25
WE were to fill a gap on the left of the Lowland Division. I spaced out my four guns with Osprey at the second post from the left. It might as well have been the tenth post from the middle for all the difference it could make. I have put this down precisely because it is the kind of precise nonsense we used, to give substance to a figment of the imagination. It was the New Religion. There was a warfare on earth in which our four Lewis guns were enrolled in the forces of Light and Truth against the Powers of Darkness—The Devil’s Own maybe? But that was only a joke—this was not a joke.
The bold contours cutting the sky-line, Messines Ridge, the great crater of the old battle—perhaps one ought to patrol round it to see if any enemy were there. Sweating with fear I set out. Then I became aware of figures on the crest; an enemy patrol. I had no grenades. But I had a revolver, blast it. I could fight. No, I couldn’t—I was outnumbered. I was scared to death. I did not know where the enemy were, where our lines.
They saw me and then mercifully turned on their tracks and went back the way they had come. More Angels of Mons, or just devils from Hell, or shell-shock, or simple ordinary wind-up? I scrambled back to the trench, said good-bye to the second gun crew from the right and set out while it was dark enough not to be seen, to report to Advanced Company HQ. On my way I passed a curved corrugated iron sheet which formed the roof for an ideal little hut for my section HQ. If only I could locate it by map reference I could tell Cook and Carter just where it was. It is such a relief to know exactly where everyone is. When you have no idea whatever where you are yourself it is, as I discovered, an admirable substitute.
“Yes”, I said nonchalantly, “I saw some Boche. No, they weren’t doing anything. Going home I should think.”
“Did they see you7” said Carter.
“I think so.”
“Did they fire at you? You’re sure?”
Surely, I wondered, he’s not working up for another decoration; it was hellish enough to be trying to earn one I had already. But Cook was paying no attention. The covered bit of trench, in which Cook and Carter were, looked cosy I thought.
“All right Bion. Let us know when anything happens.”
I found the tin hut again and crawled into it. I was glad to lie down. Above my head a small piece of mud was suspended, held to the roof by a dried grass stem. It quivered now and then with distant explosions.
I think I dozed. At any rate it seemed that the bit of mud was swaying, slowly, smoothly like a pendulum, like the pit and the pendulum of Poe’s story. How my head ached, though I could not have banged it. But the guns were banging and the grass now was dancing, not swaying. Dancing! Jigging up and down like a corpse on barbed wire when a storm of machine-gun bullets made a breeze.
I got up and quickly crawled out of the hut. I felt it would drive me mad if I stayed there another minute. It is peculiar that so many people feel they will go mad—in another minute!—if the baby won’t stop yelling, the dog barking, the telephone bell ringing—and now if the damned guns won’t stop banging. No good telling them I would go mad if they didn’t stop. I felt I couldn’t stay there another minute!
Shells were falling close around. Perhaps the enemy had found the map reference of that blasted hut. I hadn’t given it to Carter; they would never be able to find me. They wouldn’t look for me anyway. Who was looking for Cohen? Or Stokes? Or Bayliss? I wasn’t. I felt like a cornered rat. There was nowhere to go. ‘They’ were trying to club me to death. Clumsy brutes! Like trying to smash an egg in the angle between wall and floor—with a hoop. So simple really. But no; they were too clumsy to finish me off, couldn’t solve the problem of how to club me to death. And I couldn’t even sit up on my hind quarters and put my little paws together and pray the damned swine to let me off—just once! Just this little once! Oh God! I will never be naughty again—never! The guns were fewer! Well, maybe once more. Damn it, they’ve started again! Oh God! I swear I won’t. Please, please just this once!
I got out. Sulky, frightened, resentful—God be damned for making a cringing rat of me!
At number two post (from the left flank you remember—not that I give a damn if you don’t) I could not find Osprey. I bawled his name; I became angry and yelled.
There was a slab of concrete which had been blown by a shell- burst so that it covered a hollow, probably part of an old trench. From under this crawled Osprey. Pale, watery-eyed, unshaven, he was ‘like things you find under a stone’, but he was a thing under a stone!
“Osprey!” I pulled myself together. “Osprey! What the hell’s the matter with you7”
“Nothing”, he said weakly with a voice like his pale watery eyes. “Nothing. Why?”
Well, at least he could talk. I began to swear and as I swore I realized how relieved I felt.
“Look, you must shave! You really must! You look simply terrible. And you must make your men shave.”
He began to laugh. “You don’t look too well-shaven”, he said.
Of course I had not. I had forgotten that. “I know”, I lied, “that’s what reminded me. I’m just going to, so I thought I would tell you as well.”
He seemed satisfied. Anyhow he did not go on laughing and he didn’t seem to feel I should set an example to my men. Then I remembered; no tanks, no water, let alone hot water such as we used to boil on the exhausts. I got my razor out of my knapsack and had a dry shave. Another time, I vowed, I would not be so thoughtlessly efficient. It brought the blood to our cheeks—if not quite as we would wish.
Osprey had frightened me. If I really looked as he did when he crawled out from under that stone, what would our men be like? I took him with me to each gun post in turn. To my relief the men looked much better than their officers. Osprey agreed readily enough not to take shelter in that way again; so readily in fact that I was sure he was afraid of what that rat-like life had done to him.
For two more days nothing happened to break the monotony of constant, vigilant staring at no-man’s land—the crater edge, the slow rise to the crest of the ridge, the grey mud so similar in all but colour to Hill 40, inspired a state which was not nightmare, not waking, not sleep. It was an animal existence in which the eyes held sway. One did not think; one did not look; one stared. What we felt reminds me of a young child who had been sexually assaulted by the Germans in their last days of power in a village near Lille. She had been cutting some meat off a dead mule by the roadside when we came upon her. She looked up, stared and silently slid away leaving the meat as a cat might abandon its prey. While she disappeared down steps to a cellar we waited and then realized she was watching us from behind a door.
The grey scene later formed an amalgam with the scene at the Steenbeck and became the backcloth of a dream I had at Oxford—’when the war was over’. Night after night I found myself on my belly clinging by my toes and fingers to a glistening slope at the bottom of which was a raging torrent—the dirty trickle of the Steenbeck. Towards this I slithered. If I tried to arrest my progress by sticking in my toes or fingers it accelerated the descent; if I desisted, it again accelerated my descent. I did not make a sound. I just woke up bathed in sweat.
I had reached this mindless state when word came through from Cook that we were to be withdrawn. It upset my equilibrium but it was further upset that evening because it was clear that the enemy shelling of our position was becoming protracted beyond its usual limits. I had reported to the infantry battalion commander that we were being withdrawn. He was a nice man, a regular soldier of about forty, a Colonel Stewart. He said he was glad for our sakes but would miss us and our guns. He asked me to stay near and talk.
“Let’s talk about something reasonable. Let’s forget this damned war which is hotting up again. I think he’s going to attack.” He peered out over the parapet with his binoculars, but it was already too dark to see. “Do you know the de Coverley essays?”
He was delighted when I said I did. “They really give you an impression of a world worth living in.” It w
as almost impossible to talk because the shell bursts were too continuous; you can’t shout about gentle and civilized manners. He went on talking but did not bother to try to make me hear. His face seemed in the light from the gunflashes to have lost some of its lined, careworn pallor.
26
I BROUGHT our gun crews together ready to leave though now I was sure our relief would be cancelled. Most of the fighting seemed to be over to our right by Mont Kemmel. That was where the star shells and ‘Brock’s Benefit’ were concentrated, and that is what saved our relief—it was obvious we were not the main object of the enemy’s attention.
Our orders came. Although I felt sure we should be recalled, perhaps enveloped by the attack if it spread to our sector which it was sure to do if it were successful, I was glad to go—or I would have been if I could have rid myself of the shame at leaving the infantry.
It is impossible to feel anything but amazement at what the infantry suffered in that war, and impossible to think anyone will convey it. They say that the Spanish infantry never recovered after Rocroi in 1643. When I read about it at school the phrases sank into my mind; now I can believe that what I witnessed was a disaster of that order—nothing less than murder of the spirit of incomparable men. For me the disaster was to have survived and to undergo the mortification of being watched leaving the battle by men condemned to stay.
Loaded as we were it seemed easier and more practicable to ignore the shelling. The whole back area, every path and crossroad, was under fire and to try to proceed by short rushes between flattening out on the ground would only mean that the danger was prolonged.
Carter and Cook met us. “All right?” “Yes, except the fire I told you about.” We had lost no men since early that evening. A small lorry took the whole party, guns and all, racketing and jolting down the remains of the road. Cook said we had been reinforced and the new men would be waiting for us at our camp. We didn’t need more men; if they could have reinforced our spirits that would have been something; more men was nothing.
That night Mont Kemmel fell. No one knew why it was not retaken. “Our chaps did retake it”, an infantry officer told me. “We got off to a good start and got right round behind it to our final objectives. Just what the doctor ordered. The French were supposed to be attacking on the other flank. But the bloody bastards didn’t even leave their trenches! If they had done their bit we would be sitting on top of that place now with a decent packet of Boches in our cages!”
We were not ordered back. Though we did not know it at the time our infantry experience was over. When our detachment was withdrawn we had to pass through St Omer, the HQ of the Second Army. General Plumer happened to be there and not at his Advanced HQ. He stood at the side of the road and took the salute as the brigade of which we were part marched past. He looked, we said, like an old walrus with his white moustaches. There were mutterings of “Good old Plumer!”, for we had heard that he always said “Thank you” to troops as they left his Army. Perhaps that is why troops knew they were in his Army. There was no need for him to issue orders about ‘backs to the wall’.
One famous General was to review our battalion, when we were still a battalion, at Ypres. We paraded at eight in the morning. Before the great event, which was to take place at half past eight, we inspected and reviewed our every button till at eight thirty the rain came down. We had to stay on parade as ‘he’ would arrive at any moment. By eleven thirty we were soaked but though we had lost our shine we were still far from bedraggled. Our scouts warned us—’he’ was coming! A fine shiny car approached, slowed up. There was an impressive figure” in it—the General? He leant forward so we could all see him and saluted with his swagger stick. The car gathered speed again. And was gone. ‘“Struth!” said a man in the back rank of our company. “Blimey! I’m wet!”
He must have been a good general to be famous; he must have had an enormous amount of work to do. Later when he fell into disgrace I do not doubt that an episode such as I have recounted would mean that he had many fewer advocates than he might have had. Had Plumer fallen into disgrace I do not doubt that many would have remembered how he had wasted time at the roadside instead of getting on with his work. ‘An old fuddy-duddy’. But he was reputed to have a good chief-of-staff named Harrington who did his thinking for him, so perhaps that saved him from disgrace. It may be, however, that generals who watch their troops march by choose good chiefs-of-staff; or even good quartermasters who do not earn fame for their army as the worst fed of all—as they did for the Third. I was only a part of the skin on a boxer’s knuckles and could not know what lay hid in the mighty brain of the bruiser behind.
We were back in comfortable billets in one of the villages in the neighbourhood of the Central Workshops. As I was now a lieutenant and the senior of my rank I had a bed and clean sheets in a room to myself. I had a new uniform and new underclothes from army ordinance. The uniform was of good material and fitted me in several places. Above all, I revelled in being without lice for the first time for almost eight weeks. This meant that I did not have to make the agonizing choice between being warm and itching, or being free of bites and blue with cold. The itching of the new uniform gave me some anxious moments but as it adjusted to some of my more prominent and obstinate bulges that anxiety diminished too.
The comfort of clean clothes and a civilian bed played a big part in my mind; I often longed during later stages in the war for a repetition of that wonderful experience. The reconstitution of our company mess, regular parade hours, the routines of assimilating new officers and men, the training in infantry tactics as far as we had learnt them—I worked hard on this with my section as did Hauser who had now become commander of his section—all filled time and helped to repair appearances, but it never felt quite right.
Captain Robinson came to us as a reinforcement. He was older than the officers contemporary with me who had been the original tank commanders of the battalion in England. He seemed somewhat foreign because he was an American. Yet we did not think of him as a man of different nationality so much as of the same nationality with peculiarities which, when we did notice them, were very peculiar peculiarities. For example, he did not seem to understand our jokes. He also had jokes which were different from ours even when verbally almost identical.
One day Robinson asked Hauser and me what we thought of a German automatic pistol he had. It certainly looked a beautiful little thing. I said I wished we had things like that instead of the clumsy great .45 Colts. Hauser said the German pistol could never stop a man dead—like a Colt.
“Stop him deadl Ha! That’s a good one!” laughed Robinson.
“What’s so funny about that?” asked Hauser. “When you are at close quarters you don’t just want to kill him; you want to stop him as well—so he doesn’t rush into you and kill you before he passes out.”
“Oh yes, of course, I see. You mean you stop him ‘dead’. Very good.”
He showed us his watch. “Where did I get that? Same place of course. I told the Boche officer to hand over his pistol and then his watch too. He seemed a bit fed up but he forked out all right. It’s a beauty isn’t it?”
We agreed; it was. Then Hauser said, “Isn’t that what you call looting?”
Robinson said yes, he supposed you could call it that, but then it was a bit ridiculous to call it that when after all he was only a bloody German. For his part he thought it jolly well served him right.
Carter, who had come up and heard the latter part of the conversation, joined in. “Do you think then that you’d only ‘loot’ English soldiers?”
Robinson was becoming puzzled and rather resentful at a conversation which he felt was carrying fussiness a bit far—beyond a joke in fact.
A day or two later I bumped into Carter and Robinson again. This time Robinson wore no Sam Browne belt, and Carter though walking close to him was not talking. Carter was wearing his Sam Browne.
“Good LordI” I said, “You look as if you were escorting an office
r under arrest.”
Carter looked angry and uncomfortable. Robinson said, “I am”.
I was about to put my foot further and more firmly into the mess I had started to make when Carter caught my eye. He seemed to be begging me to refrain from making a bigger bloody fool of myself than I absolutely had to.
Later Hauser and I tackled Carter about it and under secrecy he told us the following facts. I was puzzled and indignant; I liked Robinson. Hauser was indifferent, but then he did not like Robinson.
Robinson had captured the officer; or at least the officer had surrendered to Robinson. All this was a bit vague. The officer was wearing a fur coat; Robinson asked him for it—whether with or without threats was not clear—and after some argument he handed it over. “The rest you have heard from Robinson”, said Carter.
A man called Colefax came and listened to all this open-mouthed. “Bloody ridiculous, I call it”, he said. Hauser was inclined to agree but changed his mind.
“After all, it is loot—by military law. Thank God no one ever surrendered to me or I might have done the same”, I said. But I didn’t believe that; I feel sure it would not have occurred to me. It seemed a bit mean—like hitting a man when he was down. I turned to Carter. “Did you arrest him?”
Carter who was unusually ill at ease said of course he had not. “I was ordered to be escort. Thank God it’s someone else’s job now—1st Battalion’s. Personally I thought he was boasting and had invented the whole story to show how gallant he was.”
“I thought he was a liar”, said Hauser. “That’s why I said I thought it was looting—to scare him. I was sure he had just bought the things from a prisoner and then decided to tell the tale about it.”
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 24