A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  “Perhaps they’re waiting for the actual moment of attack, to break it, sir. Once I saw——”

  “Allow me to speak,” said the captain, his eyes fixed upon Phillip’s. “I will do the talking here! Why, you ask, is the Hun waiting until he has got us jam-packed before him, every trench and assembly point bung-full, and then, when he can’t miss, CRASH——!”

  The pale captain smashed his fist upon the table, starting up a score of flies, some to settle upon his sweating brow.

  Alarmed, and a little shaken by the outburst, Phillip replied, “Exactly, sir! That’s what our Guards did at Klein Zillebeke, during First Ypres. They let the Alleyman cut their wire, in order to catch all of them coming through the gap.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who were you with?”

  “The London Highlanders.”

  “Then shake hands!” The other leaned over to give him a hurtful clasp. “Help yourself to a spot of old man whiskey!”

  “Thank you, sir. By the way, I’m also in the Gaultshires. I removed my badges in case the sniping was hot. My name’s Maddison. I haven’t served with the regiment yet, sir.”

  “Mine’s West. I hope you’re posted to us, one day. I’d like you in my company. I take off my hat to any man who went through First Ypres!”

  Phillip felt important with the new brassard on his right sleeve, of red, white, and green vertical stripes. In a way, he was a staff officer, he considered. The R.E. colonel at the gas school had said that the duty of a squad officer was to stay with his cylinders until they were emptied, lest their presence endanger his own men: therefore no officer, wearing the brassard, could be ordered to join in the assault. What, Phillip had said to an imagined Desmond, could be more cushy? He would see all that happened, and be under cover when the machine-guns started. He had his spare P.H. helmet, in case of accidents, such as a shell breaking a cylinder.

  There were fourteen emplacements in his sector, each having been made by digging away the fire-step, and replacing it by a wooden platform resting on stakes driven into the chalk. Under each platform fifteen cylinders were to be laid. Turned on full bore, the gas from each would escape in under three minutes.

  The captain showed him a trench map. The German lines lay just over the crest of the slope rising imperceptibly across the wide and grassy wilderness of No Man’s Land. “The Hun can see us against the skyline, when we go out on patrol, particularly when the moon is going down. We can’t see him, because the ground rises again out of the Loos valley behind his front line.” To the south, the British lines lay up another slope, with No Man’s Land an imperceptible hollow in front. Behind the enemy front line was Hill 69, rising to the skyline, and the much-wired Loos Road Redoubt. Farther on, to the south, and in the direction of Loos with its upstanding colliery gear, the German lines lay on and behind more rising ground.

  Phillip looked cautiously over the chalk-bagged parapet. Dark-brown docks in seed were visible in the thin yellow grasses; thistle floss floated into the haze of the eastern horizon from which arose the chimneys and machinery of pitheads, and dark sullen heaps of stony slag faintly green with grass. Out of the hazy, almost level scene arose the bursts of shells, like waves breaking upon an invisible reef.

  Dominating the view was a tall structure in lace-work iron, of twin pylons surmounted by a flat top, called by the men the Tower Bridge. It arose high above a red-brick village with a church. That was Loos, one of the main objectives of the attack, which had to be captured, said Captain West, in the first rush. Beyond it was the large town of Lens, which was never shelled, since the civilian population was still there, working for the old Hun.

  “Yes, they’re still mining coal to make the shells which will be blowing us all to hell next week. And we not only pay rent for our trenches in this blasted country, but have to pay for the blankets we’re buried in. Still, what the hell? A soldier’s life is short and merry. Come into my shelter and have a spot of old man whiskey.”

  Enamel mugs jinked; down went a generous slop of whiskey and chlorinated water.

  “Thank God we’re being relieved tonight,” said Captain West. “But we’ll be back in time for the alleged Big Push. When are you going to bring up your beastly gas bottles? God’s teeth, if the old Hun gets a direct hit on one of your emplacements——”

  Phillip saw that Captain West’s hand was shaky. He had a very white face, with a high forehead that seemed to think for itself above the clouded blue-grey eyes when he was silent; but when he spoke, it was usually through his teeth, and he had a grim look when he clenched his bony jaws. He was a strong-looking man, he thought; though his strength was more in his will than in his physique. Phillip had learned that his nickname among the other officers was “Spectre”. It suited him, he thought.

  “What provision have you made for leaking gas?”

  “Two extra Vermorel sprayers will remain in the sector, with two of my corporals, when we bring the cylinders up, sir, to neutralise any gas.”

  “We had to piss on our handkerchiefs during Second Ypres. I’ve got the blasted gas in me still.” Captain West thumped his chest, and cleared his throat. Phillip noticed how dirty his nails were. He was not like any regular officer he had met before.

  *

  On the 18th of September the cylinders arrived in the special tram, which was shunted into a siding. Each cylinder was in a wooden box. Phillip was ordered to remove them by unscrewing the tops of the boxes, then to loosen all the dome covers of the cylinders before replacing them in the boxes and refixing the wooden lid with one screw only.

  Remembering that chlorine was corrosive, and that his father had always put screws into wood with Vaseline, against rust, he got hold of a tin, and returned with his squad to the siding.

  While they were unscrewing the boxes, and were about to loosen the dome-cover of the first cylinder, a general arrived on the scene and asked what they were doing. Phillip called his men to attention; then repeated his instructions.

  “Put all the boxes back in the train at once,” ordered the general. “Those safety domes are not to be touched.”

  “Sir!” replied Phillip at attention. He saw, with some alarm, from the gold crossed-swords and crown on the officer’s shoulder-straps that he was a major-general. So the screws only were removed from the box lids; and one screw replaced in each, after being smeared with Vaseline.

  *

  Violent blows were splitting the sky, singly and in multiples of four; rarely was there silence; but in a rare interval when no guns were firing, he was aware of a quivering of the air, of a ground-bass seeming to shake the very earth and all upon it. At night the tremulous flickers of the French bombardment were to be seen in the sky, far away down south, where the chalk escarpments of the Champagne Pouilleuse were set sparsely with fir-plantations, now a wreckage of poles. When would the Big Push start? No-one knew; rumours were almost as numerous as the flies. His servant, an old soldier nicknamed “Twinkle”, told him all the rumours, obviously to get him to talk; Phillip listened, but made no reply; he knew that the gas cylinders were not all in place.

  On the night of 19th of September, while a slight breeze was blowing from the German lines, the boxes of cylinders were loaded on to G.S. wagons, and taken to the forward dump. The feet of the horses had been enwound with sacking, and then put inside treble sand-bags, and tied; the wheels were muffled, too. Extra care for silence was taken lest enemy shelling destroy the loads. The British shelling had slowed down, as though in sudden anxiety about retaliation.

  Without incident the wagons unloaded, and went back quicker than they came, the horses needing no encouragement to return to the picket line, where a string-bag of hay and fifteen pounds of oats was their daily ration. The box-lids were unscrewed, the cylinders removed, and slung on poles, each to be carried up to the front line, via communication trenches, by two fatigue men from the infantry. As they were heavy, and movement would be slow, there was a relief
of two extra men for each load.

  Progress was tedious up the communication trenches, as many other fatigue parties were passing up and down upon the duck-boards. At last the front assembly trench was reached, and the sergeants in command of the various carrying-parties led their men to the emplacements. The cylinders were laid on the chalk, and sandbag revetments built around them. It was nearly dawn when, having visited his emplacements and seen that all was in order, including the two men left with Vermorel sprayers, with rations, and water in a petrol can, Phillip led his squad back to the cross-roads at Philosophe, where the disused railway passed through the Lens–Béthune road. About half a mile down the road they turned left at the next cross-roads and about a mile farther on arrived at their billets in the village of Mazingarbe, which they entered as the flares were shrinking in the first pallor of dawn.

  *

  The billet was in a terrace of brick-built and tiled cottages, or corons, leading off from the square. He had a bed in an upstairs room, chosen for its airiness, while the widow and her children slept in the cellar, on top of half a dozen layers of bully beef in tins.

  It was a bare room, with one small cracked window facing east, and a floor of broad poplar boards. The bed was a rusty frame on which was some straw under an army blanket. Thereon his valise was spread open, the flap turned back, for the toothless old soldier acting as his batman fancied himself as a valet. Phillip supposed that “Twinkle”, as the batman had said he was called by everyone, was a sapper, although he wore no shoulder letters. He had appeared one evening in the billet, and offered himself as Phillip’s batman, telling him that he was the only man in the British Army to have earned two Rooti, or bread-eating, medals. He explained this curious position by declaring that he had first joined the Army in India as a cook; and when after twenty years he had got the Good Conduct Medal, and his regiment was on the point of returning home, he was left behind accidentally, and had carried on, maintaining the cookhouse on his own, “up-’olding of the British Raj, sir, wiv various punkah and other wallahs, sir”, until the next regiment arrived, when he re-enlisted and after another twenty years had qualified for another Rooti medal. That, said “Twinkle”, brought him up to the little old Boer War.

  To substantiate his various experiences, across the old soldier’s left breast there stretched a band of ribands from which the colours had faded and been replaced by grease and smoke. When Phillip asked what they were, the old soldier replied with an uninterrupted flow of sounds and spittle-sprays from toothless gums in which the originals of Good Conduct, Coronation, Durbar, Chitral, Egypt, North West Frontier, Afghanistan, Omdurman, Fuzzy Wuzzies, Boer War Queen’s and King’s, might, with a little knowledge of British military history, be made out.

  After his second time-expired discharge, according to a “Twinkle” garrulous with rum or whatever it was he got hold of at night, he had worked in the kitchen of a sandwich shop in Covent Garden, where after boiling the haunches of old boars, sows, and horses, he sliced them cold to make “thicks” or sandwiches for the porters and carters in the vegetable market. If he was to be believed, most of the great names in opera and ballet had dropped in at his “Ham and Beef” at one time or another, including Caruso, Melba, Scotti, Chaliapin, Destinn, Pavlova, and Nijinsky. Phillip was never tired of hearing the old man’s stories, which usually were told while he waited at table during his solitary dinner in the cottage kitchen at night.

  The experience in the Ham and Beef shop in London now seemed to serve the old fellow well, for in the Demi Lune in Mazingarbe, “Twinkle” did a roaring trade in beef sandwiches, which he cut up in vast quantities in the billet, after boiling great chunks of meat in saucepans over a fire in an outhouse. Where the meat came from, Phillip did not know. “Twinkle” probably scrounged it, he thought.

  *

  During four more nights cylinders were taken up in the same muffled wagons, and emplaced. On the 23rd of September a big fire broke out in Cité St. Pierre, within the German lines; vast drifting smoke filled half of the forward sky seen from the trenches, and at night the low clouds, (for the weather had broken) glowed a dull red. The work was completed that night, when all the discharging pipes had been carried to the emplacements, and laid on pegs driven into the parapet. It was hard, sweaty work, and slow, too, owing to the ten-foot lengths being most awkward to manipulate round the traverses, amidst oaths and curses among the numerous soldiers in both communication and front trenches.

  The R.E. major came to Phillip, and taking him aside, said, “This is X night. Keep it to yourself, my boy.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  A violent thunderstorm that night broke with lashing rain upon waterproof capes and chalk-bags, bringing great clogs of white slather upon boots; but the fire in Cité St. Pierre burned as brightly as before, when the storm had gone away over the plain of the Scheldt.

  By now he was fairly familiar with many of the officers and men of the infantry holding that section of the line farthest from the Germans, a little more than half a mile from a solitary tree visible just in front of the enemy wire, known as Lone Tree. As Phillip left one of the reserve infantry company’s dugout, happy with whiskey inside him, he felt he was enjoying the adventure, despite the falling rain. Thank God he would be able to sleep in a billet that night; and he was comparatively dry, in his Father’s mackintosh, which gave him an extra feeling of security.

  “Twinkle” was to have hot soup and sandwiches ready at 3 a.m., when he got back. Before going to his billet, he saw that the N.C.O.s of his squad had their hot tea and rum, and canteens of skilly.

  “Well, good night you chaps, have a good sleep, while you can.”

  “Very good, sir,” replied the senior sergeant. “Beg pardon, sir, but have you any idea when the big push will start?”

  “The wind is blowing from the west, sergeant, that is one thing; and listen to the guns, that is another. We shall know very soon, I think. Cheer-ho!”

  The night was electric with white flash and orange-red bulging flame. Walls and roofs and shattered rafters along the meagre wet street were revealed in flash upon flash of field-gun batteries massed in the fields and lanes all around. To the south, above the wooded hills of Nôtre Dame de Lorette, the sky was fluttering and quivering as though filled with a thousand butterflies. He stood a while near the broken church, letting his sensations possess him entirely—the awfulness, the strangness, the majesty, the terrible beauty of it all—to which was added a feeling of secret relief that he would not be going over the top.

  *

  Morning came with drizzle and mist, the wind being from the south at noon. Hourly reports, during the past few days, had been sent in to Brigade H.Q., and transmitted back to Division, Corps, Army, and G.H.Q.

  At ten o’clock in the morning of the 24th of September a motor-cycle despatch rider on a Triumph gave Phillip an envelope marked Secret, for which he signed. Inside were orders for the Special Companies, R.E. All ranks of the specially employed sections were to be in position by 7 p.m. on Y/Z night.

  All officers i/c sections were to report at their respective Brigade H.Q. for instructions regarding zero hour. All anti-gas helmets were to be dipped in hyposulphite solution before leaving billets.

  “At the moment,” said Phillip, to his senior sergeant, as he wetted his finger and held it up, “there is no wind at all. If we let off in present conditions, our own chaps will be gassed, and not the Germans. We are supposed to discharge for thirty-eight minutes, before a final two minutes of smoke. D’you know how long the German helmets last?”

  “Fifteen minutes, sir.”

  “How long will the hypo last on ours?”

  The sergeant, an old soldier of Mons and Ypres, laughed shortly. “They don’t tell us that, sir.”

  “Well, I’ve got to go to Noeux-les-Mines now, Sergeant Butler. I am leaving you in charge. If anyone asks for me, say I’ve gone to get some equipment from Dados. I’ll be back about two pip emma.”

  “Very
good, sir.”

  Dados, he had recently learned, was short for Deputy Assistant Director of Ordnance Supplies. From listening to Captain West he had come to believe that the extraordinary silence of both the German guns and machine-guns might be due to a plan they had to attack, should the wind change, and the British be gassed by their cylinders. The jam-packed troops would be caught, unprepared for the defensive. From what he had seen and heard of the plan of attack, every infantryman had been given instruction, in training, to the smallest detail; and if the old Hun attacked, the whole thing would be a muck-up.

  In his unsophisticated mind, his unawareness of the thoughts of others (except of the rank and file) Phillip wondered if he ought to tell the R.E. major of this possibility. Supposing the fire of the German artillery was being held back for a terrific bombardment in the event of the British gas blowing the wrong way? The gas would paralyse everyone in the deep and narrow chalk ditches: the German infantry would be able to come through the gaps which had been cut in the British wire. It would then be Second Ypres again, but this time not with the “devilish German gas”. However, his experiences in his recent battalion at home had partly subdued him; so he suppressed his fears; and thinking of his own safety, decided to get himself a revolver from the ordnance stores. He could sign a chit for it, his pay would be debited.

  D.A.D.O.S. was at Noeux-les-Mines, a couple of miles behind Mazingarbe. He got a lift on a lorry, and was soon there. To a remark by the quarter-master-sergeant at the store, as to whether or not he had lost his revolver in the line, he replied, “Yes. During some shelling”, which led to the information that by filling-in a claim form and signing it, he might get a refund. He left with a new Smith and Wesson .45, and fifty rounds of ammunition; and after a meal of steak and chips and red wine in an estaminet, got a lift back to Mazingarbe. No one had asked for him during his absence.