A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  General Haig decided to press on with the attack, to take away German strength against the French. The orders went out at 11.30 p.m. that night from his headquarters at Hinges. The two reserve divisions were to attack at 11 a.m. the next morning, get through the weak German second position, and line the Haute Deule Canal in the plain beyond. The cavalry would pass through the gap to the plain of Flanders.

  The field-marshal, loyal to the Cabinet’s directive, and to the French Allies, did not restrain General Haig, although he felt “the futility of pushing reserves through a narrow gap in the enemy’s defences”. He informed his First Army commander that the last reserves, the Guards division, was on its way “to be at his orders”, to relieve the 15th division, which would be withdrawn into general reserve.

  While this order from the First Army was being transmuted into detailed orders at the headquarters of First, Fourth and Eleventh Corps, comprising the eight divisions now upon the battlefield, the Germans, unknown to the staff, had brought up their reserves, many of whom were by this time in their second position, putting out stakes and barbed-wire in the long grass, without interference from the British; while others were advancing to the long straight road between Lens and La Bassée, for the counter-attack.

  *

  “Forward!” cried “Crasher”, in a croaking voice, just before midnight, as he laid the right-hand reins of snaffle and curb on the neck of his charger, and turned to face the white stalks of light in the distance.

  “Lead on, scouts!” said “Strawballs”, gruffly, out of three mufflers round his neck and a balaclava elongating his egg-shaped head by quite six inches. It had been made hurriedly by his wife, with a generous allowance for shrinkage.

  “Follow me, chaps,” said Phillip, as he set off, ignoring the compass bearing of one hundred and twelve degrees; to cross, for the second time that day, the wide and open space of tall stalky grasses and glimmering lines of chalk towards the ruddy glow that was the village of Loos-en-Gohoelle on fire. How strange, he thought, that he was doing what he was doing; it was all like a dream; the yellow grasses were those in the Backfield of boyhood, the slag-heaps like the ballast heap he had played on, and rival bands had tried to drive him off the heap, and out of his “lands”. It was worse than any dream; the great ruddy glare away in front was like the all-red nightmares he had had as a child, walking on Randiswell Bridge down into Randiswell, where everything was burning with a dull red glow, and he was powerless to find Mother, powerless even to walk, powerless to escape all the world on fire. Even after he had awakened, and Mother was holding him sitting up in bed, wet with perspiration, and the fire was only a candle on the chest-of-drawers, the awfulness of the nightmare, of never being able to find a way out, remained to haunt him throughout his childhood. He saw the Tower Bridge black against the burning village, rising up like something lit by a Crystal Palace firework display. What a set-piece for the destruction of the world!

  They stopped to check the compass bearing. What piffle! A compass wouldn’t get them past the wire!

  While they halted, wails and groans came out of the grasses, from unseen wounded.

  “Stretcher-bearers!”

  “Give us a moment, chum!”

  “Water, for Christ’s sake, matey!”

  “Hi! Help! Oh-h-h.”

  “Can’t we do something, my boy?” asked O’Connor.

  “Nothing. Apart from the fact that it will only bring false hopes if we stop, it’s against orders. Damn orders, anyway. For God’s sake let’s get a move on!”

  “Not so loud, my boy.” O’Connor came nearer. “The men——”

  Drifts of mist enclosed them. Then a glimpse of a full moon, apparently hastening through a gap in the clouds. They floundered into a schemozzle of wire and buried stakes. Here grey upsurged chalk was the old German trench.

  “How do we get over, my boy?”

  “Find a plank, or a bridge. If not, we’ll have to scramble over.”

  “How can Crasher and Strawballs get over, on horseback?”

  “Transfer into the Foreign Legion, and try with camels, I suggest.”

  “Not so much sarcasm, my boy. We are relying on you, you know.”

  “I was only joking. We’ll have to halt here and look for the bridge. We had to scramble this morning.”

  “Pass the word back to halt, Sergeant,” said O’Connor. The word chain-linked back into loamy darkness. “I’ll blow two short blasts on my whistle if I find a bridge,” said O’Connor. “Will you do the same?”

  “I left mine with the Bloodhound Patrol.”

  “I’ve got a whistle, sir,” said a sergeant.

  “Then go with Mr. Maddison, will you.”

  Phillip took the sergeant and Bellamy as a runner and they floundered up the line, trying to avoid the dead. Phillip had no idea where he was. He knew only that, once through the trench lines, they would be in the valley with gentle sloping sides where he had walked that morning, leading up the rise to the Lens–La Bassée road. Once there, he would leave them. He began to feel tired, and took a swig at his bottle. He hesitated to offer the others a drink, remembering Lance-corporal Hack, a regular, who had been out since Mons, who had got five years’ hard labour, to be served after the war, for pinching rum and getting tight all alone in a Belgian barn.

  “I heard Captain O’Connor’s whistle, sir.” They listened. Two blasts came again. On the way back the sergeant said, “To my way of thinking, there’s a lot of firing over yon, isn’t there, sir, for the Germans to be in retreat?”

  “Probably our chaps, firing at the whistle. The Germans sometimes blow them. Bloody dangerous things, whistles. For God’s sake don’t blow yours, Sergeant. It may start the wind-up, when both sides fire all night at nothing.”

  “I begin to see why Horatio Bottomley says the war is costing five million pounds a day, sir, when I see all this waste of men and material. Last week’s John Bull said he was coming out to see for himself.”

  “A fat lot of good he’ll do.”

  “Don’t you think his trenchant articles have done some good, sir?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that a prominent man in the City once told me that he was the biggest rogue out of gaol.”

  “Still, there’s good in all of us, sir.”

  “There’s some good in my water-bottle, Sergeant, if you swear you won’t say I gave you any. Or Bellamy.”

  “We’re not children, sir,” replied the sergeant.

  “Stuff to give the troops, sir,” said Bellamy.

  *

  It took the brigade nearly an hour to get through the old German line, with its narrow gaps in the wire and few single planks. On the farther side the men, still in greatcoats with webbing equipment outside, and carrying extra bandoliers of rifle ammunition, were so exhausted that a rest was ordered. Rain was coming down in the pattern of the clouds, with intervals of veiled moonlight revealing haggard faces and uptilted empty water-bottles. Both Phillip and O’Connor thought of the same thing at once, from different sides, speaking together.

  “Where shall we be able to fill——”

  “You probably won’t get any water—— Sorry, you were saying——?”

  “Go on, my boy.”

  “Well, I was thinking that there won’t be any water in shell-holes now, and probably the pumps and wells in the villages will be out of action.”

  “There’s the battalion water-cart, Phil.”

  It was the first time O’Connor had called him by his Christian name; and the warmth of gratitude he felt for O’Connor, added to the warmth of the whiskey-water-bottle shared with O’Connor, caused Phillip to stay with the battalion when, having left their packs behind, they went on and, half an hour after midnight, reached the road in the valley leading to the ruddy glow of Loos on their right and Lone Tree and Bois Carré on the left.

  While they sat there, the company asleep despite the cold and wet, a file of men from the brigade on their left, carrying empty petrol cans and
seeking water, stopped to give the alarming news that Hulluch had been re-taken by Jerry, causing a retirement from the Lens-La Bassée road.

  “The Prooshan Guards are on the way, chum, wi’ bags’r other reinforcements! That’s the way we’re treated out here, chum; first they tell us we’ll only be used to follow up the rout, and the next thing we know is that, not having had any proper grub or kip for forty-eight hours, we’re expected to fight the Prooshan Guard, and all our Lewis and machine-guns back with the transport.”

  “Write to John Bull about it, chum,” said Phillip, derisively, in a cockney voice, feeling Cranmer’s face on his own.

  “Who are you, old man?” asked the partly educated North-country voice.

  “Old Man Whiskey, mate.”

  “I don’t see ought to be foony about.”

  “It’s the only way out here,” said Phillip, getting up, and now talking in a rough throaty voice, as befitted the old soldier. “To hell with your pushing Prooshan Guards! They’re all rows of little crosses around Ypres, where they came over at the jog-trot, carrying rifles at the porte. We met them with the bayonet, when they came through the Nun’s Wood. They’re all ghosts now, so no need to get the wind up.”

  “Well, that’s something definite, at any rate. What are you, may I ask.”

  “I belonged to the First Guards Brigade at Ypres, but I am specially employed now,” replied Phillip, in a precise voice, as he saw himself in the character of Colonel Mowbray.

  “I say, you’re a good mimic, you are, chum! You’re not by any chance an officer are you—sir?”

  “About your water. I don’t think you’ll find any this way. Loos is on fire, and fighting is still going on there, if you listen.” The gruff thuds of German stick-bombs could be heard among the crackle of rifle-fire. “There are two pumps in Le Rutoire farm, and they are probably the nearest source of supply, until your water-cart comes up. It’s about a mile and a half back from here. There is a lane back from Lone Tree——”

  “We came up that way, sir——”

  “The farm is the turning to the right, about a mile down past Lone Tree.”

  The sergeant thanked him, saluted, and the squad went back almost cheerfully.

  “You’re a dark horse, Phillip, my boy. You ought to be on the staff—or at the Coliseum!”

  “Well, you see, Shaun, I happened to be at Le Rutoire farm last night, and saw the two pumps. All pumps this way are shelled to hell. Why didn’t the staff give each of the new battalions a squad of guides? Or better, mix them up with the old sweats. As I told you, when we came out, I mean the London Highlanders, we were put in among regulars, old sweats from Mons, who looked after us like nurses. It was hell when we first went in before that, alone, at Messines. No-one knew anything. We were just like the chaps of these two divisions. I wonder how many officers in your division have been under fire before?”

  “Probably only Crasher, I imagine. Certainly there are none among the Cantuvellaunians, with the exception of your explicit self, Phillip. What I like about you, Phil, is a total absence of either callousness or malice in your character. Do you mind me speaking so personally? Have a Gyppie cigarette?”

  “Thanks. Have another spot of old man whiskey?”

  “Not just now, thank you. I suppose it’s safe to strike a match? I’ve got one of the new trench fusees, somewhere, but it’s in my pack, which I doubt I shall see again.”

  “We must be careful, Shaun, me b’hoy, for look what happened when a fag-end was thrown down, careless like, in Loos!”

  Captain Whale joined them, sitting down, accepting a Gyppie. He smoked it vigorously, then, “Shaun, I’m worried about the transport, particularly the Lewis-gun cart, the cookers, and the water-cart. Lambert is due to be at a place called Le Rutoire farm at eleven o’clock.”

  “Here’s the very man for you, Jonah. Phil himself appears to know this line of country as well as he knew the staircases and bolt-holes of that equally watery place, Godolphin House. Le Rutoire farm is a mile and a half west of Lone Tree, where he was in action only this morning, in an unofficial capacity, let it be understood, and took the surrender of three hundred Germans.”

  “It was all luck, sir.”

  “It’s certainly our luck that we came across you today,” said Jonah. “We thought we were never to see you again!” He patted Phillip’s knee: and the upshot was that Phillip, with the same sergeant and Bellamy and a dozen other men, led the way down the route to the crossroads and so past the shambles of Lone Tree to Le Rutoire farm, to find the transport and bring up the rations, water, Lewis guns, and ammunition.

  *

  “Oh my God!” said Phillip, after the slow walk down the road from Hulluch, where an attack was going on, judging by the rattling and roaring. “God’s teeth,” he said, in a different tone of voice, as the party stopped near the mass of the farm, with its barns, sheds, lofts and courtyard walls in brick-heap ruins; but alive with every kind of voice and movement of hoof and wheel. Here were voices of Glasgow and the Cairngorms, of Northumberland and Durham, Yorkshire, London, Kent, Bedfordshire, Devon, and others amidst the cries of the wounded, laid out upon stretchers, ground-sheets, and the wet sett-stones; while shells swooped and bassly growled down, to burst with flash and rattle in the air and red spouting rage upon the earth. There were so many horses that at first he thought the cavalry was there; but getting round motionless wagon after wagon, amidst a chorus of identical questions and answers—“Are you the——? No, have you seen the——?”—repeated all around, he realised that the jam of vehicles included field-guns, strings of pack-mules, ammunition limbers, Maltese carts and every kind of transport for almost every branch of divisional troops. Having arrived, nobody could move on or back or sideways; some wagons were already ditched; one field-gun team, with a dozen plunging animals, had gone over a row of wounded lying by what originally was the roadside. Oaths and yells and high-pitched nervous cursings filled the tawny darkness; and when the full moon raced out of the clouds, a feeling of nightmare unreality, of the pale hopelessness of it all, stopped Phillip’s further movement. He had already shared his sandwiches and emptied his water-bottle—a mere sip each—and felt suddenly hopeless.

  How to find Lambert in all that congestion? He thought to go to Brigade H.Q. in the cellars, and telling the sergeant to wait where he was, walked to what had been the door of the farm. Hurricane lamps inside revealed a change. Wounded men sat on cellar steps; from below came the warm, acrid smell of sweat, and then of an open latrine, causing him to return at once. God, what a muck-up; and the old doctor in Mazingarbe playing cut-throat bridge while this was going on!

  “What shall we do, sir?”

  “Do you all know Mr. Lambert? I think the men ought to go out, in pairs, and try and find him. Each pair must get back here, just where we are now, after about an hour. Obviously the roads will be jammed. Mr. Lambert may try and get here, on foot, to find the ration party. Understand? Well, you wait here, sergeant, in case he comes. When the moon is about there”—he pointed into the sky—“will show roughly the time to be back here, for the couples going out. Probably the wagons and carts are held up somewhere between here and Vermelles, which is the first turning to the right about a quarter of a mile down this road. So two couples go that way, and three couples straight on to the main Lens road we came up this afternoon. Just a minute, before you go.”

  He could not think any more; he went a few yards away, to try and think out what to do. The men were hanging on his words. As though he knew anything! Quick, what could he tell them, supposing the wagons were jammed immovable in the traffic? What would Cousin Bertie have done? For a few moments he felt like crying. Why hadn’t he told Jonah that he had to be back at Mazingarbe, as ordered by the M.O.? Then he thought of Mother praying to St. Anthony when she had lost anything, and automatically he said the phrase he had often heard her speak aloud, Please, St. Anthony, let me find the transport.

  “As soon as anyone finds where it is, com
e back here and tell the sergeant.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  His words gave hope in the ruinous moonlight.

  *

  “The efforts to get the first-line transport forward with the brigades,” says the official history, “failed. That of two brigades struggled through the mud and shell holes of the Lens road on its way to Loos, but was held up by the original front trenches, the road here being blocked by derelict wagons broken up by the German artillery that had been shelling the road throughout the evening. In the same way, the transport of other brigades was held up by the Corons de Rutoire. Here, no authority having arranged for the co-ordination of the movements of the two corps troops in the same area, the bridges across a back line of British trenches were blocked for some hours by ammunition wagons of the First Division, returning to be filled, and by a stream of ambulances from Le Rutoire farm. The confusion in the darkness was considerable, and the transport was therefore parked off the road by the Corons.

  “Every infantry brigade having apparently ordered its vehicles to be at Le Rutoire, as the only place that could be identified on the featureless plain, the mass of wagons on the way thither led to much confusion in the darkness, and interfered very considerably with the passage of the batteries.

  “Not only for the artillery, but also for the infantry of the reserve divisions, the conditions under which the attack (the next morning) was to be launched were most unfavourable from the outset. In spite of tremendous efforts, it had been impossible to bring the ration wagons and cookers up to the battalions. The quarter-masters had made many attempts during the night to get in touch with their units, but, after wandering aimlessly in the dark through the mud and débris of the battlefield, abandoned the search.”

  *

  “I’m awfully sorry, sir, but I could not find Mr. Lambert, or any of the transport. I tried to borrow some petrol tins, and was put under arrest by a gunner major, sir.”

  “O-oh,” said a grim white-stubbled “Strawballs”. “What did you do then, Mr. Maddison?”