John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  The work goes on in a sort of sequence of smells – first the smell of ether, then the smell of iodine, then ether again. All the time, outside, the shells are passing and bursting; but the noise seems unreal down in the cellar, and very far away. Sometimes the strangeness of it strikes deeply home, that this down in the cellar is the height of man’s skill, done many feet underground at midnight because of the depth of man’s deficiency. The drivers sit on a bench beside the buckets of legs and fall asleep there, and wake up from time to time to see men bending over the table, and great shadows falling and shifting on the ceiling, and limbs turning yellow from the iodine. The iodine gets into the eyes, and a certain quietness in people’s movements gets into the nerves, and one feels that it all happened long ago, in some old tower – not now at all – and that it is part of a dream which once had a meaning.

  Once or twice, as the drivers wake, men come into the cellars, and presently the sick arrive, haggard and white, but able to walk, and the gathering breaks up and the ambulances are free to go. The moon is blotted by this time; it is darker and beginning to rain, the men say. On leaving the operating-room, one hears again as a real thing the scream of the rush of the big shells, the thump of the bursts, and the crash of the great guns. The stretchers are passed into the ambulances, the sick are helped onto seats, they are covered with blankets, and the doors are closed. It is much darker now and the rain has already made the ground sticky; and with the rain the smell of corruption has become heavier, and the ruin is like what it is – a graveyard laid bare. Shells from the enemy rush overhead and burst in a village which lies on the road home. They are strafing the village; the cars have a fair chance of being blown to pieces; it is as dark as pitch and the road will be full of new shell-holes. The drivers start their engines and turn the cars for home; the rain drives in their faces as they go, and along the road in front of them the shells flash at intervals, lighting the tree-stumps.

  This is a quiet evening’s work in a quiet time, but it is not always thus. Often there is no moon, but a blinding snow and a road on fire with shell-bursts. Then the drivers grope forward by such glimmers as they can get from searchlights; they butt into the side of the road and lurch across craters, and perhaps break down on a road being searched by shells, and do their repairs in the scattering of the shrapnel.

  These drivers (there are now, and have been, some hundreds of them) are men of high education. They are the very pick and flower of American life, some of them professional men, but the greater number of them young men on the threshold of life, lads just down from college or in their last student years. All life lies before them in their own country, but they have put that aside for an idea, and have come to help France in her hour of need. Two of them have died and many of them have been maimed for France, and all live a life of danger and risk death nightly. To this company of splendid and gentle and chivalrous Americans be all thanks and greetings from the friends and allies of sacred France.

  [source: Harper’s Monthly Magazine, May 1917, pp.[801] – 810]

  The Irony of Battle

  Irony is difficult to define, for it has many kinds and many depths; it may be light, evil and bitter, artificial and profound; it is sometimes noble in persons, as in the three or four recorded words of Dante; and it is always strange and suggestive in circumstance. In the ironical suggestion of circumstances, if ever, men catch a hint of some working behind Life upon the surface of Life; one sees glimpses of a game being played, and wonders, for a moment, if all be accidental, the working of our own wills.

  The stories of wars (which often centre about the persons of great ideas) are full of ironical circumstance, most of them, no doubt, the inventions of the poets, but some of them true. The tale that, before his defeat, Mark Antony heard in the air the music of troops passing from him, and knew that his god, Hercules, was giving him over, is probably poetical, like Pompey’s dream before Pharsalia. But it is true, and strange, that Cromwell died, knowing that his effort had failed, on the anniversary of the day which made it for the time successful. After the battle of Sedan, Napoleon the Third surrendered to the enemy in a room hung with prints of the successes of the great Napoleon. It may be that in this present war, the end will come with some strangeness and mockery of circumstance humbling to the proud.

  Probably everyone who has seen the fields of this present war has seen cases and instances of irony. Not far from one of the most famous battlefields of this war, there is a military cemetery, containing some two thousand dead. Just beside it is a village Calvary with the inscription: – “C’EST AINSI QUE DIEU A AIMÉ LE MONDE.”

  On another battlefield, in a field fortress, stubbornly defended by the enemy and at last won by the English, there is the crater of a mine, sprung by the English under a strong part of the defence. When the fortress was at last won, this crater was found to be littered with enemy dead. One of them was found lying on his face gripping a handful of papers. The papers were little tracts or leaflets sent round (apparently) for distribution to the men, and perhaps this man had been killed in the act of distributing them. The leaflets each bore a rough woodcut, representing a sinking steamer, with a naval cutter rowing towards her. The title underneath the woodcut was: – “THE U BOAT’S REWARD.”

  Close to this crater, in another part of the same fortress, where the fighting was close and desperate for several days together, the bodies of two men were found clutching each other as though wrestling. They had evidently grappled each other without weapons of any kind, and had then been killed by a shell or bomb. One of these men was a Bavarian, the other a man of some Scottish regiment. The Scotsman’s field service Bible had fallen from his pocket and lay open on the ground at a little distance from him. It was open at the 22nd Chapter of Deuteronomy, under the page headings “Humanity towards Brethren,” and “An uncertain Murder.”

  A more significant and more touching instance of the same thing may be seen in a distant part of the old battlefield of the Somme, in a part of the field where the attack of the English was a containing attack, not meant to do more than to hold the enemy while he was attacked and defeated in the main battle some miles away. Here, where the bombardment was not so terrible as in other parts of that awful moorland of battle, the spring has already begun to cover the desolation, the birds are singing and the grass pushing. The story of the battle is written plainly on the earth for anyone to read. There is the English line, just as the English held it when the battle began. In front of it is the greenish strip of No Man’s Land, with the English wire intact, save for lanes left in it for the passage of the troops in the charge. Two hundred yards down the slope is the dark, rusty tangle of the enemy wire, cut into rags and flung into heaps by the English shrapnel, which plied it for the whole of one terrible week, in the storm of fire which made the enemy speak of the Somme battle as the Blood Bath. All the way, from the English trench to the enemy wire, the English graves are heaped on the ground, just where the men fell in the minute of their leaving their trench. It is possible that they knew, as they went over the parapet, that their charge was but a secondary affair in the tactical scheme, and would not be decisive and glorious in the day’s history, so that the graves of these men are deeply pathetic. The marks of the graves stand up all the way to the enemy, almost like the men charging. Some are marked with crosses, others with rifles thrust into the ground by their bayonets, others with standing shells, or with strips of packing-case or bits of equipment. These last are nearly always the graves of the unknown or unrecognizable.

  Near one of these graves of the unknown a field prayer-book lies open in the mud at the Psalms appointed for the seventeenth day of the month. The mud and the rain have obliterated nearly all the print upon the page, but for one verse, which says, “Thou hast broken his hedge, thou hast torn down his strong places.” The enemy’s hedge is indeed broken there, and his strong place is now many miles away; so far that the guns cannot be heard from where this dead man lies.

  [source: The
Nation, 16 June 1917, p.272]

  Messages of Greeting . . . . . . From England to Russia . . .

  I wish the Russian revolution all glorious and complete success. That a great country, for so many years past the leader of the world in all the arts, should have at last cast out the government, at once devilish and incompetent, which broke Dostoievsky, exiled Kropotkin, threatened Tolstoy, bullied Tchaikovsky, and cramped, killed, blinded, and dwarfed every intelligence it could reach, throughout its continent of possessions; which, although the granary of the world, allowed its millions to go breadless, and although linked with us in arms betrayed its armies and its allies to the enemy, is the profoundest and most living event of our time. In greeting the new Russia we greet a new world and a new way of life for the world.

  [source: Manchester Guardian, 7 July 1917, p.26]

  In the Vosges

  The Story of an American Driver’s First Night Under Fire

  It is a year ago now. I was twenty at the time and had only just come out; in fact, I reached Paris on the thirteenth day after leaving home. When I reached Paris they sent me across France to join my section, which was down in the Vosges. I did not know then that trains in wartime are few and crowded; I came late and had to stand in the corridor all the way to Lorraine.

  The train made – – – – – , in Lorraine, on time, but there came a changement and delay; I could go no farther till the next morning. I had difficulty in getting permission to leave the station so as to sleep at an inn. During the night there was an air raid. In the morning there was another difficulty. The usual civilian train to – – – – – was suspended, owing to the movements of troops. The commandant of the station was too busy to attend to me. I went to his office to ask what I was to do, but it was crowded with officers, and his orderly kept me back. One officer who was writing at a desk told me that I could not go.

  I suppose that the men were nearly off their heads with work. I was on the platform for three hours, and in all that time men were bringing them papers, and officers were coming up for instructions. The line was busy, soldiers were cheering, trains full of troops came past, with windows full of shouting heads, and in the midst of all the noise they started loading the horses of a battery into some cars at a siding.

  While they were doing this I had another go at the commandant, and this time one of his officers said that I might go on with the battery. His orderly took me along and left me in charge of some artilleurs, who led me in to the dirty straw on the floor of a horse box, where I lay among the crowd, with my head on my bag.

  By and by we started and crawled along the line to where we stopped at a siding – for hours, it seemed. It was bitterly cold December weather, with snow overhead, and a flake or two blowing in the air. I don’t know that I have ever known a more evil day. None of the artilleurs knew where they were going – except vaguely, that there was to be a push on the right. We kept the doors closed and tried to keep warm. One of the men, who had just parted from his wife, was weeping; the others sang a little, and smoked and chaffed and cursed the cold.

  The Men in the Hospital Train

  Presently we heard a noise of shouting, so we opened the door and looked out, and saw a trainload of infantry going in the direction of the frontier. One of our artilleurs said, “Cà chauffe,” which means, I suppose, “Things are beginning to get a move on.” I was excited at this, yet anxious, for I did not much know what being in a battle would be like, or how much scared I should be. After this train had passed us we were allowed to proceed, and crawled on for an hour or two, when we stopped at a little station where there was a halted train that I shall never forget. One of the artilleurs pointed it out to me, with the remark that there was work for me.

  It was what is called a train sanitaire, or train for carrying the wounded. Part of it was divided up, so to speak, into residential blocks or compartments for the surgeons, cooks and orderlies, who lived and slept on board her day in, day out; the rest of it was for the wounded. I had never seen wounded men before; this was my first view of them. Of course the seriously hurt were lying on their stretchers inside the train; I could not see them. But I could see the others.

  By a chance the others were nearly all men suffering from shell shock, and on seeing them my first thought was that I was looking at a trainload of gibbering lunatics. All the windows were filled with faces full of terror and horror, with staring eyes and dribbling mouths.

  They were all white, and all ghastly; and none of them could stand being touched, or the sound of the train.

  They must have come out of the trenches during the night.

  The mud was caked thick upon them everywhere, except where they were bandaged, and one man, for some reason, stared at me in a way that I shall remember. It is possible that he never saw me, but his eyes were turned upon me all the time that I stood there. God knows what agony of terror and pain had brought that look upon him. It was the face of a man who for hours on hours has had to watch death coming nearer and nearer in its most awful form, and had at last been struck by death, and yet could not tell how badly. His arms and shoulder were all swathed in bandages, but I know now that he was not dangerously hit. By his look, he had been a clerk or shop assistant before the war, and a game of dominoes was about as much contest as he was fit for. Now he stared, as though the horror of what he had seen would never pass from his memory. His look had a kind of pity and a kind of ghastly envy in it for me who was young, and still clean and unwounded.

  After this we passed on out of the station to other stations, all full of the confusion and the bustle of war. There was certainly going to be a push on the right. At last we reached the terminus, where we all got out, and my friends, the artilleurs, bade me goodbye. They got out their horses and their guns and limbered up and away, in quick time. I never saw any of them again.

  When I got out I was numb with cold; snow was falling and we were well up among the foothills of the Vosges. It was about five o’clock in the evening, very dark, with no glimmer of a moon. As far as one could see we were in a kind of glen, with a sort of blackness, which might be hills, on both sides of the line. I had hoped some member of my section might be there to meet me, but when I saw there was none I realized that they had expected me by the earlier train, half a dozen hours before, and had now given me up.

  I went to the commandant of the depot to ask about it. He told me that a man had come down to meet me, but had long since given me up and gone. It was seven miles to the village where the section was billeted; I could walk it, he thought, unless stopped by the guards; or perhaps someone would give me a lift.

  Some First Impressions

  He was called away before I could ask him how I could get a lift. I waited for him to come back, but he did not come. His office was a little room, with a red-hot stove in it, and two tables, one his own and the other for his clerks. The clerks were two old soldiers, both intently busy, making three copies of everything on paper of different colours with pens that scratched. I wondered what it was they were doing and what would happen if they left out, say, a yellow copy or a dark-red one, in any of their sets of three.

  There were some prints upon the wall; a big coloured map of France with “the line” drawn across it in blue chalk; a map of the Vosges, with big red wafers stuck upon it to mark I know not what; and the famous yellow print of the Crown Prince, Le Raté, or The Thwarted, on the battlefield of the Marne. Men came in from time to time to leave papers on the commandant’s desk.

  By and by, after I had waited a long time, an officer who entered asked who I was. He looked at me pretty narrowly and asked to see my papers, which he studied with care, especially the photograph on my passport. This photograph was not very like me; it had been taken at home, before I put on my uniform, and my uniform had greatly changed my appearance. He asked if I had no photograph showing me in uniform, and when I said “No” he seemed displeased. My papers were en règle, but I had been told about the danger of spies, and the man’s manner
made me anxious. He asked how I had come on from – – – – – – , and then took my ordre de mission out of the room.