A Fox Under My Cloak

by Henry Williamson

  *

  The day was misty, with low clouds and scatters of rain. When he reached the outskirts of the village, walking round shell-holes half-filled with yellow lyddite water, his boots and puttees were clotted with grey-white mud. He plodded on past a cemetery with trenches around and through broken crosses and bits of artificial marble-chip flowers, and making for the church, found the empty square, or place. This looked to be sinister, open to a thousand unseen eyes, so he kept to the protecting houses, picking his way over splintered rafters and heaps of bricks below gaping roofs and standing walls. He went carefully, lying down when shells swooped to throw up red brick dust amidst dark fragments. He wanted to get to the Tower Bridge, which now seemed, with its criss-cross iron-work, and flat roof, as high as the water-towers that flanked the Crystal Palace seen from the entrance gates at the top of Sydenham Hill, when he had marched there six years before with a thousand other Boy Scouts, for the Grand Review. Even then, in the mock battle, Mr. Purley-Prout had tried to get round the flanks of the defenders, instead of being like the other scoutmasters, content to charge direct, and cross broomsticks with their rivals. God’s teeth, he heard Westy’s voice saying, the Germans knew how to protect their flanks. He could hear their stick-bombs going off, gruff noises like old men clearing their throats in the shelters on the Hill, as the Germans worked down the chalk trenches on Hill 70; while their machine-guns were chattering, rigid as German discipline.

  He sat down, and let his thoughts rest, when he came to the troops in the cellars beyond the church. Smoke of wood fires arose, with a smell of frying bacon. So some rations had been got up. After ten minutes he went on, around fallen walls and window-frames towards the Tower Bridge. Where was the front line? he asked a soldier, obviously cavalry, in breeches, puttees reversed, and leather bandolier. He turned out to be the North Somerset Yeomanry, and told Phillip that the Germans were half a mile away, in trenches from Chalk Pit Copse to Hill 70, up behind the Tower Bridge.

  “Plaize to kape your ’ade down, zurr, there be znipers auver thurr”—pointing to Cité St. Pierre—“over thurr”—the greygreen mass of the Double Crassier—“and in they brick ’ousen of yon mine-shaft. It ban’t exactly a ’ealthy place, midear.”

  “Any up the Tower Bridge, do you know, by any chance?”

  “Not now, zurr, but they cleared out one on’m yesterday, ’twas a telephone chap, so I did hear. ’Twas a Jerry all right.”

  “Can one get up the pylons?”

  “Aye, aye! There be a round ladder, like up a church tower. But ’tis risky, zurr, what wi’ they znipers about!”

  That was enough for Phillip. He crept round shallow places in the rubble, bending low until his neck ached; he went on upright—until a bullet spat on a brick wall, and pinged away like a metal wasp. Cautiously he reached the base of one pylon, around which the usual rubble of brick and wood was piled, with a scattering of glass, amidst rifles, water-bottles, tins of beef, biscuits, and half-buried dead.

  What was unusual was the sight of two light-draught horses, their harness hanging awry, waiting side by side near an upturned G.S. wagon, the lower part of the driver’s body lying beside it. Obviously the old cushy days of the transport were over, he was thinking, when with howls ending in clanging cracks four woolly bears broke to hang yellow above the Tower, and their splinters swooshed down upon tile and brick. The shells had obviously come east, from Lens.

  He ran to cover, through a tangle of ironwork and brick which must have been the engine house; a huge fly-wheel lay in pieces near a riveted and rusty boiler full of holes and tears, and girders split and wrenched about; while above, seen through a tattered iron roof, the steel platform where the trucks had been loaded to be run off on rails along the crassier or dump were visible. He thought that the twelve-inch naval gun on the railway at Béthune must have hit it, to have caused such upheaval. And yet, despite the destruction below, the steelwork of the towers seemed to be untouched, except for gashes in the metal. They looked immensely strong.

  Had the search party which had found the German telephoning climbed up the framework? It looked impossible. His thought was broken by the fat buzz of howitzer shells, coming from the opposite direction, from the north, probably in Hulluch. So guns were placed for cross-fire, the same as machine-guns! He wondered if the staff knew this: it might be a discovery.

  Yes, it was definitely a cross-fire! Four more yellow bears appeared in the sky, coming direct from behind Hill 70, from Lens. The gunners had shifted range and direction, to burst over the square. He stood up, and saw an open iron door half hidden by scrap metal in between the feet of the towers. Insinuating himself there, he saw an iron stairway leading upwards, spiral and very narrow, enclosed by sheet iron. It was like the iron staircase up to the mezzanine room between the Town Department at Head Office and the directors’ floor. Up the old Bloodhounds!

  It was with thoughts of past days with Cranmer as corporal of the patrol that Phillip started to climb the iron stairs. Round and round he went, his feet sometimes fumbling at a tread, not daring to look down, or to think of what would happen if a shell made a direct hit on it. Shrapnel had struck it many times; hundreds of jagged holes were in the boiler-plate walls. He paused for breath, to ease the ache in his legs, while the dim tube whispered hugely of the noises of battle, then whang! the blow went right through him, as a splinter of woolly bear opened an eyelid-shaped space six feet above his eyes.

  After hesitation, he decided that the law of averages—no shell ever fell exactly in the same shell-hole as another—would protect him; so he climbed on, to rest again a dozen yards higher up, and to see large gaps in the boiler plate above him. Would that bare space be watched by a sniper? Why were there no British observers up the tower? Perhaps because they could see all they needed for the moment from their old O.P.s in Maroc, and the huge crassier near Vermelles, with telescopes?

  He came to the top of the staircase, and found himself on an iron floor strewn with shell-splinters and broken glass. He was in a circular room, like a turret, with breast-high windows all round it. Cold wind moved past him from the empty spaces, with their serrated glass edges.

  He began to tiptoe around the platform, under the steel roof. At the far end was a table, with one leg fractured, leaning sideways. Below it was a small pile of newspapers, apparently slidden off, with an empty wine bottle and a piece of dry black bread; and in one corner, a single grey Zeiss glass. He picked it up, screwed the adjustment, and saw that it was unbroken. What luck! He put it on the table, and took up a newspaper, making out the thickly carved German letters, Berliner Tageblatt. Then there was a little book of cartoons, with a picture of Big Bertha, a fat smiling woman bending down, face turned back to look at her posterior, which was a gun pooping off a shell with the motto Gott Strafe England! He examined other pictures of smiling, moustached soldiers, wearing the round nob of gunners on their pickelhauben, in scenes of snow. There was a Russian bear, with the Czar’s face under its peaked cap, ambling big and stupid right into the muzzles of a German battery. On another page was a long lean lanky Highlander, with bony knees and a narrow face and brow with glengarry slipping off, and buck teeth holding a huge curved pipe, and a marmalade pot in one hand, running away from a laughing German soldier labelled Michael with rifle and bayonet.

  Phillip sat down and studied the book, while he ate his lunch. He was keeping the best things of his adventure for after his meal—the view over the battlefield from the window. “Twinkle’s’ sandwiches had never tasted so good, with their French mustard. They were horse all right, browner and more tender than beef, with a wider grain that made the slices easier to bite with the bread, and softer to chew. Then, having folded his sandwich paper, and put it back in his haversack, he opened his map, and going to the window with the grey Zeiss monocular, looked out.

  The morning mist had cleared up, and the country lay spread out below him, with its faintly blue pyramids, tall brick chimneys, —some of them white—and thickly con
gested pithead villages or corons of brick, lying as though pressed upon the wide spaces of rolled-out downland. The downland itself looked flattened, as though it had sunk down with all the stone and coal lifted out from under the coverlet of chalk. On the map-like scene little men in groups and files were moving, all one way, amidst the booming of cannon and the burst of shell. He focussed the glass on one group, but they were without interest: mere slow-moving figures. It was better to look with his eyes only, at black spouts of shell-bursts amidst the thin and wandering lines of white in the brown-green grassy flattened downland. He saw the flashes of guns, tiny winks of light, and imagined the air torn in strip upon strip above the tiny men moving so slowly, so far away—always so slowly, so far away.

  He went to the dangerous side of the tower, towards the Germans, after covering his face with his khaki handkerchief, to blend with the rusty iron. North lay the shallow valley between Lone Tree ridge and the crest of the Lens-Béthune road, with its lengths of coppice concealing the machine-guns which had cut up the Cantuvellaunian attack of the day before; and farther down the valley, into which the straight road dipped, lay the brown cluster of Hulluch, and beyond it a stream in a green valley, with trees in full foliage just beginning to turn to the colours of autumn. Farther away and beyond, five miles or so, lay La Bassée and the canal. West of La Bassée lay smaller Auchy, and this side of it miners’ cottages, corons, near the big sullen Dump, and a tall chimney by the pit-head; and in front of it, semi-circular in a dressing of sulky chalk, wreathed in the smoke of many shells, lay the Hohenzollern Redoubt, which had been taken and lost, and was now being attacked again, judging by the white British shrapnel smoke over it.

  He saw Vermelles, comparatively untouched by shell-fire; and the big grey pyramid that was the crassier at Philosophe, tunnelled along its peak for shrapnel-proof observation posts. Back behind the British lines lay the tall slag-heaps of Noeux-les-Mines, the square tower of Béthune, and the dark mass of a wood. How small and remote everything seemed!

  He saw the trenches of the lost and dying soldiers’ world like lines of waves white-crested: low waves frozen white on the green and dun underswell of a frozen sea—frozen with pain and despair—waves of burst chalk-bags strewn with punctured men. Through the glass he could make out the criss-cross of larch poles, the knife-rest obstacles with their coils of wire; and the dead men caught in the tangles.

  Turning to the south, he saw the high, tree-billowing crest of Nôtre Dame de Lorette, running into another wooded height, which must be Vimy Ridge, which the French had failed to take. The Germans were too strong. Their dugouts, forty feet down in the chalk, made them safe from bombardment. How could men so brave and clever be beaten? Would they not hold out for ever, since they believed that God and Right was with them in their struggle for their Fatherland?

  A terrific clang shook the turret; an equal fear possessed him. Supposing the stairway was blown away, and he would not be able to get down? The air was acrid; a yellow bear had hit the steel frame somewhere. Well, if it happened, it happened. He peered out tremulously from his high place. Yellow bears were coming over almost as regularly as clockwork from Lens, and Black Johnsons from Hulluch, or from Auchy—two horns of a bull goring the attackers. He could just discern the flashes of guns.

  *

  The noise was greater now, the attack of the Foot Guards must be starting. He could see a row of dots, in perfect alignment, coming down from Lone Tree ridge into the shallow valley beyond the brown fracas of the village. Soon black spots of shrapnel found them; and woolly bears were breaking above them. Through the Zeiss glass he saw a tiny figure fall; then another threw up its arms, and fell, and another, and another, while the line went on steadily. The air was solid with metal hammering. Was Bertie down there?

  He felt fascination and excitement. The Foot Guards! He recalled the charge through the Nonne Bosschen before Ypres in November 1914. Oh, why wasn’t he with them, and Cranmer, and Tommy Atkins? But this wasn’t like that faraway charge, this was like a field day before the general, all correct in line and spacing. He began to swear as more and more figures in those straight lines dropped out. If the Guards failed, all was lost. Ought he to get down the tower? Would the Prussian Guard division counter-attack down the slopes, if the Foot Guards’ attack was broken by the terrible hammering?

  Then he saw thick black smoke rolling along from the direction of Hulluch, two miles away in the shallow openness of the valley. The wind was very slight, it brought it billowing forward so very slowly. Would it get up the slight slope in time, to hide the advancing lines? Even if it did, the fixed machine-guns would sweep through it, as before. Oh hell, hell, hell!

  Looking farther back, towards Vermelles, where the lower sky was grey with drifting smoke of another kind, obviously shrapnel, he saw that the supports were coming forward in diamond formation; and in between was a column of slowly moving transport. Black dots began to spatter the sky above it, as he watched.

  Turning north again, he saw the black smoke screen moving towards the Lens-La Bassée road, but so slowly. Quick, quick, quick! Get to the coppice around the Chalk Pit this side of the road, and Bois Hugo the other side of the road! That was where the hammering came from! Then above the rolling smoke all the woolly bears began to gather, in sixes and sevens, while howitzer shells spouted up from the ground. Obviously the Germans were taking no chances, for there were no troops under the smoke screen. Go on, waste all your ammunition on the smoke! Poop it all off before the line of Guards came up the slope! He felt great excitement and anguish.

  The shells were coming from behind the Hohenzollern Redoubt, three miles away, and the dark mass of the Dump, from Auchy; where the infantry was back again in the original British front line. He could see little nicks of flashes in the village, from the German batteries.

  Trembling and taut, he turned away to the south again, and saw troops leaving the shelter of the houses immediately below, and making for the little plantation beside the road into Lens. From Hill 70 redoubt, less than a mile away east, came the hammering noise, while a few British shells burst upon the chalky flatness. As he moved his glass from figure to figure, taking the boiling feeling of each one upon himself, he gave a start: for in the retina of his right eye he saw a dark-blue movement, and with a rush of fear turned round prepared to see a German covering him with blued barrel of automatic.

  To his relief he saw that it was a swallow, flying round and round inside the turret, crying with beak open above the tawny stain on its throat, crying inaudibly. Looking up, he saw a nest upon one of the roof girders, in a space where it was crossed by a lighter length of iron. There was the lip of grey mud, dry grasses showing, and shrunken marks of droppings on the floor.

  He climbed on the table, and felt in the nest. It had young, a late brood, probably, he thought, coming from rich feeding on the flies which infested the battlefield. The swallows would be migrating soon; the little ones would be left behind. He thought of the tragedy of the parents, torn between love and the urge to migrate when the inner call came to leave. Would it be kinder to kill the nestlings, and so decide for the parents? Perhaps they might be able to feed their young in time for the flight down to the Mediterranean and across to Africa? After all, they had built there, and had been able to rear them so far during the war.

  The hen bird slipped through the open window, and he saw her flying in the air, catching flies. He thought it wonderful, that in all the noise, she had carried on; but if a woolly bear were to burst near her——

  *

  The attack of the Guards had become a feeling of mourning. They moved so slowly, they were but figures walking on, with wider and wider gaps between each little fore-shortened figure. Only a ragged suggestion of a line reached the Chalk Pit and its trees; and when, after an interval, a few scattered figures appeared beyond the trees, in the terrible exposure of flat open country beside the narrow road, they withered away almost immediately: and looking through the glass, he saw that th
ey were lying on the ground. About a dozen figures got up to run across the road, but they too, in ones and twos and threes, went down under the hammering.

  He felt empty and weary. The afternoon light was going. He must try not to think as he went down the spiral stairs. He must go slowly, lest be become giddy. One last look at the nest on the rusty iron girder, bon chance mes hirondelles!; and slinging haversack and water-bottle, he left the turret.

  *

  It was dark when he got back to his billet, after passing troops winding up along the road, amidst the usual roll of wheels on mudded pavé, through all the desolation and the raging of guns. It was dark, the moon not up; but far away, around the Hohenzollern and beyond, the flares were rising, like curious lilies of the dead.

  “Ou est M. ‘Twinkle’, madame?”

  “Parti, m’sieu!” The tragic face of the woman, her children staring behind her thicknesses of black skirts, looked into his.

  “Gone?”

  “Oui, m’sieu! Les ‘redcaps’.”

  “Comment, madame?”

  “Pardon, m’sieu?”

  “Pourquoi les ‘redcaps’ avent prendre prisonnier ‘Twinkle’, madame?”

  “Mud Jeck, m’sieu!”

  “Comment, madame?”

  She spelt it out, he was the more puzzled: she wrote it down in pencil: Mad Jack.

  Mad Jack! The name seemed familiar, but only when he learned that “Twinkle” was a deserter, and had been one since ’quatorze, did he connect Mad Jack with the old deserter he had once seen at Villeneuve railway junction outside Paris, in September of the first year of the war. Mad Jack used to sleep behind hay-bales, he had a sack of bully beef as his capital, and swopped tins of it for red wine. When last seen, in those lines-of-communication days, Mad Jack had been humping his sack across the tracks, having seen redcaps on one of the platforms.