And We Go On

by Will R Bird

  A man came down the street, walking slowly, quietly, and sat beside me on the old stone wall. It was Stewart, the stretcher bearer, and he spoke softly as a woman as he talked about the beauty of the night. Then he rambled on, telling me of his boyhood in old Scotland, of his going to Canada, of all he had done, and intended to do, intimate things which only old friends mention. I listened sympathetically and over an hour we sat together, then he walked on up the road. I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock in the morning.

  Before I could leave another came, the Professor. He had been lying down and could not sleep, and now he unloaded his mind. He thought that some one should shriek from the high places about this awful, stupendous folly in which we were engaged, that the few sane men left on earth should combine their efforts to stop the carnage. He hated war, loathed it, feared it, hated everything connected with it, even to those gaily-woven silk souvenirs and postcards that played havoc with our five-franc notes. Our existence was, he said, an ugly nightmare, and Heaven must shudder in protest. We walked back slowly, and in the garden by our billet found Mickey lying on the brook bank. One roll would have dropped him in a deep pool, and there he lay on his back in a drunken stupor. We carried him in and I could have hugged him; sharp lines were cutting into his boyish features, altering him, aging him.

  We moved to Hazebrouck. Sitting in the “40 Hommes” coach I watched the boys. They were normal again, but different. They sang a long time, old songs, in harmony, and then were silent; there was none of the usual jesting. I had looked at each in turn, “Old Bill” with tissue paper on a comb, one of the orchestra; Sambro beside him talking to Barron; Big Glenn, reading a letter; Melville, Ira, Jennings, and Hughes singing lustily; Stewart, smiling at them; old Sam, as sour as usual; Hickey and Egglestone with a lance jack named Always, a nice fellow; Kennedy, Bunty, Johnson, Luggar, Dykes, Flynn, and Eddie, all singing. I sat with Mickey and Tommy by the door, and Tommy talked of the marching battalions he had glimpsed on the road. The Professor came from a corner and joined us. He was talking again about the war, calling it a ghastly paroxysm of civilization.

  Mickey stared at him, wide-eyed, and I tried to ease the condemnation, pointing out that war was not new, had always been. I got out my little guide book and tried to divert Mickey’s thoughts as I read about the history of the country. Arras, Boulogne, Cambrai, Verdun, had all been towns under the reign of Julius Caesar, and a German invasion was nothing new. Attila and his heathen Huns had poured into France when it was Gaul, burning and plundering and had lost 160,000 men before they were driven away. I read about King Edward at Crecy with his expeditionary force of thirty-two thousand, facing three times his strength of the finest French chivalry. The English held strategic position on a slope, with the sun at their backs, and their bowmen shot down the mounted Frenchmen who attacked with their lances. Thirty thousand men of France fell in that battle, twelve hundred knights and eight princes, so why should we consider we were entangled in an original catastrophe.

  “How many knights and princes are going to be killed up in Passchendale?” asked Tommy, cynically. Then he raved about the officers, the gilded staff in fine chateaus and billets, waited on hand and foot, living like lords, travelling in cushioned cars, stroking away – with careless pens – thousands of lives. The Professor and Mickey did not speak.

  I turned the pages and read to them that when Louis XIV was waging wars, taking four fortresses on the Rhine in four days, the pomp and splendour of his equipage rivalled that of fairy princes. Every campaign ended in a sort of royal pageant. There were coaches of crystal and gold, horses draped in cloth of gold, courtiers and conquerors dazzling with diamonds, ladies in silks and plumes and laces. Old King Solomon himself was outshone. “So you see, Tommy,” I said, “there’s really nothing new. The old boys had their big parades and banquets and probably their W.A.A.C.’s to wait on them.”

  “That’s all right,” said Tommy, doggedly, “them old chaps were bred for wars, it was all they knew. They didn’t think about anything else.”

  The Professor had been looking at my little book and now he snatched it from me. “Listen,” he said tensely, and read, “… the code of chivalry was completed by an education that began at the early age of seven years. Boys were sent to the castle of their father’s overlord, where, in return for their breeding, they rendered domestic service, no matter how lofty their birth. At twelve they learned to ride and use arms. Then they went on adventure, on horse, carrying shield and lance for their leader. Between sixteen and twenty they were made knights and put on, for the sacred fast and vigil of arms, the white tunic, a sign of purity; the red robe, which symbolized the blood he must shed; the black jerkin, betokening death, a close companion of all knight-at-arms.” “They were soldiers,” he cried, “we’re not. They wanted war, we don’t.”

  “It’s all the same through history,” I said weakly.

  “There has always been war and will be. We can’t change things, we just go on.”

  The Professor argued firmly that such reasoning was piffle, stank of the fatalistic. Chivalry, he said, had long been buried, purity had become a strange word.

  I tried to stop him, but it was no use and Tommy took up the argument, declaring that we were really worse than they were in the Dark Ages, and that anyone who had been drilled to fight and kill from the time he was seven was different. We were simply civilians in soldier’s clothing, and war was a mess of grotesque murder. He stopped, finally, when I could give him a nod that Mickey could not see, but the lad had absorbed every word. He sat staring at us and through us, seeing things, fearful things. The Professor stilled as soon as he noticed him.

  At Hazebrouck, Melville and Ira and I went to have a feed of eggs and chips, but discovered that we did not have enough money amongst us. As we looked in the windows of the shop we saw big, good-natured Gordon sitting alone at a table, and at once went in. He could not speak French and we were able to make madame understand that he would pay the bill. As we ate I talked with Ira, and found him changed. He was quiet, thoughtful, kind in manner, and never raised his voice as he calmly told me that everything was all right with him, he had got hold of himself. I dared not ask him what he meant, and he told me without asking. He was going to his death, he said, and would meet it like a soldier, and there was that in his voice that told me any argument of mine would be futile. My skin was pricked with goose flesh as he talked.

  Melville heard all he said and was impressed. We all forgot about our empty pockets until Gordon had risen to go, and we were in a predicament. He looked at us, then grinned in his usual manner. “I’ll bet you guys were planning to stick me,” he said. “Just to let you have your joke, I’ll go ahead and pay.” And he did. He was a big-boned man, sometimes a little awkward in his work, but no bigger heart than his beat under khaki.

  It began to rain that night and continued all the next day. We went to Ypres and waited there four hours. Tommy and I went exploring and found our way to a lane that led to an old ruin half-hidden by piled wreckage. We scrambled over debris and got into a long, shadowy passage with a film of moisture on its walls, ending at a door as cold and stiff as a thing dead and rigid. I pushed it in, wondering what we might discover, but it was only a large inner room, the windows completely blocked so that little light crept in. It was a place of dull mystery, shadows and watching darkness, and the stillness of desolation brooded over it. Tommy shivered, and so did I, and we hurried out into the drizzle and stared around.

  I told him how in 1382 the Bishop of Norwich had landed at Calais with sixty thousand men and marched to take Ypres – and failed. In my little guide book I read descriptions of that part of Belgium. “White villages glistening in warm sunshine, orchards teeming with golden fruit, here and there a gleam of water. The land is highly cultivated. Waving cornfields overshadow the soil, the homes are ornamented with ivy, the honeysuckle, rose and vine peep from groves of poplar or willow; and placid waters – the slow streams and still canals, which
intersect that land in all directions – sparkle and glimmer. Yet this landscape of mild earth, so lovely in an aspect of repose, has been the theatre of almost all the sanguinary wars which from time to time have desolated Europe; that luxuriated crop has been manured with the best blood of the brave, the gay, the virtuous; those sleeping groves have responded to the storm of slaughter – and may yet again.”

  “Cut out that stuff.” Tommy spoke sharply and I put the book away. I could understand his irritableness; it was on all of us. The atmosphere of the Salient had gripped us. Before us, all around us, in the fan of a great wheel, it lay, Pilckem, Wieltje, Railway Wood, Hooge, Sanctuary Wood, Mont Sorrell, Hill 60, Hollebeke. Among the veterans I had visited in other battalions I had heard of numerous Farms, Lancashire, Turco, Argyle, Hussar, and Essex. And there were Cottages and the Willows, and Admiral’s Road, and Hellfire Corner, and Crab Crawl, the Spoil Bank, the Bluff, Maple Copse and Zillibeke Lake. We peered around us as we marched out into that flat world of mud and water, a desolation racked by explosions, fetid with slime of rotting things, gray and gruesome beyond description. We went to California Trench, relieving the 4th C.M.R.s, and found it a dreadful ditch with make shift shelters. The rain continued and we stood about like wooden Indians or arranged some sort of roof to shed the drizzle. There was considerable shelling from all angles and at dusk the Salient seemed a mighty ghoul, something invisible and vengeful, blood-seeking, watching. All that night we sat in such shelter as we had and were soaked by constant dripping, chilled to the bone. Dawn came slowly and with a clinging penetrating mist that made even the rifles clammy to the touch. We got out and moved off in small parties and an officer came to INSPECT that swamp hole in which we had cowered, to see if any cigarette butt or rubbish had not sunk in the mire. Wheeeee–ump! A shell, probably a stray, came with a heart-stopping suddenness and exploded in the very niche Melville and I had excavated, leaving the lieutenant a bloody pulp.

  We moved to tents in St. Jean and left our equipment there. It was still raining and we were taken through the mud to battery positions. Horses and mules had drowned there as they tried to move the guns and so ropes were used, and thirty men tugged on each one. We could not pull the guns in the usual fashion as the mud gripped the wheels, so we turned them over and over until they were in new emplacements. It was tremendous labour. We wallowed often to our armpits in mud and water mixed to porridge thickness and the only thing solid underfoot was a dead man or his equipment. As we got the guns in their new places big black-winged Gothas came overhead and dropped bombs on us, or the track that was some hundred yards away. There ammunition-laden mules were packed in line and I saw direct hits made on broad rumps or on the shaky planks of the “board road.” More carcasses were piled beside the way, more legs to stiffen toward the skies, more bodies to distend and afford footholds for rats. Shambles of heads and heels and entrails were shovelled into the mire and the procession kept on. None of our airmen were in sight.

  Then the Hun shelled us. The battery had not loosed a round before one gun was wrecked by a direct hit and two gunners killed. We went away, back to our tents, sodden, shaking with cold and exhaustion, and were cheered by steaming hot tea and mulligan. But we sat at night in the rain-soaked tents, huddled in sitting positions on floors that were pooled with icy water and the shelling kept on. We sat there in the dark, unmoving, without speaking, our brains numbed by the awfulness of everything, trying to reach a comatose state that answered for sleep. Again we moved on, this time to an area dotted with derelict rusting tanks, and on the way met remnants of relieved battalions, men who looked like grisly discards of the battlefield, long unburied, who had risen and were in search of graves in which to rest. A German airman came over, flying deliberately, one of those hawks of the Black Cross, swooped down and sprayed bullets at one of the sausage balloons above Ypres. There were forked flames, billowing smoke, a meteor of fiery fabric, charred fragments, and two swaying figures attached to parachutes. They dangled a moment and then sank from sight.

  Some of the men slept in tanks. We went to one, Melville, Tommy and I, and could tip it with our weight. Water was underneath and as we rocked the monster, a head squeezed out in the muck, a face without eyes, the skin peeled as though from lard, a corpse long dead and frightful. We left the place and found a mound of solid earth, enough to make our bed, and there we stayed, between sandbagged walls, with a roof of salvaged corrugated iron. Not far from us was an old trench revetted with German stick work, blocked at one part with broken wire and the black dead of forgotten fights. At night we were called forth and led to a dump and there laden with sections of new-made “bath mats.” All around the giant horseshoe of the Salient there were red flashes and winking glows and the misty light of flares.

  We went toward the front line, past water-logged trenches, a nightmare of scummy holes, an indescribable desolation, on and on. The sky was illumined by strange flickering lights, the reflection of a thousand gun flashes, and quivered with the passage of shells. As we neared the end of our duckwalk a few flares soared up ahead of us, alarmingly near, and their fitful gleams cast strange moving shadows over the swamp. A machine gun fired nervously and bullets buried themselves with vicious thuds in jagged, fang-like stubs nearby. We hurried, then met the foremost carriers without their loads. Each man, as he came to the end of the narrow “bath mats,” threw down the one he carried, butting it to that one on which he stood. Thus the path went on with amazing speed. But the boards were new and their whiteness was detected. Suddenly a hurricane of shell-fire was all about us. Fortunately I was just at the end and I threw my load down, jumped around and ran. Others heaved their sections wildly and all was confusion. High explosive rained all around us – stunning, stifling, ear splitting; everywhere there was a dead smell of gas and mud and blood.

  One man went down as I pushed by him and then we were all away. It was a miraculous escape, but the shelling followed the walk. I left it and plunged through mud a distance and gained another pathway. Someone seized my tunic, someone who wheezed dreadfully. It was “Old Bill,” night blind, up there with his load, and he had finished putting it in proper place before he ran. I walked with him, helped him back to solid footing, and back to our shelters.

  We went on to Abraham Heights and relieved the the R.C.R.’s. It was soft ground and we easily dug a trench and took shelter in it. Sambro was on one side and Melville on the other. As we worked together our rations came, very slim, and dry socks, and – wonders of wonders – mail. Melville had not talked since we moved and I watched him closely. He took his pair of socks and placed them in a corner of the bivvy he had made. “Bill,” he said quietly, “remember this pair and get them when you come back.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  He tried to grin, big red-faced Melville, who had been with me through a hundred ticklish corners, and then he said simply, “I’m not coming back.”

  I tried to argue with him, asked him questions, but he never told me whether he had had a dream or what had given him his premonition, and he was not afraid. He had received a parcel containing some of his favourite chewing tobacco, “Napoleon,” and he gave it all away to the other men of the platoon, saying that he had more than he needed.

  Sambro and I looked at each other and talked together. There was nothing we could do. Melville had joked many times about Freddy’s “fool ideas,” and now he … As we stood gazing over the morbid ground there was a distant report, distinguishable above the others, and a shell came over us with a rush that made me perspire. It was a high velocity gun that was strafing us and that first hit was not fifty yards from where we had dug. Whii-iip! Another. Across from us Hickey and Alway had dug a short bed-length shelter and that shell caused them to duck low. Before they rose the third one came – and burst just beside them, burying them deep. We rushed to the place, choked with fumes, and dug with all our strength. It was of no use. We found Hickey first, and he had been killed by the blow of the explosion. Alwa
y was doubled beneath him.

  Once more we moved, in the darkness, up Grafenstrafel Road and halted by shell holes occupied by the 49th. As they left we dug in, connecting holes, then cut places in the trench side and hung ground sheets over them, and there boiled mess-tins of tea. One lot and our water was gone, and we were almost famished for hot drink. I crawled a distance in the muck and found a hole deep enough to dip from and filled my mess-tin. Twice more I went and we all had plenty of reviving tea. Then a low moaning sound in front caused us all to stand steady. It was repeated at intervals, sometimes faintly, and sounded like a man in agony. Once at Vimy, while over on the left of our company talking to members of the adjoining battalion, I had heard a man moaning in no man’s land, and had seen a sentry go out to help him. There had been a shot, and the sentry managed to crawl in, badly wounded by a German sniper, who had simulated suffering in order to lure a victim over the parapet. I thought it another trap and said so, but Sergeant Oron and Clark went out. They found a German in the swamp. He was badly wounded, had lain in the muck for three days and gangrene had set in. He hated us, bared his teeth, snarled like an animal. A stretcher party took him to the nearest dressing station, struggling for hours in the mud, and left him to await his turn in the line. Before it came, a shell dropped between him and a wounded officer and blew them to atoms.

  Clark told me I was wanted at the end of the trench. An officer was there and told me I was to go on patrol with him. His men were all of another platoon and I did not know where we were, but I went gladly. Action helped me in the Salient. It was the deadly waiting, helpless waiting, that was unnerving, for always it seemed as if swooping Death were just above us, hovering, or reaching tentacles from dark corners. There was much whispering among the men and mention of a pillbox at Furst Farm. We moved out slowly, cautiously, through a farmyard, slimy, nauseating with putrid filth and stench, and crept along a hedge toward a road. All at once I froze. Directly in front of me I could see the outline of pot helmets. German heads, close together. A patrol seemed bunched there, waiting for us. The officer did not know what move to make and as we peered I saw that the helmets had never tilted a fraction. They seemed fixed, immovable, and two of us crept forward. Every German was dead.