A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  “Yes, Aunt Hetty told me. I went there for my twenty-four hours’ embarkation leave, the day after the news about Messines came. The rumour was that we were going out at once to help you; but we did a fortnight’s training, near St. Omer, before coming up here.”

  “You weren’t at an unfinished convent, were you, by any chance?”

  “At Wisques, yes! We got there a week after you’d left.”

  There was a pause; then Phillip asked how Jack Temperley was killed.

  “He fired through a steel loop-hole, without putting his rifle through the hole, but standing back in the trench. His bullet hit the plate, and came straight back at him.”

  “Yes, I saw a chap get killed like that. Poor old Jack.”

  “Aunt Hetty told me about your friend Cranmer, Phil. He is ‘missing’, isn’t he? At least it means a chance of being a prisoner.”

  “It’s unlikely. Both our Guards and the Prussians don’t take prisoners if they can help it.”

  “The Saxons told us this morning that the Prussians are relieving them next week. ‘Shoot the lot of them,’ they said, ‘and the war will be over.’ They hate the Prussians. I heard that long before the war.”

  “So did I.”

  The talk had taken place under the broken crucifix at the cross-roads of Le Gheer, about a hundred yards behind the British front line. They decided to take a look inside one of the cottages of the hamlet. German dead lay in the first cottage, surprised in a counter-attack of the Inniskillings the previous October; one whiff was enough. Outside in the flooded ditch, just under the ice, lay a British soldier, on his back, his blue eyes open as though staring at the sky, arms extended, fingers spread. A look of terror was still visible through the ice.

  “I wonder what he thought as he was killed, Phil. Perhaps he saw himself going farther and farther away, and then he was looking down at his body, left behind.”

  “I don’t know, Willie, I think one thing one moment, and another the next. By the way, did you see what looked like a round, glowing light, on a pole, behind the German lines last night, by any chance?”

  “Yes, the Morning Star!”

  “But doesn’t that rise just before the dawn?”

  “Not always. Do you know, Phil, I have been wondering if it was the same star that the Wise Men saw in the East, at the birth of Christ.”

  The frost was settling again in little crystals upon post and wire, new mound and icy shell-hole. It was time to think of getting back.

  *

  Having said goodbye to cousin Willie, Phillip set off at a vigorous pace down the road beside the wood into Ploegsteert, with its broken church, and from there to Romarin, and the road to Neuve Eglise. There he had the luck to find an A.S.C. lorry going to Poperinghe. After some discussion, and five francs changing pockets, the driver agreed to go through Kemmel, instead of his usual way through Dranoutre. From Kemmel it was a couple of miles to Vierstraat, he said, on parting; and thanking him, Phillip jumped down and, walking with a rapid, loping stride, got back to the line of bunkers just after sunset. Fires gleamed through the trees as he approached the reserve line, his boots ringing on the frozen cross-pieces of the corduroy path. No-one had noticed his absence.

  He set about collecting wood for the night’s fire, in the light of the moon tarnishing the iced shell-holes. Soon smoke was arising, turning the moon’s horns brown. There he would return, after the carrying party that evening.

  *

  Much work was done during the next two nights, in the pale hard air. British and German working-parties put up wire, repaired parapets, carried up trench boards and other material, talking normally. No shot was fired. Then on New Year’s Eve a messenger came over with a note addressed to the Officer-in-Command, saying that a staff-inspection was taking place at midnight along the Corps front; the “automatic pistolen” would be fired in accordance with orders; but they would be fired high. And at half past ten o’clock, as Phillip was knocking a staple into a post, he and others with him heard German voices calling out, “Go back, Tommee! Go back! It is nearly midnight!” Sergeant Douglas decided to take the party back, realising that Berlin time was an hour before Greenwich time. At eleven o’clock the machine-guns opened up all along the line, and from the British trenches the up-slanting flashes were seen. Flights of bullets sissed overhead, much to the alarm, it was said, of the Quartermaster, who had decided to ride up with the ration wagons from Bardenbrug Farm, three miles back, as there was a truce—only to find himself under fire.

  One afternoon Phillip watched some of Headquarters Staff making a sling to throw jam-tin bombs. Two little trees were shorn of their side branches, roped together, and wound down on a block and tackle. A leather sling was then tied to the rope between their tops, a blue Tickler’s plum-and-apple bomb put in, and the fuse lit. The onlookers hurried back behind thick trunks of standard oaks, while Staff-sergeant Lyon pulled the release cord. The saplings jerked up, but the bomb remained in the sling. It went off with a sharp flash and crack. The catapult, Phillip learned from Journend, was made from a sketch supplied by Colonel Cust, of the Third Battalion in London. Colonel Cust, before the war, was said to have been an Oxford professor of history, and the catapult to be based on one used by the Romans.

  Chapter 5

  THE DIEHARD T-TRENCH

  THE frost broke, the rains came, the truce ended. No more wavings, like children saying goodbye, no more heads above parapets. The Saxon Corps left; Prussians took over the front. The sniper’s rifle cracked, the lyddite shell spread its yellow fumes; but more deadly than nickel bullet and copper-banded shell was the cold and the wet.

  Rains drove through the bare woods; diggings, which had cut through many of the tile-drains of that land of clay, led sub-soil springs into the trenches. The water rose to ankle height, to knees, to thighs. Frost winds made little crackling glaciers of goat-skins; greatcoats were slabbed stiff and hard as boards. In such weather it was Phillip’s turn to go out on listening patrol with Glass, under Lance-corporal Blunden. Glass was fair-haired, and slight; the breath of his sighs was soon white on the wool of his balaclava. The three froze to the ground by woollen glove and kilt of hodden grey under the rise and fall of the calcium flares, the hammering hiss of machine-guns traversing through the iron tangles of the German wire. Glass whimpered, and cried; tears glazed upon all their cheeks. They lay for two hours and then, tearing themselves piece by piece from the ground, managed to get to their knees, and on all fours got back somehow.

  It took a dose of rum, and an hour’s agonised jumping and swinging of arms before there was some relief from frost-pain, despite the coke braziers, some of which flickered with ration biscuits added to eke out the scarce issue of coke; biscuits more valuable as fuel than food.

  No braziers could be lit in the Diehard T-trench. One rainy January night it was the turn of Mr. Thorverton’s platoon to occupy this dreaded sector. In file the men, led by the officer, slid and picked their way out of the wood. Phillip hopefully carried a fire-bucket he had scrounged together with a sack of charcoal. Floundering, sweating-hot with the weight of equipment and wet woollen clothes, he approached in the darkness made more absolute the moment a flare had died hissing in the mud and wire of No Man’s Land. Staggering past shell-holes, suddenly before him, at foot-level, were the familiar red stabs and thuddings of rifles, fired to keep down the heads of the enemy opposite. Sliding down the parados, bottom naked to the mud, he found himself in water to the base of the belly.

  *

  So began a period in which time moved irregularly with human movement through swilling yellow marn, movement made step by step, with ponderous suck and pull upon each boot sunken into thicker bottom clay. Some of the darkness and all of the daylight was endured in the canal of the T-trench, often shrouded in mist and rain. What was beyond his twenty yards of trench, Phillip did not know.

  Parapet there was none, unless it was a low ragged thorn-hedge, its stub-line piled with mud and straw. Peering through this a
s dawn came, he could see, in the mist, the low, uneven German parapet less than eighty yards away. In No Man’s Land were lying the shrunken bodies of dead cows, and one black sow. Farther off were the crosses of ration-box wood, souvenirs of the Christmas truce. He lowered his head after two seconds’ stare, because of snipers.

  The Diehard T-trench was in fact a ditch widened and deepened under fire during the October fighting. Lean-to shelters, leading off it, had been made by former occupants. They were rough frames of sticks resting on the stub of the hedge, and thinly thatched with brown tobacco leaves and straw laid on cross-sticks. The thatch had in part sagged, in places collapsed; even so, the shelters were preferable to the trench, their floors being only a foot or so deep in water.

  To avoid being sniped, Phillip and his three companions had to enter their shelter—Swamp Villa—on hands and knees, through the water. To squat in Swamp Villa meant that he bad to sit in the water; and when this became unendurable, he crawled out to stand in the trench below the thin black stems of the hedge. Any movement was preferable to standing cold in the marn which shook with creamy ripples around the pockets of his greatcoat.

  Intense weariness went with the cold; so when Phillip, Glass and another man were detailed to fill sand-bags, with which to build up the decayed parados, the trio made little progress. They took turns to hold the hessian bags, to fill them with a shovel from which most of the marn ran off, tying their slopping necks and hoisting them to the crumbling lip behind. The skin of their hands became white and corrugated; the entire body was chilled; and one bag became too much for the three to hoist up. Anyway, most of the bags laid into position had slidden back underwater. They were too dejected to swear. But helping to keep Glass and the other man from giving way to despair (for the horizon of life was lost) kept Phillip from sinking into himself. Also he took a swig of his linctus bottle, nearly gone now, every time he felt deathly cold. And he had his talismanic photograph. There were many times, though, when the thought of the photograph meant nothing.

  He discovered a pump half-submerged at a point in the trench where the T was crossed, and appointed himself pumper when the sandbag fatigue ended. Working the double-handed pump alone was something to do, as with shut eyes he tried to think of nothing. But progress was slow, so he waded to Swamp Villa and asked Glass to give him a hand. They pumped for an hour or so, during which time Glass often lowered his head and cried with exhaustion. Phillip went on pumping, the action lifting up Glass’ hand which weakly held the other end.

  “I know how you feel, Glass. We all felt pretty awful when we first came out here. But if we go on, we will keep some of the cold out, and lower the level a bit. Have a sip of my linctus, it keeps you warm. Don’t take too much—it’s got to last out.”

  Either the pump was not working properly, or the water was rising quicker than it flowed away in the canvas pipe which disappeared through the hedge bottom. Perhaps it was running back into the trench lower down, since the ground sloped imperceptibly up to the German lines. Whatever the cause, the smooth yellow marn continued to conceal about eighteen inches of the skirts of their greatcoats and twelve inches of their kilts from the knees up. Phillip persisted that it was worth going on with the pumping. It was better to do anything rather than nothing.

  “Thinking can paralyse you, sometimes. I used to call it ‘the battle of the brain’. So let’s keep going, Glass, old man.”

  Sergeant Douglas came to visit his men, moving at the rate of four yards a minute. He praised the work on the pump, and said that soon it would be dark enough to get out of the trench, when rations would be fetched from the advanced carrying party at the Château. Phillip wanted neither food nor drink. Smoking, too, was rejected as an idea; and apart from distaste, all matches were sodden.

  In the night was hope, for warmth was life and life was hope; and the brazier outside the signallers’ bunker was all warmth and hope and beauty. He sat on a box of tobacco and, taking the photograph from his brown pay-book, held it to dry in the crown of flames rising from the bucket rim. Then back to the T-trench, and the slide into life without horizon.

  *

  Private Church, the last of the Leytonstone tent in the old “P” Company’s lines at Bleak Hill, was moving slowly along the T-trench to Swamp Villa. Sometimes to pull a boot out against the suction of the clay below the liquid marn took several minutes in the deeper places. In the shallower places, while trying to free one foot, he had to keep himself upright under weights of clay slabbing his greatcoat—weights added by touching the trickling sides of the trench. Church was making the journey along the trench from one wing to the other, in order to apologise for an accident with the mail that had come up with his fatigue party of the previous night. The six-foot Church made the journey with his head held as low as possible, since the trench was enfiladed from both north and south in some places. He passed the junction with the impassable communication trench (the hurdles put up on Christmas Eve had been blown askew by the stormy winds) and saw the pump lying there, handles half covered by water, and yellowish traces in the water suggesting that someone had recently been working it, and had gone away down the trench. About ten minutes later he arrived at Swamp Villa.

  “I’m awfully sorry, Maddison,” he said in his best public-school voice, “but the sandbag containing the platoon’s mixed ration of sugar, tea, and letters, was inadvertently dropped somewhere in this trench in the darkness, and we haven’t managed so far to fish it up. There were two letters for you, and I can only apologise for the fact that they are lost.”

  Church had recently been told that he was to appear in battalion orders, promoted to lance-corporal.

  “That’s all right, Church. I suppose you didn’t notice the post-mark?”

  “Afraid I didn’t. But the hand-writing was familiar—I think you’ve had several from the same source before, according to my recollection.”

  Phillip felt that part of his mother had been drowned in the mud. “Well, thanks for coming to tell me, Church. I think I’ll do some more pumping—one way to keep warm. Any rumours of when we are being relieved?”

  “I haven’t heard. But for what it’s worth, Mr. Thorverton doesn’t look very well. He’s got a flushed face, and a ‘nasty ’acking cough’.”

  “Good thing I brought that bottle of linctus with me. I nearly left it behind at Hazebrouck, but thought it might come in handy.”

  Phillip decided to go along the trench to see Mr. Thorverton. He had been along the trench so far only once before, to the latrine, a sump-hole in a sap dug for the purpose. That was before the water had risen into the sump, foetid and yellow with the effects of dysentry. Now the sap was fallen in: a dangerous place, registered by a fixed rifle firing at intervals through a gap in the hedge torn by a shell.

  Pushing slowly along the trench behind Church, he found Mr. Thorverton in a shelter made of three fire-buckets in a row supporting a plank of wood an inch or so above the level of the water. There was a mud-covered sheet of corrugated iron as roof, bent in the middle. A torn blanket, yellow with clay-marks, hung awry over the edge of the iron sheet. Mr. Thorverton was sitting with his legs before him on the plank, his neck bent owing to the short space between plank and roof. The officer looked fearfully cold and sallow, he was breathing quickly and harshly.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “Yes, thank you, Maddison. Sergeant Douglas tells me you have done good work on the pump.”

  “One way to keep warm, sir. Would you care to have some of this cough linctus, sir? It’s a wonderful health restorative. I don’t really need it.”

  “That’s most kind of you, Maddison, but I have only a slight chill, I think. But thank you for coming to offer it to me.”

  “Well, do take care of yourself, sir.”

  He wrung out the edge of Mr. Thorverton’s greatcoat which was trailing in the water, and tucked it under his legs on the plank. Mr. Thorverton thanked him again, and after a little bow, Phillip returned along the trenc
h, a small warmth of satisfaction within him.

  *

  The misty day grew darker. It was near the time of clambering out, to spend the night on the comparatively solid ground behind the trench. The effort of getting out, dragging sodden coat-tails, was too much; so Phillip, like the others, cut his off with his jack-knife. Flares and stray bullets were heedless things, he never thought about them. What he longed for in the night was freedom to crouch on solid ground and, hidden and alone, relieve the pain of hot thin squitters, a dozen times in the comforting darkness. By day in the trench, he must wade as far from anyone as possible, always mindful of keeping bent, head well down: for all the T-trench was commanded by snipers.

  “Remember, don’t raise your heads. You must not raise your heads,” said that faithful shepherd of sheep, Sergeant Douglas, visiting his men. Church did, while working at one end of the pump; he was explaining to Phillip that, although the bloody thing was allegedly fool-proof, it was obvious now, on looking at it closely (he was standing up, holding the body of the pump out of the water) that the intake end had been fixed by the sappers to the delivery end. “If this isn’t the bloody limit——” he was saying, when there was a loud crack and a slight thud: a small blue puncture in his cheek: glassy-eyed he stared a moment at Phillip as though in surprise, then his head drooped and he slid down, snoring, one arm over the pump handle, blood-bubbles blown from his nostrils. He fluttered his arms feebly, they beat the water as he sank under, and when Phillip pulled him up he was dead. The back of his skull had a large hole in it. It was too dangerous to try and push his body over the crumbling parados, so Phillip laid him across the pump and left him there, his face with the small bluish puncture out of water, and the blood coagulating on nose, lips and chin.