The fear of death or dishonour will make even cavalry dig, even without tools – especially when they were urged on by a man like Curzon, and when they were helped by finding themselves in muddy fields whose soil yielded beneath the most primitive makeshift tools. A man could dig in that mud with his bare hands – many men did. The Twenty-second sank into the earth just as will a mole released upon a lawn. The crudest, shallowest grave and parapet quadrupled a man’s chance of life.
The fortunate ditch which constituted the greater part of the regiment’s frontage, and the shallow holes dug on the rest of it, linked together subsequently by succeeding garrisons, constituted for months afterwards the front line of the British trench system in the Salient – a haphazard line, its convolutions dictated by pure chance, and in it many men were to lose their lives for the barren honour of retaining that worthless ground, overlooked and searched out by observation from the slight crests (each of which, from Hill 60 round to Pilckem, was to acquire a name of ill-omen) which the cavalry brigade had chanced to be too late, by a quarter of an hour, to occupy.
For the moment there could be no question of readjustment of the line. Some time in the late afternoon the bombardment began – a rain of shells compared with which anything Curzon had seen in South Africa was as a park lake to the ocean. It seemed impossible for anything to live through it. The bombardment seemed to reduce men to the significance of ants, but, like ants, they sought and found shelter in cracks in the ground; the very pits the shells dug gave them protection, for this bombardment, so colossal to their dazed minds, was not to be compared with the later bombardments of the war when mathematical calculations showed that every patch of ground must be hit by three separate shells.
When it was falling dark the bombardment ceased and the German volunteers came forward in a new attack, climbing over their heaped dead, to leave fresh swathes of corpses only a few yards further on. It was the lifting of the bombardment and the roar of musketry from the Surreys on the left which the dazed men huddled in the mud first noticed, but it was Curzon who repelled that attack. There was no limit to his savage energy in the execution of a clear-cut task. He had no intention in the least of impressing his men with his ability to be everywhere at once, but that was the impression which the weary troopers formed of him. In his anxiety to see that every rifle was in action he hurried about the line rasping out his orders. The wounded and the faint-hearted alike brought their rifles to their shoulders again under the stimulus of his presence. It was this kind of leadership for which all his native talents, all his experience and all his training were best suited. While Curzon was at hand not the most fleeting thought of retreat could cross a man’s mind.
The attack withered away, and darkness came, and the pitiless chilling rain continued to fall. Curzon, with every nerve at strain with the responsibility on his shoulders, felt no need for rest. There was much to be done – ammunition to be gathered from the pouches of the dead, patrols to be sent out to the front to guard against a night surprise, wounded to be got out of the way, back to the shell-hole where the medical officer crouched trying to save life by the last glimmerings of a dying electric torch. The earth still shook to the guns, the sky was still lighted by the flame of the explosions. Shells were still coming over, and every little while a tremor of alarm ran down the attenuated line and men grabbed their rifles and fired blindly into the darkness while the patrols out in front fell flat on their faces and cursed their own countrymen.
There was an alarm from the rear while Curzon was stumbling along through the dark seeing that the line was evenly occupied. He heard the well-remembered voice of the Brigadier saying: ‘Point that rifle the other way, you fool,’ and he hastened back to where a trooper was sheepishly allowing the General and a dozen looming forms behind him to approach.
‘Ah, Curzon,’ said the General when he heard his voice. ‘All well here?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Curzon.
‘I’ve had to bring up the supply column myself,’ said the General.
A brighter flash than usual lit up the forms of the men in his train; the leader was in R.E. uniform and bent under a load of spades.
‘Thank God for those,’ said Curzon. He would not have believed, three months back, that he would ever have thanked God for a gift of spades, but now he saw no incongruity.
‘I thought you’d be glad of ’em,’ chuckled the General. ‘I’ve got you fifty spades. The rest’s S.A.A. I suppose you can do with that, too?’
‘My God, yes,’ said Curzon. The supply of small arm ammunition had fallen away to less than a dozen rounds a man. He had not dared to think what would happen when it was finished.
‘Take it over, then,’ said the General. ‘I’ve got a lot more for these men to do.’
‘Can’t they stay here, sir?’ said Curzon. He longed inexpressibly for a reinforcement of a dozen riflemen.
‘No,’ snapped the General, and then, to the carrying party: ‘Put that stuff down and get back as quick as you can.’
There was a bustle in the darkness as the regiment took charge of the loads. The voice of Lieutenant Borthwick could be heard demanding ammunition for his precious guns. Curzon left Major Browning to supervise the distribution while, obedient to a plucked sleeve, he followed the General away out of earshot of the men.
‘I couldn’t send you up any food,’ said the General. ‘But you’re all right until to-morrow for that, with your emergency rations. You’ll have two a man, I suppose, counting what you’ll get off the dead.’
‘Pretty nearly, sir,’ said Curzon.
‘You’ll be able to hold on, I suppose?’ went on the General, his voice dropping still lower. His face was invisible in the darkness.
‘Of course, sir,’ said Curzon.
‘Speak the truth – lying’s no use.’
Curzon ran his mind’s eye over the line, visualizing the improvements those fifty spades would bring about, the new life the fresh ammunition would bring to Borthwick’s guns, the piled dead on the hill-top above, the exhaustion of his troopers.
‘Yes, we ought to get through to-morrow all right,’ he said.
‘To-morrow? You’ll have to hold on for a fortnight, perhaps. But let’s get through to-morrow first. You’ve got patrols out? You’re strengthening your line?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I knew I could trust you all right. I couldn’t get over here during the day – had to stay with the Surreys. Browne’s dead, you know.’
‘Not really, sir?’
‘Yes. And so’s Harvey of the Dragoons. You succeed to the brigade if I’m hit.’
‘Don’t say that, sir.’
‘Of course I must say it. But I’ve got no orders to give you in case I am. It’ll just mean holding on to the last man.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘There’s two hundred men in the brigade reserve. Horse holders. R.Es. A.S.C. Don’t be lavish with ’em, because that’s all there are between here and Havre. And don’t trust that major who’s commanding the Surreys now. You know who I mean – Carver’s his name.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’m getting a second line dug on the edge of the wood back there. But it won’t be any use if they break through. Not enough men to man it. So you’ve got to hold on. That’s all.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Good-night, Curzon.’
‘Good-night, sir.’
The darkness engulfed the General as he plodded back alone across the sodden earth, and Curzon went back into the trench, to goad the men into more furious digging, to see that the sentries were alert. Yet even despite Curzon’s activity, despite the guns, and the shells, and the pitiless rain, there were men who slept, half-buried in the mire – there never was a time when at least a few British private soldiers in any unit could not contrive an opportunity for sleep.
Chapter Six
Perhaps it had been a premonition which had caused the Brigadier-General to talk so freely to Curzon about what should be
done should the latter succeed to his command. It was no later than next morning, when the German bombardment was searching for the shallow seam in the earth wherein crouched the Twenty-second Lancers, that a mud-daubed runner came crawling up the drainage ditch which had already assumed the function of a communication trench in this section, and gave Curzon a folded scrap of paper. The writing was blurred and shaky, and the signature was indecipherable, but the meaning was clear. The General was dead and Curzon was in command of the brigade. The runner was able to supplement the information – a shell had hit the brigade headquarters and had killed or wounded everyone there and left everything disorganized. It was clearly necessary that Curzon should waste no time in taking over his duties.
He passed the word for Major Browning, and briefly handed over the command of the regiment to him.
‘What are the orders, sir?’ asked Browning.
A Frenchman would have shrugged his shoulders at that question. Curzon could only eye Browning with a stony expressionless gaze.
‘None, except to hold on to the last man,’ he said, not taking his eyes off Browning’s face. Perhaps this was as well, for he saw a flicker of despair in Browning’s eyes. ‘You understand, Browning?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Browning, but Curzon had already made a mental note that Browning of the Twenty-second Lancers would need stiffening as much as Carver of the Surreys.
‘Those are positive orders, Browning,’ he said. ‘There’s no chance of their being modified, and you have no discretion.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Browning. Whatever motives had led Browning to join the Twenty-second Lancers as a pink-faced subaltern, twenty years ago, he was being condemned for them now to mutilation or death, and Curzon did not feel sorry for him, only irritated. Men who stopped to think about their chances of being killed were a nuisance to their superior officers.
‘Right,’ said Curzon. ‘I’ll come up again and inspect as soon as I can.’
He picked his way along the ditch, the runner crawling behind him. But such was his appreciation of the need for haste that Curzon ignored the danger of exposing himself, and walked upright across the fields pitted with shell-holes while the runner cursed him to himself. The cottage beside the lane to which the runner guided him had been almost completely demolished by a high-explosive shell. As Curzon approached the first sound to strike his ear was a high-pitched, querulous stream of groans and blasphemies. There were some dead bodies and fragments of bodies lying on the edge of the lane, and the red tabs on one obscene fragment showed what had happened to the Brigadier. The groans and blasphemies came from Carruthers the brigade-major, or what was left of him. There was an orderly bending over him, as he lay on the grass, but the orderly was despairing of inducing this shrieking thing which had graced so many race meetings ever to be silent. Five or six runners were squatting stoically in the ditch near the cottage; there was an R.E. detachment stumbling through the cabbages in the garden with a reel of telephone wire.
Within the shattered walls, down in the cellar now exposed to the light of day, lay Durrant, the staff officer, who yesterday had guided the Twenty-second into action. His left arm was still bare, but the bandage round it was no longer red, but black, and his tunic was torn open at the breast showing white skin. He was putting a field telephone back on its hook as Curzon arrived, and, catching sight of him, he snatched it up again with a hasty:
‘Hullo. Hold on. Here he is.’
Then he looked up at Curzon and went on:
‘We’re through to the First Corps, sir. Just re-established communication.’
Curzon lowered himself into the cellar and took up the instrument. There was a moment of murmurings and grumblings before the earpiece spoke.
‘Commanding the Cavalry Brigade?’ it asked.
‘Yes. This is Colonel Curzon, Twenty-second Lancers, just taken over.’
‘Right. You’ll go on reporting to us for the present. We’ve told your division.’
‘Very well. Any orders?’
‘You are to hold your position at all costs. At – all – costs. Good-bye.’
Curzon put down the receiver and stood silent. The pain-extorted ravings of Carruthers, twenty yards away, came pouring down to him, cutting through the roar of the battle, but he heard neither sound. He was tugging at his moustache; his rather full, rather loose lips were set hard and straight. He was adjusting his mind to the business of commanding a brigade; and he was ready for the responsibility in ten seconds, and turned to the wounded staff officer.
‘Any report from the Dragoons?’ he demanded.
That was the beginning of eleven days of anxiety and danger and responsibility and desperate hard work. Even if Curzon had the necessary literary ability, he could never write an account of the First Battle of Ypres in which he took so prominent a part, for his later recollections of it could never be sorted out from the tangle into which they lapsed. He could never recover the order in which events occurred. He could never remember which day it was that the commander of the First Corps, beautifully groomed, superbly mounted, came riding up the lane to see for himself what were the chances of the Cavalry Brigade maintaining its precarious hold upon its seemingly untenable position, nor which day it was that he had spent in the trenches of the Surreys, leading the counter-attack which caused the Germans to give back at the moment when there were only a hundred or two exhausted Englishmen to oppose the advance of an army corps.
Curzon’s work during these eleven days resembled that of a man trying to keep in repair a dam which is being undermined by an unusual flood. He had to be here, there, and everywhere plastering up weak points – the materials at his disposal being the two hundred men of the brigade reserve whom he had found ready to his hand, and the scrapings of other units, reservists, L. of C. troops, which were sent up to him once or twice from G.H.Q. There was the ammunition supply to be maintained, food to be sent up into the line – for water the troops drank from the stagnant pools in the shell-holes – and bombs to be doled out from the niggardly supply which the R.E. detachments in the field were just beginning to make.
He had to watch over his reserves like a miser, for he was pestered every minute with pathetic appeals from his subordinates for aid – and in this conservation of his resources his natural temperament was of use to him, because he found no difficulty in saying ‘no’, however urgently the request was drafted, if his judgement decided against it. He put new heart into the men by the way in which he disregarded danger, for to his natural courage was added the mental preoccupation which gave him no chance to think about personal risks. No soldier in the world could have remained unmoved by the nonchalant fashion in which he was always ready to lead into danger. In every crisis his big arrogant nose and heavy black moustache were to be seen as he came thrusting forward to judge for himself. Over and over again during those eleven days it was his arrival which turned the scale.
He was one of the fortunate ones. In the battle where the old British Army found its grave, where more than two-thirds of the fighting men met with wounds or death, he came through unscathed even though there were bullet holes in his clothes. It was as unlikely that he should survive as that a spun penny should come down heads ten times running, and yet he did; it was only men with that amount of good fortune who could come through long enough to make the tale of their lives worth the telling.
He was fortunate, too, in the chance of war which had put his brigade into line separate from the rest of the cavalry corps. There was no divisional general to reap the credit of the work done by his men, and the corps headquarters under whose direction he was placed regarded with approval the officer who carried out his orders with so little protest or complaint or appeal for further assistance, and who was always ready to try and wring another ounce of effort out of his exhausted men.
The old army died so gloriously at Ypres because the battle they had to fight called for those qualities of unflinching courage and dogged self-sacrifice in which they were pre
-eminent. They were given the opportunity of dying for their country and they died uncomplaining. It occurred to no one that they had to die in that fashion because the men responsible for their training had never learned any lessons from history, had never realized what resources modern invention had opened to them, with the consequence that men had to do at the cost of their lives the work which could have been done with one-quarter the losses and at one-tenth the risk of defeat if they had been adequately armed and equipped. And of the surviving officers the ones who would be marked out for promotion and high command in the new army to be formed were naturally the ones who had proved themselves in the old-fashioned battle – men like Curzon of the Twenty-second Lancers.
For there could be no doubt at all that the High Command looked with approval on Curzon. When eventually the arrival of new units from distant garrisons and of an army corps from India enabled the exhausted front-line troops to be withdrawn a very great general indeed sent for Curzon at headquarters. The message arrived the very day that Curzon brought the cavalry brigade out of the line. He saw the brigade into billets – not much accommodation was necessary for those few score survivors, filthy, vermin-ridden men who fell asleep every few minutes – and did his best to smarten himself up. Then he got on his horse – it was good to feel a horse again, between his knees – and rode slowly over in the dark of the late afternoon.
To Curzon there was something incredibly satisfying in his arrival at that pleasant château. He had seen enough of ruin and desolation, of haggard men in tatters, of deaths and wounds and misery, during the past weeks. Some of his beliefs and convictions had been almost shaken lately. It was a nightmare world from which he had emerged – a world in which cavalry regiments had clamoured for barbed wire, reels and reels of it, and in which horses had been ungroomed and neglected so that their holders could be sent into action with rifles and bayonets, and in which he had almost begun to feel doubts as to England’s ultimate victory.
It was like emerging from a bad dream to ride in at the gates of the château, to have a guard turn out to him all spick and span, and to have his horse taken in charge by a groom whose uniform did not detract in the least from his general appearance of an old family retainer. There were beautiful horses looking out from loose-boxes; there were half a dozen motor cars polished to a dazzling glitter.
The General Page 7