The Long Week-End 1897-1919

by Wilfred R. Bion

  “Fall in!” The word began to pass along to us from the distance; then stopped without reaching us. After another fifteen minutes there was a flurry. An angry voice, agonized—Bagshaw’s—’That you? What the hell do you think you’re doing? You’re supposed to have fallen in years ago I Oh, never mind, get fallen in now anyway!” Boots squelched in the mud; the rain poured down our faces and necks; the sound of it mingled with sniffs and coughs and curses. We moved off, too well disciplined to ‘slouch off, too raw to achieve a semblance of a march.

  Oosthoek Wood they said it was, tangled undergrowth which our advance party had made an attempt to slash down. It was a quiet night. The distant gun flashes made it impossible to do more than guess that there were branches between us and the teeming sky. “Put down your bivvy tents where you can and turn in.” We used them mostly as ground sheet cover; in the blackness and rain it was foolish to pretend to pitch anything. Tomorrow we would put up proper tents. Then and there it was a tangle of knotted twigs and roots and rain which we churned up with our heavy ammunition boots preparatory to lying down on the patch which we fancied that we had trampled flat. When we could stand it no longer we seemed to arrive at a simultaneous agreement that it was ‘tomorrow’; therefore time to pitch our tents.

  After a few days the wood was filled with irregularly spaced tents laced together by a network of paths. “Luckily for us”, sneered Cook, “the Boche couldn’t recognize it as a camp even if he could see through the trees.” “If we were the ship-shape Guards”, said Carter, “it would take hours to make them look like this. As it is, our natural flair of warfare needs no schooling; we are just spontaneously military.” He swore as he tripped in the remnants of a shrub.

  We all felt excited though it would be hard to say why. The prospect of action at last, the fear of being afraid—all the phrases were true but empty if uttered. For me fear was the central fact made worse because I could never even try to escape. I remembered ‘Popsy’ Brightman inviting me to get a commission in the Corps and his feeble, off-putting inducement, “You won’t get a Military Cross you know—just one of those little wooden ones.” How absurd to think that any such commonsense could carry weight. And now, here we were in the bleak, grey desolation of rain which seemed to have a quality of garishness.

  One evening the company was sent on a route march. ‘You’re in the army now’ was the catch phrase to sum up such exercises in forgetting our incurably civilian outlook. It was wet, cheerless and dark. The vitality of the desolation broke out of black night, mud and abandoned gear like the bubbles in a cauldron. As we stood ‘fallen out’ in one of our regular halts, the horizon changed from uniform black to dazzling, shimmering white. We stood, stupefied. Then on the breeze came ‘drum fire’ in which no individual gun could be heard any more than the individual flashes could be seen. The white was now penetrated by the red of bursting shells, the enemy’s return fire.

  The order to ‘fall in’ came down the line and we continued our aimless march. The raid, for that was all it was, was not even mentioned in Comic Cuts, the army paper, and since we were not marching in that direction we could ignore it. There must have been few who did not, like me, wonder how anyone survived exposure to such hell. One day I would see in broad daylight a German battery position with the legend ‘Hurricane Fire’, guns wrecked, German bodies around, some half-clothed as they had been surprised by our gunfire. The scene had the meaningless neatness of a war correspondent’s drawing.

  Our march was sombre, irritable, mindless, as if to keep an appointment with reality emulating a popular weekly; headlines exciting a languid curiosity—’Fall of the British Empire’; “The Umpteenth Royal Irish Grenadiers’ drawn up in regular lines at the Ypres Salient, kneeling with heads devoutly bowed, ‘Receiving Holy Communion Before Battle’; ‘Tanks Storming the German Lines’. The pictures might have repaid careful study; our march seemed unlikely to reap any reward at all. It was just a bore spoiled by hideous mis-shapen blobs of fear.

  Then—we were going into action. At least, my section was going into action—not Battle. A division of infantry, a section of Tanks, simply to clear up a couple of pill-boxes.

  We were urged, ordered, to reconnoitre. This was exciting, frightening. Soon we felt, we should know. Our section commander, a young, bespectacled captain, addressed his officers and men. The talk was designed to tell us of the nature of the operation and, I suspect, enthuse us with the lust for battle. His appearance reminded me of the Mock Turtle; this, combined with a sense of reality, militated against a would-be forceful address.

  “As you all know we shall shortly be going big-game shooting.” He sounded as if he was talking from the bottom of a heavy cold. We were listening with such intensity that the mirthful response which a stage direction would have indicated was absent.

  “The red line on the map”—here came a crackling of papers as officers, four of us, with the crews craning their necks to see the shared papers—”marks the starting point. We have to take Hill 40. Got it?” More rustling. “And the village behind.” Gunner Harrison, our cockney, looked serious which usually meant a witticism was coming, but none came.

  “Bion, you take Hill 40 and patrol it till the infantry have consolidated. You must watch the sunk road—marked just to the north-east—because our intelligence have told us that the ‘umptieth’ Division have just moved in. You will see on this map which is secret and must not be given to you”—he held it up for us to see—”the sectors held by the individual units are marked and will probably remain unaltered for three or four days—that is till after your show. The chap in command of your sector always likes to counter attack down sunk roads; so, when you are patrolling after taking the Hill, watch for this bit”—he indicated the sunk road—”and let them have it. Despard, you’d better watch it too. The village no longer exists, but Quainton, you and Cohen have to take it and hold it. You can tell when you are there by the brickish stain of the mud. Any questions?”

  “The pill-boxes sir!” It was my tank sergeant O’Toole speaking. His large protuberant ears, red shiny face and permanently indignant expression suggested that an officer should have asked the question. Perhaps he was blushing for us.

  “Ah yes; I nearly forgot those. Well, you know they have usually six or more men in them—some people say a dozen. As they are solid concrete and over a foot thick all you need do is fire at the gunslits and go round to the back door. The gunners are concentrating on them so don’t go too near. If you fire at the gunslits you may stop the Boche firing.”

  It sounded most improbable, but he had to say something. We all knew of heavy howitzers, 9.2’s, that had registered direct hits and done no harm. Our questions had little to do with a thirst for information; it was a mindless activity, the individual becoming merged into a primitive brute, an army.

  On our journey to ‘the Salient’ we came first to a crawl, then to a halt. After a long pause someone said we were outside Hazebrouck and couldn’t go through because the station was being shelled. The train, like a stupid caterpillar, waited. Finally it went through, slowly, ponderously, between shell bursts which continued rhythmically like an animal chewing the cud. The tail of the train waited breathlessly for the front to get hit; the front waited for the tail. We listened, searching the air as if to get some clue.

  We were to parade in a quarter of an hour to start our first reconnaissance. The remnants of evening sun—its appearance after weeks of rain had precipitated the idea that the battle commenced on July 31st could be continued—lit up a watery sky as we scrambled into a lorry. Our captain was in front with the driver; the four tank commanders and men in the back. We rattled, roared and bumped our way at a good pace for half an hour. Then stopped.

  We could see we were at the beginning of a ruined city—Ypres; unusual, for buildings still stood. “Military Police”, said someone. At that instant he appeared at our tail board. “All gas masks to be worn at the Alert from now on”, he said. “Gas and HE shells mixed,
but they have slowed up a bit now.” We set off with a jolt as the driver let in his clutch. “God! He’s going as if all the devils in Hell were after him”, said Despard as he was thrown against me by a particularly violent jolt. Cohen, who had known action and wounds before, shouted through spasmodically clenched teeth, “So would you if you knew Ypres.”

  6

  ‘WIPERS’, Ypres, the Salient. It had to be held. Gaunt, echoing streets, empty but for an occasional soldier, always hurrying. This I was soon to know was a peculiarity of the Salient—no one in sight other than the solitary hurrying figure; uncharacteristic were the standing walls and masonry forming a pattern which made it possible to speak, still, of streets. We were soon done with it and were standing on the banks of the ‘Canal’. Like ‘Wipers’ and ‘Salient’, the word needed no qualification.

  These words have little meaning to anyone today, but as an ancient this is the only way of making my voyage through time; from now on it can be only to islands in the mists of memory. Thus, though it must in fact have been dark as we stood there, a few dream figures about to traverse a narrow causeway from one bank to the other, a black puff uncurled in the sky and expanded like the Japanese flowers of my childhood. “A woolly bear; they are quite harmless. If the nose-cap hit you it would kill you, but as you can see, the shell bursts about fifty feet in the air and it would be very unlikely for any of the bits to damage anyone. No, they’re quite harmless.”

  The Canal was not the place for chat; we moved on impelled partly by doubts of the harmlessness of woolly bears, but also by the state of mind engendered by that dreadful place. Even now the menacing streets of Ypres and this nightmare Canal can return to me and leave a stain of foreboding on the brightest day.

  We pushed on in silence till it became too dark to see more than the mud at our feet in the light of gun-flashes. As we were to continue the reconnaissance in daylight the next day, we returned to our waiting lorries. They wasted no time on the journey home, thankful to be getting out.

  The scene in daylight had its peculiar horror, contrasting with the blackness of night and the unknown it covered. We went in twos, I with Quainton whose cheerfulness, though unspoken, was a change from the more usual silliness with cliche and foul-mouthed continue The sky for once was blue and cloudless, the land a glistening ochre. There were in the distance some scattered stumps which we decided was a wood, since one was marked on the map. We were walking down a slope supposedly to the Steenbeck from which the ground rose to a series of gentle rounded slopes, one of which was Hill 40. The enemy line, between us and the hill which was to be my objective, was clearly marked on the map as a series of trenches in great depth, redoubts and machine gun posts, all in red and dated the previous day. It was meticulous and a marvel of the work done by the Royal Engineers. We walked on a duck-board track, shattered here and there by a recent shellburst. Otherwise there was nothing to be seen; no trenches, redoubts, fortifications or machines. Even so I had enough respect, never diminished, for the Royal Engineers, to know that what they had marked was not a flight of imagination, but a reality.

  We stopped and sat on a piece of duck-board to study the map. As I fumbled with it I found my hands were trembling; I was exasperated to find I could not control them. I was grateful to Quainton that he seemed not to notice them. A sudden scream and almost instantaneous explosion made us both flatten out. The enemy had fired a salvo of three. We picked ourselves out of the mud as we realized the burst was some hundred yards away, in no sense dangerous. Then we noticed a group of three men between us and the shell bursts. They were standing; their teeth shone white in a mirthless grin; our reaction had been observed. I was too obsessed with fear of cowardice to avoid flushing with humiliation. We walked on with as much swagger as we could muster.

  And now a fresh anxiety—where was the Steenbeck? At this time it was as deeply graven and marked in our minds as the fortifications were clearly delineated on the map. It was notorious as an obstacle that had presented an insuperable barrier to attack after attack of our armies which were supposed, on August 31st, to have swept on over it and beyond to ‘open warfare’ in what I had imagined were green fields where the German was to have suffered a blow from which he would never recover. It has now become at most a name without meaning except in the minds of a few old men.

  We looked at the maps again. They were exact and clear; the cursed place where we stood was not. As far as one could see, even in the direction from which we had come, was a rolling desert of mud where shell-holes intersected shell-holes. We were in a hollow from which the ground sloped upwards; water trickled from one shell-hole to the next, or lay stagnant at the bottom. Quainton asked one of the party of men with whom we had now drawn level where the Steenbeck lay. Still grinning inanely he pointed down to the quag where we stood. So, that was the Steenbeck. Quainton then asked where Hill 40 was. He continued to grin but said nothing.

  Haig and his Staff have been blamed for thinking that such terrain was suitable for tanks, for not reconnoitring the ground personally, for not understanding the capacities and limitations of tanks. Well, we three did know the tanks and we were reconnoitring the ground on the spot. But I do not remember that any of us for a moment thought that a forty-ton tank could float; the mud must have seeped into the place where our minds were supposed to be. The army, of which we were part, was mindless. “One of these lumps”, said Cohen vaguely indicating the horizon, “must be Hill 40. The German line is between us and them, about a hundred yards away.” The slow quacking machine-gun note and some whining bullets were at once answered by a burst of rapid fire. “Lewis guns; too damned close for my liking. Come on, let’s get out of it.” Cohen with his wound stripe could dare to say this, but neither Quainton nor I could. The working party had disappeared. We had not seen them go and this intensified the sudden sense of loneliness. The sky darkened. “What about Hill 40?” I asked. “Look for it tomorrow”, said Quainton sarcastically.

  My anxiety to be gone made me particularly guilty about not having identified my objective. The ochreous slime, glistening, featureless, stretching for mile after pock-marked mile scared me. Some guns over on our right began to fire; more machine-guns, the slow German rhythm as from a squat animal, mingled with the faster hysterical chatter of our Vickers and Lewis. So this dead place was alive; this was what armies concentrated for battle looked like. “Come on”, said Cohen. “Come on!” said Quainton. I was not afraid; I felt as if my nostrils quivered, scenting danger, watched by thousands of eyes, animal eyes like those in the Indian night of my childhood.

  A man over to the right where the guns were firing was hurrying along a path; while I watched he disappeared. Then I noticed we were hurrying with short, quick, staccato steps. Later I realized that any figure, every figure, walked in the same way. Even our faces had become standard, strained, covered with a slimy sweat.

  The ochreous mud became reddish. “This must be that blasted village we couldn’t find.” “Blasted is correct”, said Cohen.

  Things seemed to be livening up; many more guns were firing. Machine-guns, five-nines—”What did you do in the Great War Daddy7… What are five-nines Daddy?… What…” “Oh, eat your damned bun…” I still feel I am in too much of a hurry to explain all that. And anyhow it is out of date; they do things better now. Even atom bombs, nuclear fission and such ‘trash’ have been replaced by… the successors to the human race, at present an unknown, undetected, but what we would call particularly dreadful disease.

  But, to return to happier days—we were once more at the Canal. The woolly bears, great black question marks in the sky, were more frequent. “I hope we get across before they start shelling the bloody place properly with something harmful like HE.” (Not His Excellency—High Explosive, you fool.)

  7

  IN the darkness we could just distinguish some remains—possibly they had been sheds. English Farm they called it. This is where our tanks were to rendezvous for the battle. The timing was exact and we we
nt on without having to wait for each other, but not before some German bombers unloaded. Meant for us? Did the enemy know of our impending attack, or was it just a routine raid on English Farm because it was there? Then a star shell fell on our route. We stopped instantly, or so we liked to think; no man moved. The entire line of tanks, eight of them, was glistening, brilliant metal against the velvety blackness of the night. It burned on and on. What an age they took to open fire. Bayliss, at my side, suggested they were just having a good laugh as they watched us, standing to attention there like a lot of military dolts. We had not recovered from our first bombing; dread of the immediate future weighed heavily on our attempts at being carefree. No weight so leaden as the weight of freedom from care. Perhaps Miss Whybrow and Mrs Thompson had been right—I should have run away. Too late, too late.

  In another ten minutes we could not be affected by what happened to English Farm. Suppose, though, the presence of the tanks had given away the impending attack. It is difficult now to believe that our anxieties were of so little substance.

  The route we were pursuing now became jammed with traffic; suddenly without warning troops came from nowhere. We waited. Nothing happened. I ordered Allen to switch off the engine. On that packed road no one spoke. Occasionally a mule whinnied or harness jingled.