whistle. I believe we got that.
Would it be the boatswain? At all events an old salt was always outside the Mess door, and 'piped' off the premises any person of commissioned rank.
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