The Passing Bells

by Phillip Rock

  “The Fourth Middlesex reports contact with the enemy at Obourg bridge.”

  A map pin was placed on the spot. Other reports came in, and the sound of distant small-arms fire became more rapid and intense.

  “The West Kents and the Royal Fusiliers are heavily engaged. . . . Two Fritz battalions attacking Le Bois Haut . . .”

  By ten in the morning German artillery began to open up, and the telephone network to the line battalions started to break down as shellfire cut the wires. Messengers and battalion runners came and went. More dixies of hot tea were brought in along with bully beef and bread. Fenton sat in a corner of the operations room, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes. He felt out of things, a useless mouth to feed. He walked out onto the school play yard in the afternoon and watched the pall of smoke which lay heavily along the northern skyline. The towering slag heaps of the area chopped off visibility to a few hundred yards in any direction. A drab and miserable landscape, but people lived there, built homes, married, raised children, and sent them off each morning to this little dark brick school. Now shells were screaming out of the hot sky and thundering into the earth a mile from the village. The little houses stood waiting for the storm to reach them. Their occupants were gone or leaving; bundles of belongings were piled onto carts, into ancient, wheezing motorcars, in perambulators and two-wheeled dog carts. The shells inched closer to the village, and a haze of red dust from blasted houses obscured the sun. Chunks of debris splattered the yard, and the schoolhouse windows were starting to shatter under the heavy concussions.

  It seemed foolish to stand in the open with a good part of Frameries falling about him, so Fenton walked casually back toward the school, aware that a platoon of Highlanders at the far end of the play yard, and prudently under cover, were watching him. It would not do, he thought grimly, for a captain in the Coldstream Guards to run. A piper with a sense of humor blew a few notes of “Johnnie Cope”: “Hey, Johnnie Cope, are ye wauking yet?” The platoon laughed in appreciation, and Fenton doffed his cap to the piper when he reached the school building, a gesture that brought a burst of cheers—followed by a German howitzer shell which turned the center of the play yard into a volcano. The platoon of Royal Scots ducked, a swing and a teeter-totter were blown into lethal fragments, and Fenton dove headfirst through a door.

  The headquarters staff was still working efficiently despite the broken glass and fallen plaster that littered the rooms. A medical orderly wrapped a bandage around Fenton’s cut head, handed him a tot of rum, and then hurried off to aid the more desperately wounded, who were being brought into the schoolhouse in increasing numbers. Colonel Blythe, hollow eyed and grim faced, spotted Fenton nursing his head in a corner and came quickly over to him.

  “Are you all right, lad?”

  “Fine,” he said thickly. “Just a knock on the head.”

  “Because we’ve got a job for you. We’ve received orders to disengage and pull back five miles . . . set up a new line by nightfall. This bloody artillery is getting to be too bloody accurate.”

  “What does the general feel about that?”

  “Woody wants to stay and fight. He sent a message to GHQ asking for ten machine-gun teams. They won’t send them, of course. I doubt if there are ten Vickers guns to spare in the entire army. Anyway, machine guns won’t stop cannon, and the Huns are moving batteries of ’em onto our flank. We’ve got to pull back, but Woody’s afraid that once we start retreating there’ll be no end to it. He’s sure we’ll just keep sliding back to the coast.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “We’ve lost all contact with Fifth Division HQ at Elouges. Get in your car and hurry over there, make certain they know we’re pulling back to Sars-la-Bruyère. I’ll give you the timetables for the withdrawal. We must coordinate our movements or there’ll be frightful gaps in the line.” He shoved a packet of papers into Fenton’s hand. “Hurry along. That’s the good chap.”

  Fenton gave Webber the choice of staying or going along with him. Like any devoted batman, Webber elected to stay “with my officer.” He sat in the front with Lance Corporal Ackroyd, a loaded Lee-Enfield between his knees, convinced by rumors he had heard that hordes of Germans were on the roads disguised as Belgian nuns.

  The pattern of the roads forced them due south for a mile before they could hope to turn west toward Elouges. It was a slow mile. The road was choked with artillery and transport turning to go back. Some artillery officers were refusing to turn their teams around, cursing the fact that they had yet to fire their pieces at the enemy. Squads of Tommies from the Wiltshire Regiment were acting as military police, and soon the jam of horses, wagons, and guns was broken and the retreat became an orderly and steady flow to the south.

  The road to the west was narrow and twisting, meandering through fields, woods, nameless little villages, and past slag heaps and coal dumps. Streams of infantry crossed the road at a dozen places, moving away from the battle, which still cracked and thundered along the horizon. They were tired men, their uniforms torn and filthy, their faces black with coal dust, but they all appeared cheerful and full of optimism. A lieutenant in the Royal Irish, who flagged the car down to ask directions, told Fenton that they had stopped the Germans in their tracks at the canal.

  “Shot them down in droves . . . five rounds rapid all along the line. . . . Didn’t have to aim. . . . Came on in masses, shoulder to shoulder. I hear the Kaiser called our army contemptible. Wonder what he thinks now?” The lieutenant felt they were on the verge of a major victory even though they were, in his words, giving up a bit of ground. It seemed to Fenton that more than just a “bit of ground” was being given up. The army was turning its back on an advancing enemy, and it would be a logistic nightmare to get it turned around again. The lieutenant had assumed that the hundred yards or so of his platoon’s front was the entire conflict, and he had seen the German attacks on that front wither away under the murderous rifle fire of his marksmen. He had not seen the big map at HQ that revealed the action at Mons as being only a tiny part of a huge battle raging from the Swiss border to Brussels. A battle is more than the sum of its parts. Even a stupendous victory at Mons would mean little or nothing if the French armies were falling back from the frontier, which they seemed to be doing. The tiny British Expeditionary Force was way out on a limb, and if it didn’t pull back in a hurry, that limb was going to be chopped off. There was no point in trying to explain any of that to a euphoric young Irishman who felt he had just won the war. Fenton gave him some cigarettes, the directions to Sars-la-Bruyère, and told Lance Corporal Ackroyd to drive on.

  No one at 5th Division HQ gave a damn about the withdrawal timetable of the 3rd Division. The pressure on 5th Division’s front—and that pressure was severe—made it necessary for the officers to devise their own timetable for retreat. Shells were thudding closer and closer to Elouges and turning the roads into interlocking craters. German troops were across the canal in force and the rear-guard action was becoming desperate. Most of the bridges across the canal had been blown, but large formations of German cavalry supported by infantry were sweeping around the canal east of Conde and taking the division in flank. Coordinated withdrawal was impossible. Each battalion had to pull back when it could.

  “Tell Sir Julian that we’ll try not to leave any gaps, but we can’t possibly guarantee it,” the division commander’s ADC said a bit testily. “After all, this isn’t Salisbury maneuvers.”

  Lance Corporal Ackroyd was pacing restlessly beside the car as Fenton left the HQ building in the town square. A battery of eighteen-pounders in a seedy little park was firing shrapnel at a not-too-distant hill, and firing as rapidly as the crews could load the shells. Webber sat rigidly in the front seat clutching his rifle, head turned, watching the shells splatter the skyline with bursts of black smoke.

  “Where to now, sir?” Ackroyd said as he opened the car’s rear door. He had to shout to be heard.

  Fenton looked at his watch. Four twenty-five.
It would be dark by the time they got back to Frameries, and the chances were that the division would have pulled out by then. They would have to catch up with it on the road to Sars-la-Bruyère. He sat on the running board with Ackroyd and went over the map with him. The main road south was starting to clog up badly; transport wagons, gun teams, and troops were already backing up into the town square. To drive into that crush would be folly.

  “We can easily go around, sir,” the corporal said. “This is a big, powerful car and the fields are dry as stone. We could cut across country and be at this Sarlabrewer in two hours.”

  It sounded reasonable to Fenton, and he made a mental note to recommend Ackroyd for another chevron.

  The car plowed through fields of oat and barley, leaving a wake of bent grain, but after a few miles the landscape changed from flat fields to a thickly wooded country interspersed with slate quarries and coal works. A labyrinth of narrow dirt roads, none of which could be found on the map, headed in all directions. They took one that looked promising, but, after two miles of steady travel to the south, the road ended abruptly at a coal mine and they had to turn back and try another. The new road wandered haphazardly south, then west, then south again, going through dense woods, the branches of trees forming a gloomy canopy. At one point Ackroyd had to brake in a hurry to keep from slamming into a troop of French dragoons who suddenly emerged from the shadowed woods at a trot, the horses lathered, the riders gaunt-faced with fatigue, moving across the road in a flood of foam-flecked horsehide and glittering accouterments. They were part of General Sordet’s corps screening the BEF’s left flank, clattering past in the fading sunlight like ghost cavalry on the way to Waterloo. The woods on the other side of the road swallowed them up.

  “Blimey,” an awed Ackroyd murmured. “They don’t ’arf look a sight.”

  There were more cavalry further down the road—British hussars, a hundred or more walking their tired horses. The khaki-clad troopers looked less splendid than their French counterparts, but more warlike with their Lee-Enfield rifles jutting up from the saddle sheaths. Fenton recognized the major in command, one of the better whist players at the Marlborough Club, and called out to him. The man walked slowly up to the car, leading his horse.

  “Hello, Fenton,” he said. “What are you doing out here all on your lonesome?”

  “Trying to reach Sars-la-Bruyère.”

  “Well, this road will take you there—eventually. But the place is an unholy mess . . . jam-packed with transport, and all of it moving back into France. What’s happening up north?”

  “Damned if I know exactly. Big fight this morning all along the canal from Mons to Conde. We did well, I think, but the corps’s in full retirement nonetheless.”

  The major’s smile was thin. “Talk about the fog of war. The right hand hasn’t a clue to what the left hand’s doing. I don’t like this groping around in the dark one bloody bit, I can tell you. Got any whiskey?”

  “Afraid I don’t.”

  “Pity.”

  There was a crackle of rifle fire in the distance, the sound distorted by the wall of trees. The major cocked his head to one side like a hound. The rifle fire slacked off to be replaced by the unmistakable chatter of a machine gun.

  “Trumpeter!” the major shouted as he swung up into the saddle. “Mount! At the canter! . . . Forward!”

  A bugle blared, and the troop mounted and followed the major across the road and into the trees. They were soon out of sight, swallowed by shadows as the French dragoons had been. There was something foreboding about the woods that brought a shiver up Fenton’s spine. They might not have seemed so ominous at noon, but the sun was almost down now, and the sky, or what could be seen of it, was a blood red. The faint light that filtered through the beech trees had the same sanguinary hue.

  “Drive on,” he said. “Fast.”

  The road curved east, then due west, and the woods began to thin out. The sun was a grossly enlarged scarlet ball that seemed to touch the road ahead of them. Shadows flickered across it.

  “More bleedin’ horses,” Ackroyd muttered as he stepped on the brakes.

  “Lancers,” Webber said, squinting into the glare from the windshield.

  Fenton caught a glimpse of the riders’ headgear silhouetted against the sun. Not English cloth caps nor French brass casques, but small helmets with a flat projection on top, like a miniature center-post table upended.

  “Uhlans,” he said with remarkable sangfroid, considering the chilling quality of that name. “Back up.”

  Private Webber was only a batman, but even the lowliest guardsman went through the regimental training depot and its extensive musketry course. He stood up, braced his body against the windshield, raised the Lee-Enfield to his shoulder, and squeezed off a shot. One of the shadowy figures toppled to the road and a riderless horse careened wildly past the car. His second shot went wide as Ackroyd threw the gears into reverse and floored the accelerator, the car roaring back down the road, weaving from side to side. There was a burst of machine-gun fire from the fringe of the woods ahead of them, and bullets splattered the car, shrieking through metal, rubber, and glass. The front tires blew and the car lurched violently off the road into a ditch. Fenton caught a glimpse of Webber toppling backward with blood sheeting his face, and then he was flying out of the back of the car, crashing through branches and landing heavily in a drift of summer-dried leaves.

  He blacked out from the fall, and when he opened his eyes he could see nothing but dancing red lights. He struggled to breathe, but something seemed to be pressing against his face, holding his mouth and nose with a suffocating grip. He began to struggle, and then a mouth pressed against his ear and the barely audible voice of Lance Corporal Ackroyd said, “Don’t move, sir . . . don’t move.”

  The grip on his nose slackened, but Ackroyd’s hand was still over his mouth. His eyes came into proper focus, and he could see that the red lights that had been darting and flipping about had turned into billows of flame shooting up from the car. He was lying a good thirty yards from it, well into the woods, his view of the fire fragmented by slender black trunks. Surely, he thought, he had not been thrown thirty yards through a beech forest. Lance Corporal Ackroyd must have dragged him. By Harry, he’d see that the man made sergeant, and was awarded a DCM to boot. He nodded slowly, an assuring signal to Ackroyd that his restraint was no longer necessary.

  “Where are they?” he whispered.

  “Fuckin’ everywhere . . . sir.”

  He could hear them now: the soft thud of horses’ hooves, the crack and splinter of young trees and underbrush, the cursing of men—guttural German curses. There was a clatter of hobnailed jackboots on the road—the Jäger unit of infantry who followed along behind the Germany cavalry to support them with expert rifle and machine-gun fire. Someone shouted, “Achtung! Die Engländer kommen!”

  A bugle call from far down the road, and then the distant thunder of galloping horses. The uhlans who had been searching the wood crashed back toward the road. A machine gun began to clatter from a position near the still-blazing car. Rifles joined it, and the firing was sustained and intense. Fenton could see nothing of the action, but he could visualize it all too clearly—the hussars coming back at the gallop, drawn by the fire, or pyre, more than likely, because poor old Webber was probably being consumed by it. Horses and men would be going down in a heap.

  “Oh, God.”

  “Shhh . . . quiet, sir . . . quiet. Can you walk, sir?”

  “I . . . don’t know.”

  “Try, sir . . . try.” There was an edge of desperation in Ackroyd’s voice. Fenton got slowly to his feet. There was a dull pain in the small of his back, but nothing seemed to be broken.

  “Keep low, sir . . . and run like hell.”

  The direction seemed unimportant at the moment, the only factor being to get as far away as possible from the German lancers and the Jägers; the latter, as Fenton knew, were born hunters and foresters. Bending nearly double, the
y began to run, Ackroyd in the lead, racing through the closely grouped trees, stumbling and plunging through the thick underbrush. The firing continued behind them, but no shots came their way until they broke out of the woods into a small clearing. Dark shapes moved, and rifles barked. Ackroyd dove for the tall grass with Fenton right behind him. They lay flat and crawled as bullets hissed through the grass around them. Once among the trees again, they stood up and kept running, dodging from trunk to trunk, not stopping until total exhaustion brought them panting and sobbing to the ground. Fenton vomited and rolled onto his back under a hawthorn bush. Ackroyd lay on his face as though dead. They were deep in the forest, and there was no sound but the gentle rustling of leaves, a nightingale’s lilting notes, and their own tortured breaths.

  They hid by day and moved by night, working their way slowly southward. The German Army was all around them, but not in a solid mass. There would be hours during the day when they would not see even one enemy soldier, and they would debate whether to leave their hiding place—be it copse or haystack, abandoned mine shaft or reeking pigpen—and walk on more quickly than they could at night, but invariably Germans would appear sometime during the day: a solitary squad scouting a road, or an entire battalion swarming across a field. And then there was always the lurking menace of uhlans, death’s-head hussars, or less exotic-looking cavalry to worry about. So they walked south by night, traveling by the map, using kilometer road markers as points of reference, and avoiding the villages. They ate apples and wild berries and what little food they could find in the many abandoned cottages. The weather was good, hot by day and balmy at night, with cloudless skies and enough moon- and starlight to make walking cross-country easy. A sudden, violent thunderstorm struck during the second night of their journey and forced them to seek shelter in a barn. The rain stopped at dawn, but a different thunder continued—the thump-thump-thump of heavy shellfire. The artillery bombardment was nearly due east, ten miles or so away, at or near Le Cateau, as far as Fenton could judge. It continued from dawn to dusk and was obviously a major battle, but when the firing ceased there was no way of knowing who had won.