At this meeting, one of the ‘frocks’ from Whitehall took the Chief of the Imperial General Staff aside and asked how he could best help.
“By leaving the soldiers alone,” replied the C.I.G.S. to Lord Milner.
*
No. 1 Composite battalion, occupying two hundred yards of the west bank of the river, lay in moonlight which seemed to be shedding pollen upon pink flowers of frost growing in glitter upon the ruins about them. Sentries stood swinging arms, and blowing upon painful fingers. Phillip had put a piece of match-stick under his left eye-lid, to keep himself awake.
Fires were burning in Albert, up by the river; probably, he thought, the British hutments. Curiously stratified layers of mist, after arising from the river and creeping over the Grand’ Place, diffused the light of flames.
Were they surrounded? Occasional flares—German parachute ‘lilies’ larger and whiter than the British Very light-balls—indicated that the Germans held the railway embankment four hundred yards behind them; but how far down through the western suburbs to what he imagined from the map to be the level-crossing over the Amiens road, were they?
Another arc of lights began to arise around the south-eastern outskirts of the town. The second jaw of pincers! But the jaws were not entirely closed. Was there a gap there? Were their own troops holding on to a sort of bridge-head across the Amiens road? Perhaps for a counter-stroke against the German forces down south, in the event of them getting to the railway troop sidings outside Amiens? Ought he to try to get through the gap? Without their helmets, to lessen chance of immediate recognition? The freezing mists would help them, anyway the Germans were as balled-up as themselves.
Phillip had brought back with him a dozen bottles of Auld Scottie from the E.F.C. after Brendon had gone, following on the suggestion that a German drunk was as good as a German out of action. Five of these bottles had gone into the water-bottles of the men, well diluted. The rosy glows seen through fog of smoke were now being transferred to the battalion. And also it would seem, to many of the Germans, judging by the singing and excited shouts in front. He discussed this with Kidd and the Fusilier acting-adjutant.
“You know, this reminds me of my grandfather reading the prologue from Henry the Fifth when I was a boy. The word ‘umbered’ made me shiver. I looked it up in the glossary of my sister’s Shakespeare school prize, and it said, ‘discovered by gleam of fire’.”
A burst of cheering came from the direction of the E.F. Canteen.
“Look here, old boy,” said Kidd, acting-parts of devil-may-care and pukka sahib raised by the whiskey, “how about sending up Bill Kidd with a party to bomb the bastards? Quite frankly”—his voice now took on a drawl—“I don’t fancy myself sitting here and listening to bilge from a bloody silly play by Shakespeare, who was probably Bacon anyway, and who knew damn-all about soldiering, old boy.”
“Well, for one thing a bombing raid would give away our position.”
“What’s the idea, then? To remain freezing here on our arses until morning comes, and then put up the white flag?”
“‘Spectre’s’ orders are to hang on to delay any attack, and then——”
“To hell with that for a tale! The chap on the spot is supposed to show a little initiative, old boy, take it from Bill Kidd! I don’t care a damn if you are my superior officer, or not! I’ve had my captaincy with the old Eighth a damn sight longer than you’ve had yours with the regiment, after being kicked out of the Machine Gun Corps, and don’t you forget it!”
Phillip did not reply. Kidd’s deterioration after rapid whiskey drinking was repellent: an underlying coarseness of part of his nature showed itself in roughness of contempt of those he felt to be weaker than himself.
The Fusilier subaltern, whose name Phillip couldn’t remember, said with a slight stutter, “Didn’t Henry the Fifth cross the Somme not far from here, sir, on the way to Agincourt, or was it Crécy? I’m a bit rusty about my history, I’m afraid.”
“Christ, you two make me sick!”
Phillip said, “I am now going to look around by myself. I leave you, Bill, in charge until I return.” He took off helmet and equipment. “On no account allow any firing, but remain quiet until I return. I shan’t be long. But if I do not come back, your orders are to make for the Amiens road, leaving your helmets here. Leave in twos and threes, as casually as possible, with rifles slung. When away from the Square, have the men close up, but not in any regular formation. Straggle out a bit, as though you are a German relief party. I’m pretty sure that it’s as big a mix-up with them as it is for us. The only chance of getting back is to move slowly through their outposts. They won’t know who you are in the mist, if you go casually.”
He set off, hoe-handle tapping the ground as he walked towards the Square.
*
He imagined the wraith of Father Aloysius braving the mort blast of machine-guns and shells in no-man’s-land of July the First, that blue morning with the sun glaring into the eyes of the attacking troops, and rising up to shine upon the dead. He saw himself setting out from the wood below Wytschaete on Christmas Day 1914, on a bicycle, passing the football match between German and British: and pedalling along the cobbled road of the Messines ridge down to Ploegsteert wood, freewheeling with the thought that no harm could come to him on the day of Christ’s birth. He had not the same callow confidence now, but he must go on. Fearfully he kept close to the ruins adjoining the Grand’ Place. Before him hundreds of figures were silhouetted against flames, some sitting down, others standing. Laughter, talking, the crash of an empty bottle, a few cheers. What were their officers doing? He could only hope that none were among them. By the excited shouts and bursts of singing, they were young soldiers, of the 1920 class of Sauer and Kraut, ready to welcome any thought away from that of death.
He went back whistling the Blonde from Eden as he approached a row of faces umbered against the black desolation of moonlight.
To Kidd and the Fusilier he said, taking them apart, “They’re unarmed, so far as I can see. With Kraut as interpreter, we might take them prisoner. Make it clear that anybody who shoots without my order will be court-martial’d for it. The whole plan exists on the idea of maintaining the spirit of a damned good binge. Have you got your mouth-organ?”
“You bet your life I have!”
“Well, don’t play until I tell you. Now, Kidd, go and tell the company commanders will you?”
After the conference Kidd said, “You’re really mad, old boy, but I’m mad too, so count on me.”
“The main point is that those Jerries will be unarmed. D’you know Over the waves waltz?”
“Sure thing. We’ve got it on the old polyphone at home.”
“So have we! Play it when we get up to them.”
“Right you are, old boy.”
*
At 2 a.m., at a time when only an occasional shot was to be heard or flare seen, they set off, bare-headed, rifles slung over shoulders. Phillip and Kidd walked in front with the two mascot prisoners. When within forty yards of the crowd, Phillip halted his men. It was a moment of annihilation of the old, a moment of life and death in balance. As though in a sleep-walk he touched Kidd’s shoulder. The weak notes of a cheap pre-war German mouth-organ, ‘dumped’ under Free Trade and bought in a Penny Bazaar at Dalston for a Christmas present for a wild street urchin, arose among the noises of the Square. Soon voice after voice was softly joining in the tune which had been heard in South German towns, Swabian villages, from the strings of violin and piano in wine-shops and hillside arbours trellised with vines on Bavarian hillsides, in beer-gardens shaded by linden trees in Berlin—a tune of boyhood’s lost summers of the old world.
Leaning on the hoe-handle, he cried out, “Mein prächtige kerl! Ihre krieg 1st beenden!”
“Ja!” cried Kraut. “Waffenstillstand! Zugreifen sie bitte zu! Zusammenkommen! Auf Parade!”
They fell in, and led by the mouth-organ, passed through the Square, and on down the Amiens road. T
hey saw no one as they came near the plashes of the Ancre, to enter white layers of mist which rose higher as they went on, until only their heads were showing like a string of corks bobbing upon a moonlit sea, whence came the tenuous music of a mouth-organ, accompanied by the chipping cries of water-fowl among the charred stumps of the poplars in the marshes. No challenge rang out, no shot was fired. And so through the German line.
Remained the British outposts.
“Play A long long trail.”
The moon was now fearfully bright.
At last—“Who are you?”
“Gaultshires!”
“Give the password.”
“Shut your f——g mouth, or I’ll shut it for you!” hissed Kidd in his fiercest Cockney.
“Pass friend!”
“Bairnsfather, old boy, pure Bairnsfather!”
*
Tinny and feeble, generated by the last thrust of the whiskey-water from a nearly empty bottle, a music-hall air arose from the column shuffling and dragging itself along the road to Millencourt. At last—a white cottage on the right of the road. “Fall out.” Movement disintegrated upon the earth. Its leader, gaunt and puffy-eyed, moved through a dream to ‘Spectre’ West.
“Well done. Take a pew.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll see that my chaps are settled in, and come back, if I may.”
The Brigade First-class Warrant Officer reported one hundred and forty two prisoners.
“May they remain here tonight, sir? They’re just about as done-in as my chaps.”
“We’ll see to it.”
It was warm in the cottage, he sat on the floor, flames in the fireplace lapped painfully into him through his eyes, he was asleep.
*
Holding the pale buff Field Postcard, the visible answer to prayer, Hetty hastened next door to see Thomas Turney.
“Phillip is safe, Papa! He says he is well, and a letter follows!”
“Thank God.”
“Amen,” from Aunt Marian.
The old man was agitated by thoughts of his Will, and the urgent need, in the little time left, to make up for his ill-treatment of his son Charley; for Charley’s son Tommy had been wounded in the battle, with the South African Brigade. Tommy had given the name and address of his grandfather as next-of-kin.
The Daily Telegraph correspondent in that morning’s paper declared that the South Africans had saved the flank of the Fifth Army by their stand at Combles, halfway across the 1916 battlefield. They had destroyed an entire German division before they were over-run, and had fought to the last man.
“I must send a cable to Charley, Hetty. Poor fellow, he will feel it keenly.”
He fingered the gold ring, set with a large white diamond, which held his neck-tie together. This cherished possession should go to Charley, with his house. That night he wrote and told his son this, in the letter following the cablegram to a P.O. Box number in Cape Town.
*
Two days before posting the printed card to his mother, Phillip wrote the last entries in the War Diary of No. 1 Composite Battalion.
23 March. In action.
24 March. In action.
25 March. In action.
26 March. In action.
27 March. In action. Withdrew from Albert at 2 a.m. with 142 prisoners, handed over to West’s Force near Millencourt at 4 a.m.
At 2 p.m. we marched in drizzle to Bresle, where No. 1 Comp. Battn. was handed over to A.P.M. at the Stragglers’ Cage. There its temporary members were sorted before being returned to their original units.
P. S. T. Maddison
Lt. a/Capt., 2nd Gaultshire Regt.
It was a poignant moment: they had been through much together. Phillip, as he walked away in the rain now falling, heard cheering. He turned and saluted the faces behind the barbed-wire fence. Thank God he had kept back O’Gorman.
At Bresle a draft of nearly four hundred men arrived with nine officers from the I.B.D. at Etaples for the 2nd Gaultshires. Most of them were 18-year-old boys, with but six months training. There were a few old soldiers, combed out of base jobs after wounds which had kept them out of the line since 1916 and 1917. Some had blank faces, and dead almost furtive eyes.
At Bresle could be heard the continuous noises of battle, upon which were borne many rumours; some were confirmed by the night summaries from Corps. The MICHAEL attack, which had begun on 21st March, had gone deeper towards Amiens against the remnants of the Fifth Army, now under the command of the French General Fayolle.
By the icy-cold evening of 28th March it was known that the MARS attack had been launched that morning upon Arras, and been repulsed with heavy enemy losses.
The next evening, Good Friday, they heard that Third Army, which had taken over the northern sector of the Fifth Army, held the line of the Ancre; that the French, below the remnants of the Fifth Army, had lost Montidier; while the Fifth had gone back seven miles towards Amiens, and the vital railway junction at Longeau, a mile east of that town, was now within range of heavy German guns. Would they be sent south? Phillip felt the old dreads of going into action, the more fearfully now that he was away from the line.
Easter Sunday was cool and showery, with bright spaces in the day. Moggers, from whom most of the news came, said that night that General Gough, with his headquarters, was in charge of preparing lines of defence well to the rear of the battle.
It was after midnight when orders came, Prepare to leave camp on the morrow. Before this, Moggers had offered to bet Lampo a bottle of whiskey that the Division was waiting to go north to join Second Army.
On April 1 the 2nd Battalion the Gaultshire Regiment, led by its German Band (instruments shining in the sun and to hell with Hun aircraft) marched over the hill to Baizieux and down again to Warloy, through country untouched by war. After a halt to rest for an hour—both old and young soldiers were soon showing distress—they went on up the long rising road to Varennes, coming in late afternoon to the railway sidings at Ascheux, so much larger than when Phillip had arrived there from England with Jack Hobart’s machine-gun company sixteen months before.
The long train came in, to stop with shrieking greaseless jolts and nervous high notes of a copper horn. The journey was slow. It took the best part of two days, with many shuntings into sidings to let other troop trains pass down to the Somme. The old soldiers, never enthusiasts, their bodies now gone to salvage and their minds to compost, slept or smoked, having few words; the new boys showed interest and even excitement in all they saw, shouting out to placid civilians what they would do when they got at the Germans.
Along the coast of Northern France the engine of the Chemin de Fer du Nord dragged its train, rolling slowly over the bridge crossing the Canche below Étaples, with its views through dirty windows of woods and distant sands.
“If Longeau is put out of action, we’ll be for it,” said ‘Spectre’. “This line will be the only way through,” as they passed a battery of anti-aircraft guns.
At least the journey gave two nights of sleep out of the cold; but the party spirit declined as they crossed the Pas de Calais.
To Phillip this was familiar country, seen from a railway carriage window—flat green fields divided by polders or dykes marked by rows of decaying willows; St. Omer, headquarters of Sir John French in faraway 1914, now surrounded by canvas tents, wooden hutments, and picket lines of horses. St. Omer, still a town very nearly untouched by war, still part of the old world of comfort almost beyond imagination—yet a boring, dull place to officers in jobs done on chairs, who slept in beds all night, who, if they got wet, could change and dry their clothes before a fire, perhaps on a clothes-horse…. Mother before the kitchen fire, reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to them by candle-light, beside the washing on the upright wooden frame.
A long wait in the sidings of the station; then, at last, to the thin cries of the horn those shuntings, jolts, clash-bang-groan. They were going north, passing through the west-east line of the Monts de Flandres—a row of gravel
hillocks rising out of the level green plain, above the most westerly of which, Cassel, flew the banner of the Second Army. To the east, and the firing line, the low mounds of Vidaigne, Noir, Rouge, Scherpenberg and Kemmel, crossed the T of the Wytschaete-Messines Ridge—from which in one direction might be seen the English Channel, and in reverse direction the Flemish plain almost to the Dutch frontier.
They had to wait an hour at Hazebrouck. ‘Spectre’ was angry that this period had not been used for making tea, for each company had brought a couple of large dixies.
“It’s your business to find out these things from the R.T.O., who presumably knows how long any wait at his blasted station will last! There’s plenty of boiling water in the engine!”
Phillip had already talked with the R.T.O., and been told that troop trains were now passed on from station to station, their ultimate destinations not being known; he supposed this was because enemy agents were active. Phillip thought it best not to argue the toss with Westy, and said, “Very good, sir.”
In old newspapers, the first seen for a fortnight, it was possible to see what had been happening, from the maps. The war-correspondents’ accounts had long been discredited: in them the lightly wounded were always cheerful and sure their own side was winning; larks sang through the barrage (they did, but heard only by eggs-and-bacon-with-coffee ears, well to the romantic rear); the Germans were always disconsolate and knowing they had lost the war (the proud and ‘arrogant’ prisoners were never interviewed, only the hang-dog kind). Now, reading Bonar Law’s announcement in the House of Commons of the opening of the 21st March assault, ‘Spectre’ cursed and threw down the Daily Trident of 22nd March.
The train-wheels whimpered to a stop outside shabby Poperinghe, crowded by camps; clanked on past a siding near hospitals and the graves of the years; and finally shuddered, with blow-off of steam, at a camp siding. Here they saw the mulberry face of Moggers, who told them that Hubert Gough had been removed from command of the Fifth Army.
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