“Now if only they had said to me instead, ‘’Op it, Moggers, you’re for ’ome——’”
“It could not be Haig’s doing,” said ‘Spectre’. “It’s those damned ‘frocks’!”
“The hounds of Whitehall have done what the Alleyman couldn’t do, and torn up the mud-balled fox!” said Phillip.
“That’s the sojer’s life, Lampo. Up with the rocket, and down with the stick.”
While Moggers was speaking, an adjacent mule laid back its ears as though preparing to lash out with hind legs at the Quartermaster. Moggers uttered a roar of anger and rushed at the mule, giving it a kick, amid laughter from the onlookers.
It was like old times again—almost.
Chapter 9
ST. GEORGE I
It was known that other German attacks were mounted, ready to be launched. MARS had been repulsed at Arras; MICHAEL was held along a front west of the Ancre to Villers Bretonneux, seven miles east of Longeau railway yards. There remained to be launched the thunderbolts of ST. GEORGE I and ST. GEORGE II in Flanders; VALKYRIE north of Arras to Lens; ARCHANGEL north of the river Aisne. And so, Nach Paris!
Such were the German blows planned to weaken, and finally to shatter, the Armies of the Allies in the West.
The object of an attacker in war is to pierce the steel front of his opponent, and, entering into softness, to disrupt and stop delivery of his supplies—food, ammunition, reserves. Thus the defender’s fighting soldiers starve, and resistence crumbles.
But if an on-driving attacker goes too far forward in his destructive impulse, without entering into softness of the administrating services, he lays himself open to a side-blow or blows which may stagger him and in turn cause a break in his own supply services.
The situation in Flanders during the first week of April 1918 was that VALKYRIE and ST. GEORGE I were mounted, and preparations for ST. GEORGE II were well forward.
*
When they reached camp Moggers went sick. He had been subdued ever since they had come out of the line. The M.O. suspected an ulcerated stomach and sent him down to the base. One more link with the old battalion was gone: how far away were those days of peace and quiet at the White City, how callow he must have been to resent the fun of Moggers when first he had arrived there. But ghosts had no place in Flanders among so many new faces. Legends, yes; the past was gone and seemingly forgotten, save the funny stories, the legends retailed in Y.M.C.A. hut, E.F. canteen, Officers’ Club, and Battalion mess.
Coates, the R.Q.M.S., wearing both South African ribands with those of 1914 Star and Long Service Good Conduct—the rooti or bread-eating medal—was promoted Quartermaster with honorary rank of lieutenant. He became the centre of respect among new young officers listening to the legends of the great Colonel Moggerhanger, tales covering the years from the Retreat from Mons to the March Retreat. How the General of the Light Division, a cavalryman appointed to command what was left of it after four days of continuous fighting, wept in Moggers’s arms before going off his head with the strain—of being in Moggers’s arms. How the grey-haired guardian of the electric light plant at Combles, on being given by Moggers a sled-hammer with which to smash his engine just after he had painted it red, white, and blue, had locked himself in with his engine and had refused to come out, although the South African Brigade was fighting an entire German division just across the way. Only when the Springboks, having fired off all their ammunition and lost nearly all their men, had surrendered to a German colonel who said, ‘Why didn’t you surrender long ago, why did you have to kill so many of my men?’ did the engineman unlock his door and allow his engine to be smashed, while remarking to Moggers, ‘There’ll be trouble over this, you’ll see, when they find out.’ How Moggers, coming upon an old mash-tub near Maricourt, had had it trundled into an orchard and had a fire lit beside it to heat a score of petrol cans filled with water for a hot bath into which he had climbed, his 18-stone body as white as a lily and his face as red as a beetroot. There he sat, in full view of the troops, ‘a sight for sore eyes’, while his batman scrubbed his back with a loofah. Moggers gave his own Parabellum to Phillip before he left, to replace the one lost when he was captured.
Phillip felt less anxious as he got the hang of a battalion’s organization. He visited the snob’s shop, where boots were repaired; the M.O.’s hut, where more than one old soldier was trying to swing the lead to get to the base: with gleat due to chronic gonorrhoea, flat feet, piles, or other hopeful complaints; the tailor’s hut adjoining the Q.M. stores, where three bespectacled men were busy sewing on to jackets the coloured flashes of battalion and division; the cookhouse, where bad rations were shown to him, dried vegetables salvaged from bomb damage at the base, mouldy bread, reasty bacon, compressed slabs of Australian rabbits with heads, scuts, and fur still attached, once frozen in bundles but now in parts deliquescent; the picket lines, where mules still thinly rectangular and mud-rashed gnawed at their neighbours’ rugs, being on half rations of oats and hay; the bandsmen’s hut, the carpenter’s hut where wooden traps were being made to catch the grease in water from the cookhouse drains, to be sent to salvage for eventual use in the making of high explosive.
Once again it was masses of paper-work for Phillip, sitting in the orderly room smoking one of his twin Loewe ‘Captain’ pipes sent out from home.
He had forgotten the padre, a newcomer, an elderly pale man with a nearly grown family at home, judging by the photographs in leather frames in his cubicle.
“Do you think I should visit the men in their huts, Captain Maddison?”
“It is good of you to suggest it, padre, but later on, perhaps. All this night work, you know, leaves them pretty exhausted. I’ll tell Colonel West of your suggestion.”
When Phillip returned to the orderly room he had a shock. ‘Spectre’ had been given command of the Brigade. A new C.O. was on his way up from the ‘colonel’s pool’ at the base. He arrived on the evening of the 5th April, a big man, with reflective brown eyes, an amiable country gentleman who had been a major in the Special Reserve battalion when war broke out. After serving for five months in France he had gone home in December 1915 with jaundice; upon recovery he had been posted to the depot in Gaultford to supervise the training of recruits. He was about fifty years of age, Phillip considered.
The next morning ‘Spectre’ took him up the line, held by another brigade of the Division, with Phillip in attendance as adjutant. During a routine strafe of shelling the new C.O. repeatedly crouched down in the communication trench. He apologised again and again, saying that he would soon get acclimatised. After returning he had a private talk with ‘Spectre’; and when he went back to the pool next morning, Phillip was given temporary command of the battalion.
This did not please Captain Kidd, who appeared at the orderly room with an official request, in writing, to be allowed to see the Brigadier. What he said Phillip never knew, but he suspected that Kidd had complained of his inexperience as a battalion commander; for ‘Spectre’ afterwards rang up Phillip and suggested that he might like to put Bill in Part Two Orders as acting-Major and Second-in-Command. This was done, and Bill Kidd put up a crown.
That night Phillip went up with the working parties, accompanied by Bill Kidd. One party went into No-man’s-land to put up wire. It was quiet. No flares went up from the German trenches. Kidd came to Phillip, whispering, “I don’t like it, old boy. What does it mean? I have a feeling the bastards are creeping up and any moment we’ll get it, from the flanks. You ought to have told Tabor to put out flanking parties, you know.”
“Naturally, I arranged that with the C.O. of the Moonrakers holding this sector.”
“What are you going to do about it, stay here until we’re scuppered?”
“What do you suggest, Bill?”
“Might send a patrol forward, to listen at the Boche wire.”
“Would you like to go?”
“Me? I don’t give a damn!”
“Very well, go forward by you
rself, taking your runner, and come back here and tell me if you hear anything.”
No-man’s-land was about 300 yards at that sector. The wire concertina coils were being placed roughly a third of the distance before the Moonrakers’ front line. Kidd was soon back.
“I heard them talking, old boy. They’re bringing up the old minnies. I swear it’s that. I heard bumps, like oil cans being pushed down. We ought to shove off, old boy. Any moment now——”
“Yes, you’re right, Bill. I’ll tell Sergeant-major Adams to get the word passed down, to return to the Moonrakers’ trench. Most of the wiring is done, anyway. Get a move on!”
The forward working party was going down the communicating trench from the front line, while Phillip and R.S.M. Adams walked on top, when low flashes arose behind them, followed by dull thuds. They turned and watched. Within a few seconds great fans of light arose, and then the crashes of the minenwerfen drums of ammonal. “We’d better get down, sir.”
The two slid down into the trench, and had joined the men hastening back when red and green rockets arose, and soon the British barrage was swooping and screaming overhead, the shells bursting in and above the German front line.
Later when Phillip was reporting to ‘Spectre’ he was told that nine minnies had been reported by the Moonrakers. “Bad luck, you’ll have to get the wire replaced tonight. Many casualties?”
“None, thanks to Bill Kidd. He put up a good show. He went forward alone, and heard them dropping the drums into the wooden mortars. The Alleyman must be hard up for material, he’s improvising again, on the 1915 patterns, sir.”
Kidd was in high spirits, helped by whiskey. Phillip thought that Bill had been giving Tabor his version of the matter when he returned from the orderly room, for his voice tailed off and then was silent a moment before he recovered himself to say, “Bong! A faint hissing! A dull thud! Crash! And the moon shone bright on Charlie Chaplin! Hullo, old boy, what did ‘Spectre’ say?”
“He said nine minnies had come over, and that you’d put up a good show.”
“Well honestly, old boy, someone had to use some savvy——I ask you!” as Bill Kidd glanced at Tabor.
*
On the night of 7/8th April Corps Summary of Intelligence said that there were now 199 German divisions on the Western Front. Of these, 88 had been identified as engaged in the MICHAEL attack, while 31 remained in reserve, and fresh.
Dining with ‘Spectre’ at Brigade H.Q. that night, Phillip learned that there were two Portuguese Corps, of two divisions each in the line, south of Armentières.
“That is where the Boche will push,” said ‘Spectre’, adding that, behind the enemy front along that low grazing country, intersected by canals, dykes, and waterways, the roads had been observed to be full of transport, with train movements from Lille, Roubaix, and Tournai. Much artillery had come north, according to R.A.F. reports.
Phillip was returning with the R.S.M. through the misty darkness of the moonless night, having visited the battalion working and wiring parties up the line, when gas shells began to swoop over along the whole front. They splashed yellow, oily liquid from the soft bursts. No high explosive fell. Out of damp darkness there swooped the softly spinning containers, each woo-er-woo-er followed by a slight pop on arrival.
He telephoned the Brigade-major, his acting-adjutant, the Fusilier subaltern, Gotley, having gone up with the working parties. These parties were made up of more than three-quarters of the battalion strength. ‘Spectre’ told him to get all the sleep he could.
“You can do nothing until your men come back.”
He could not sleep, but lay with the old helplessness of himself, in command of an untrained incoherence of men, whose officers he hardly knew: a ‘crush’ of unfamiliar faces, most of them very young, a mere mixture of shoulder numerals officer’d by various regimental badges worn only a few weeks after leaving cadet battalions at home. What would happen if the attack came while they were up putting out wire and doing other jobs under the R.E.? He got up, and wandered about, box-respirator at the alert, wincing in his mind at every flash in the sky, dreading the imminent crash of the Boche barrage.
At last the working parties came in. Some of the young soldiers were crying, burned about the face and hands with mustard gas, which had raised blisters, some of them half-an-inch thick. Forty-two other ranks went to the Aid Post.
*
If Phillip—one among many junior officers at that time to find themselves in command of scratch battalions—was worried, so was every senior officer in France and Flanders, up to the British Commander-in-Chief. The previous afternoon Sir Douglas Haig had conferred at Aumale with General Foch, now the Supreme Allied Commander. Foch had issued a directive for a joint French and British offensive between the Avre and the Somme—the northern ‘hinge’ of the MICHAEL salient. All signs, said Haig, pointed to the imminence of the VALKYRIE and ST. GEORGE attacks against tired British divisions, in the line between Arras to Ypres.
Haig found Foch ‘friendly but immovable’. While the conference was sitting, a note was passed to Haig. It was from the commander of the British Fourth Army, who wrote that he could not carry out the attack, as directed, unless he had two more divisions. General Pétain, also, had asked for 11 more French divisions. Foch held to his plan, and ordered that preliminary movements for the counter-piercing of the MICHAEL bulge should be made the next day, 8 April.
*
The following night more working parties from the 2nd Gaultshires left camp to collect picks, shovels, screw-pickets, coils of wire and other dreary weights for their work in the Battle Zone. As on previous nights, they went through Kruisstraatpolk, south of the Canal, to the Damstrasse and Pheasant redoubts near the White Château about a mile behind the front line. The sky flickered with gun-fire. Shortly after 4 a.m., hot tea with rum was dished out to the returned soldiers. Some of the young boys refused it through exhaustion; a few were crying. When they had dropped to sleep, some still in equipment, upon the hut floors, Phillip went back to his hut, to lie upon a stretcher bed. Hardly had he curled up when he heard the bubbling rumble of a barrage down south. He got up to listen in drizzling mist, thanking God that it was not falling on their front.
Had VALKYRIE been launched upon the Lys plain? What if the attack was a feint, and the real push was coming against the Salient?
With knees drawn up to chin for warmth, hands shut tight, he lay in his bag of stitched blankets across the wooden bars of the stretcher, seeing the formless discolorations of the 1917 battlefield, edged by the splintered wooden stumps of the Menin Road and living again the terrors of the nights upon the timber tracks. He breathed deeply to calm his mind, waiting for daylight to come; then getting up, he went out into the cold dampness of fog, and returned feeling that now he could sleep; but hardly had he dozed off when O’Gorman came in with a mug of hot sugary tea made a sickly yellow by tinned milk.
The fog hung low upon the Salient that morning, blotting out the deadly landscape. The working parties of the night before slept on until 10 a.m., then opened their eyes to less than nothing, for all was to do again, without respite—cleaning rifles, puttees, boots, uniforms, then drill intended to give some effect of coherency in what inevitably was to come. They grumbled, “Lampo’s all spit and polish, like the rest on’m.” Phillip felt their dullness to be beyond him. What could he do, to bring some kind of regimental spirit to this near-mob of mixed up Scots, Irish, Londoners, and others with dialects and habits from a score of different British districts and homes? He spoke to Bill Kidd about it.
“You tell me what line to take, and I’ll follow it, old boy,” replied that individualist, shortly.
“You’re a lot of help, I must say.”
“I’ll do what you tell me—sir!”
In the afternoon it was known that the Germans had broken through on a 9-mile front, from Bois Grenier south of Armentières to the old 1915 battlefield of Festubert. The Portuguese had left their trenches and fled in such pan
ic that some of them had stolen bicycles of a Cyclists’ battalion sent up as reinforcements. About this Bill Kidd, who had dumped himself in the orderly room, was savagely sarcastic.
“When last seen, all those bastards, poxed up to the eyebrows with old man siff, were making for the red lamp district of Hazebrouck,” he said. “Their officers live on the fat of the land and treat their men like bloody pigs.”
“Every single one?”
“That’s what Bill Kidd said, old boy, and that’s what Bill Kidd meant. They’ve let down the B.E.F., that’s enough for me!”
Phillip knew that rather ugly mood of Kidd’s when he had been drinking. Unable to resist the desire to give balance to the other man’s emotionalism, he repeated, “Every single one, Bill?”
“You ’eard!” retorted Kidd, a rasp in his tone, showing the yellows of his darting eyes. “Christ! Sitting here in the mist waiting to be scuppered gives me the guts ache!” He shoved a pile of typed papers over the edge of the table.
Gotley, the adjutant, got up and said, “I have to see the Quartermaster, sir, if you’ll excuse me.” He went out.
“Look here, Kidd, aren’t you going a bit too far when my adjutant has to make an excuse to go out to avoid embarrassment?”
“Not far enough for Bill Kidd, old boy! I’m not concerned with the delicate feelings of a bloody clerk, anyway.”
“It doesn’t help, you know, chucking Gotley’s files about.
“What’s the odds, old boy? We’ll be burning this bumph before long.”
The telephone buzzed. Kidd listened, put it down. “What did I tell you? Get ready to push off at an hour’s notice! I’ll go and warn the companies.” He shouted out for the R.S.M. “Where are you, you old skrimshanger?” To Phillip, he said, “I may as well take the old lad with me,” as he went out. He came back to say, “I’ll warn the transport to get loaded, and tell Coates, the Doc., and that bloody priest.”
A Test to Destruction Page 17