A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  He walked in front of and away from the leading platoon as the men were moving round the cratered chalk, extending to the new formation. He was about a hundred yards ahead when he saw a German standing up so near that the band of his pork-pie hat was a bright red. The German waved. Phillip beckoned, his heart beating fast. Other Germans were clambering up beside the first. One carried a white flag. With a calm feeling Phillip waited until his runner, clambering to reach him, was near enough for him to speak to in a low shout, saying, “Tell Mr. Allport to remain in charge until I come back, and not to advance until I give the word.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Taking long, but slow strides, and using the walking-stick, Phillip approached a group of five German officers in long overcoats. One had a fur collar. He felt that he was being drawn along, as on the afternoon of Christmas Day when he rode on the Belgian bicycle towards the Hôspice. When he got within talking distance, he shouted out, “Prächtige kerl, ja?” and then, before he could think, “Ist Mittagessen fertig?” which was about all the German he knew. With relief he heard them laugh. He straightened his brassard, and walked towards them.

  Other Germans were now appearing out of the frozen sea, while a line of British troops advanced from the rear of the German position. Very soon scores of Germans were standing up, hands raised above their heads. Then right away down to Lone Tree and beyond he saw that the garrison in the salient had surrendered. Poor old Westy, he had missed it all.

  His lack of German was made up by the fur-collared hauptmann with the numerals 51 in red on his grey shoulder straps. He spoke English almost like an Englishman, and wore the silver-black riband of the Iron Gross. He clicked his heels and said, “Ritter!”

  Remembering from what his father had once told him about Germans introducing themselves by their surnames, Phillip succeeded only in stumping muddy loamy heels, as he replied, “Maddison”. Hauptmann Ritter bowed again, as he stood by the framed entrance to a shelter on a level with the trench fire-step.

  “You are a little late for Mittagessen. We expected you some time ago, awaiting the inevitable, since our ammunition was used up. Please to enter.”

  Inside the shelter was a carpet, a bedstead with coverlet and white sheets, pictures on the matchboarded walls, an enamelled stove, a chair, a table. The German officer spoke sharply to an orderly, who sprang up stiff and went outside.

  “I have ordered coffee, Herr Leutnant.” He put a box of cigars beside Phillip.

  “Not at the moment, thank you, sir. This beastly gas——”

  “Where did you learn our slang expression, ‘Prächtige kerl’, may I ask? Ah, Christmas Day! We, too, had hopes, after Tannenberg, of the war being over by Silvester—the New Year. Do not let us talk of war. Ah, here is the coffee. Sugar? It is beet sugar, we cannot just now supply Jamaica cane sugar!”

  Phillip wondered if the coffee was poisoned; the German captain seemed to feel his thought for, having poured two cups, he made no attempt to pass one, but, “Do help yourself, won’t you?”

  There was a vase of cornflowers on the table. The hauptmann explained that they had been grown in a garden in the support line. They were a favourite flower in Germany, he said, as he took one out of the vase and gave it to Phillip.

  “Now, if you will excuse me, or rather, since I am your prisoner, sir——”

  “Well, thank you very much, sir,” replied Phillip. He heard shouts outside, English shouts, with Welsh accents, and going out of the dugout, saw that some of the kilted troops with bayonets outheld were on the parapets. Among them an officer, revolver in hand, was violently beckoning with the other, and crying “Keep them covered! Keep them covered!” It was Douglas of the London Highlanders.

  “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” Phillip cried out. “They’ve surrendered!”

  At first Captain Douglas did not recognise him, but when he did, he said sharply, revolver in hand, “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking round the place.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “About five minutes.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Through the Bois Carré—we advanced after a flank movement.”

  He felt amused that Douglas was suspicious of him. Douglas knew that he had German cousins. There were stories of German officers in British uniforms. Even Westy had believed that one had given false orders behind the British lines to cause confusion. Like the Mayor of Arméntières being shot, for telephoning through to the Germans, in 1914!

  While Captain Douglas was waving the prisoners to climb the parapets, under escorts with fixed bayonets, a whizz-bang arrived with a scream and crack and shower of chalk and Douglas afterwards was lying on his face, kilt in ribbons, and his backside a mass of blood. Seeing that he was cared for, Phillip walked back to the Gaultshires, which under Allport had advanced, seeing that the German resistance had collapsed. The Gaultshires looked delighted, not unnaturally: for they had expected to be killed. Phillip was wondering what to do; he felt light-headed with relief; and was saying to Allport, “I think we had better lead on, to the Lens–La Bassée road, and attach ourselves to the nearest battalion. Then I’ll report where you are——” when he saw Allport looking with delight at a short, sturdy figure with an ugly face, approaching through a gap in the wire, followed by a string of soldiers. ‘“Pluggy’ Marsden!” said Allport. The figure recognised him: a full lieutenant of the Gaultshires. He had been in the first wave, and had been lying before the wire since early morning.

  “Well,” said “Pluggy” Marsden, “this is what I call a bit of fat, boys!” After some more enthusiastic talk, Phillip said that he ought now to hand-over his command.

  “I am due to report back at Mazingarbe.” After further explanations, it was agreed that a runner should go back to Le Rutoire, to report the position to brigade.

  “Stout fellow,” said Marsden. “By the way, aren’t these your prisoners?”

  “Well, the Welsh and the London Highlanders seem to have collared them. I’ll say goodbye now. For all I know, my C.O. will put me under arrest for not having gone back with my blokes this morning!”

  Lieutenant Marsden looked up from his field message book. “Au revoir!”

  “We’ll meet again, I hope, sir,” said the C.S.M., saluting.

  “Yes, I hope so,” added Allport.

  “So do I,” said Phillip, as he turned away, swinging his stick. He added to himself, “‘Archibald, certainly not!’”

  *

  He wanted to see his emplacements, not from a sense of duty (which he did not as yet possess) but out of curiosity. His mind, formed in ancient terrors, brooded romantically on the war: not the war of waves breaking, and so dying, upon the foreshore of terror: not the war of each actual laborious moment, but War, an extended dream, the jetsam of combat become quiescent under ceased movement and lost hope. He wanted to walk about and stand and stare and let his feelings possess him, so that he could lose himself in a dream that was beyond nightmare—the romance of war, the visual echoes of tragic action. Gas brassard on arm, he was free; no-one would question him if he appeared to be going about his job. He must visit the Lone Tree, imagine the barbed-wire as it was when holding up the assault.

  The Lone Tree had a smooth brownish bark, or what was left of bark after hundreds of bullets had scored it. The bark was speckled with yellow. It smelled like a sixpenny cherry-wood pipe he had bought once. A few brown-edged leaves still remained on three unhappy stumps of branches.

  All around the cherry tree the pitted chalky ground was strewn with dead and the movements of wounded. The white bottoms of London Highlanders were conspicuous among the grasses, as kilts of hodden grey lay torn and flung over still bodies. Hands lifted among the yet-alive crawling and dragging themselves, smeared with grey loam, around shell-holes, ghastly of face, torn of tunic; others were lying palely quiet beside patches of coagulated blood, where blow-flies stood, drinking. Others, less hurt, talked reasonably, asking wh
en stretcher-bearers were coming. He spoke to many, as appeal after appeal arose to his face. He recognised little Kirk, still wearing his pince-nez as he lay back, bare-headed, a thick dark stain down one side of his tunic. Where was he hit? In the chest, came the whispered reply. Were the stretcher-bearers coming? Phillip told him that they would be coming soon. Anyway, the Germans were now a mile back, and the Fifteenth Division was in Lens.

  He made little Kirk as comfortable as he could, then saying he had to go on, he left him, after promising—as he promised others again and again as he walked on—that he would report the need for stretcher-bearers.

  He became weary, almost irritable with so many promises, all along the line, all through the thin grasses extending up to the gradual rise of Hill 69. How strange that there should still be skylarks among these thin yellow grasses clustering upright a dozen inches above the loamy soil pocked and gashed white with shell-crater and trench: chalk-white the kiltless rumps of the bulleted dead, those cleanly killed, not savaged and destroyed by high explosive, which had cast a litter of severed legs and arms and fractured shin-bones sticking out of laced boots. He began to feel hollow as though his life were ebbing away; he felt helpless, for himself and others; his throat was sore; and only when his breathing suddenly was sickly trapped, and a petrifaction came upon him, that he was in chloride of lime hopelessly trapped, did he realise that he had come into an area where chlorine still hung about. So he hurried away east out of the hollow until he came close to the German front line beyond the tumbled wire along the slight ascent of the terrain which was the foot of the Loos Road Redoubt.

  Here he met a Scottish major, who was examining the ground of his battalion’s attack. He said that the Fifteenth Division had started eight minutes late, as the men had crowded together, trying to find the gaps in the British wire, which had been cut only the night before. There had been some casualties from shell-fire, but practically no opposition from the Hun infantry. In twenty minutes his battalion had got through the fourth enemy line, and “were into the blue”. The major was optimistic; the German front was broken; the R.F.C.—Phillip had not seen an aeroplane so far—had reported a concentration of horse transport outside Lille, which looked as though the old Hun was in a panic, and shifting his headquarters further back. Did he know where were our reserves? Had he seen any? Why hadn’t they come up? Had he seen anything of the cavalry? What?

  “No, sir.”

  The dead in feld grau lay everywhere in their old front line; they had got the gas. He crossed over, and walked beside a communication trench leading up to the redoubt. It was choked with German dead piled upon one another, three and four deep. Obviously they had been caught in the Allee, or communication trench, trying to get away; bomb after bomb, to judge by shattered heads and faces, must have been lobbed on top of the struggling masses. Many had hands blown off, as though they had been crying Kamerad. It looked like a massacre of prisoners, which was understandable, so soon after zero hour, because attacking men were nearly insane with fear, and the exhilaration succeeding intense fear. It was awful; he had seen enough; and when he got to the top of the down-like rise, and suddenly saw troops moving along the skyline, and saw very close to him the twin pylons of Loos and the brown cluster of broken roofs down below on his right, and heard the gruff coughs of bombs, with the hiss and cracking of bullets passing him, he turned back, determined to make his way to his billet in Mazingarbe, and report sick with gas. With luck, he would get down to the base.

  This idea became an obsession. He must get away from all the horror, which really had no purpose, since both sides thought they were fighting for the same thing. He began to stride along fast, but the going was heavy; boots were clogged with grey clay, puttees thick with plaster. He went down the slope to what looked like a track, along which, in the distance, wheeled transport, strung out, was visible. At last he got to the road beyond, after floundering through more trenches blown in, their withy-and-stake revettments in a horrible mess, feld grau and khaki dead lying outside the tilted beams of dugout and shelter, and came to the top of the rise where the old front line had been. He walked down the road for the best part of a mile, and saw no fresh troops moving up. Shells from field gun batteries in the open were flashing and barking under the leaden sky, into which reared the dark pyramids and heaps of the fosses, the strange iron towers of the winding-gear of coal-pits. He thought how it all looked like the scenery of the nightmares he had had as a child.

  It began to rain. The churned-up road, pitted with shell-holes, gleamed hopeless like the sky. The flashes of guns were indistinguishable from large and nervous blinks of the eyes. He passed hundreds, thousands of wounded limping, or lying on stretchers in the mud above ditches, and no-one to take them away. He hastened on, desperate to get to his billet.

  *

  The elderly major of sappers said, “Ah, so you are back again. We feared something might have happened to you.”

  “I was with my regiment, sir. They had lost most of their officers.”

  The old man looked at him benevolently. “Well, you look to be in need of a good night’s rest, my boy. Perhaps you had better see the doctor. That hoarse voice sounds like a whiff of gas.”

  “I think I’m all right, sir.”

  “Well, better to be on the safe side. Chlorine is not so easily got rid of. I think we’ll have the doctor run over you. How were things going on your sector?”

  “The Lone Tree position was surrendered by the Germans, sir.”

  “Yes, we heard that. Things are going as reasonably well as can be expected, though Horne’s Second Division is still checked. The gas blew back, I am afraid. Thesiger’s Ninth has over-run the Hohenzollern Redoubt, and both Big and Little Willie trenches, and has taken Fosse Eight and the Dump. Capper’s Seventh has captured the Quarries, and is over the Lens-Béthune road, and reached the second German line about Hulluch.” He looked at a message on his blanket-covered table. “Yes, things are going well. The First Division, as you know, is now astride the Lens—Béthune road after initial checks at Lone Tree, and has captured six hundred prisoners.” He put down the Corps battle report. “Well, let me have your written report first thing in the morning, will you? Now I think we’ll get the doctor to vet. you.”

  Phillip saw the M.O., an elderly Scotsman with a rugged face and drooping grey moustache yellow with nicotine. A cigarette smouldered on his lip. He had a scurfy scalp, Phillip noticed, as he put the stethoscope over his chest.

  “Do ye play bridge? We need a fourth in the mess.” He folded up his red rubber tubes, and pulled down his patient’s lower lids. “A bit of inflammation, you’re lucky to have got no more than a whiff of that gas.”

  “No, I don’t play, Doctor, I’m afraid.”

  “Ye’ll soon learn. A few days’ light duty won’t hurt you. Your heart’s intermittent, and a wee bit on the rapid side. We play for sixpence a hundred. Did ye see anything of the new Kitchener divisions as you came down the Harrow Road?”

  “No, I didn’t, Doctor. But the wounded were still lying out in No Man’s Land. I think it ought to be reported to someone.”

  “Oh, things are bound to be in a muddle at this stage. Don’t worry yourself about what canna’ be helped. The Hun front is broken, but our reserves are on the way. Two Kitchener divisions from home have been marching up during the past three nights, to avoid being seen from the air. Then some dam-fool military policemen held up the leading Brigade for an hour, on a standing order, for trench warfare only, that platoons going into the line must have a hundred yards’ interval. You were with the London Highlanders at Messines, were ye not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I had a nephew of mine killed at Ypres—Elliott, did you know him?”

  “Yes, Doctor. He was in my company.”

  “Well, you’ve done your bit. Take things easy. I’m giving you four days’ light duty. Now go and sleep. Have you got four francs on you? I can let you have a bottle of Johnny Walker, only don’t dr
ink too much. It’s the best sleeping draught.” Phillip handed over a five-franc note, and took the bottle.

  “Right, you’re a franc in credit. And don’t forget to come to the mess for bridge after dinner tomorrow. We only play for sixpence a hundred.”

  Phillip hurried away, thinking jubilantly that it was indeed a bit of fat. His jubilant mood soon went. He was cold, his throat was metallic; depression returned as he crossed the wretched little square filled with limbers and wagons, files of led mules with pack saddles, and echoing to the tramp of a weary-looking column of soldiers passing through towards the line, and went on to his billet, one of a row of drab little back-to-back cottages, the corons of the French miners. The village had been shelled during his absence; more rafters gaped, new shell-holes in the road had been filled in with bricks, the blackish mud was streaked with red by the passing of files of pack-mules taking up eighteen-pounder shells, and wagons.

  He found his batman sitting by the fire with the widow and her children; they got up when he entered, and all except “Twinkle” disappeared into the scullery. Thinking to celebrate the break-through, Phillip invited the old fellow to have some whiskey with him.

  “Twinkle” handled lovingly the bottle of Johnny Walker, and insisted on pouring for Phillip what he called a chota peg, which meant that a cup with a broken handle was filled nearly three-quarters full. Then “Twinkle” helped himself, as invited, and proposed his officer’s health, which Phillip took appropriately seated, while the batman swallowed his cupful in two swigs, champing his bare gums afterwards, and uttering deep sighs of satisfaction.

  “Twinkle’s” bare gums were in the nature of a permanent insurance; he had told Phillip that he had hidden his dentures against the possibility of being ordered into the trenches; for, toothless, he would be unable to eat iron rations.