Carter said it looked like being an expensive story. I returned to my problem. “But who do you think told on him? Who ordered his arrest?”
“What on earth makes you think anyone ‘told on him’7” said Carter becoming exasperated. “You heard him yourself. He goes all over the place shouting out what a fine looter he is and you say ‘Who told on him?’ He probably went and boasted about it to the Brigadier himself. Anyhow, the order to arrest him came from Brigade.”
Robinson was not unpopular and as the news of his arrest spread the debate became a source of embarrassment and uneasy questioning. One story was that the German officer himself complained to Brigade. This gained credence; it could even have been true. ‘All’s fair in love and war’: such were the proverbial phrases with which one was familiar. They are spread like a carpet covering the human mind, usually dormant and dark, but becoming active and luminous in accordance with the movements of the forces concealed below.
Robinson disappeared. I am still haunted by the expression on his face—incredulous, unbelieving. “Surely”, he seemed to be saying, “this can’t be happening to me? You can’t do this to me?” Yet warfare between civilized states should be governed by a code of law. Who says they are civilized? Was our Colonel civilized? Or our Company Commander? ‘They tame but one another still’.
At about this time a letter was handed to me by the corporal of our company office. It had been sent to the Battalion HQ by the mother of one of our men who had been killed in action. Did I know who wrote it? If not, could I find out and let the company officer know?
The letter said, ‘Dear Madam, By the time this reaches you, you will have heard that your son, Gunner X, has been killed in action and how brave and universally loved he was. I want you to know that he was the biggest rat and meanest coward I have ever met. He was not killed in action. He was a skunk and he died of fright before he got near danger. If you have any more lily-livered curs like him in the litter keep them out of it. We don’t want them endangering the lives of good tank men.’ It was not signed.
Robinson and this letter floated up to the surface of my mind as part of my Oxford education. The city of ‘dreaming spires’ was not what it might once have been. Even in sleep the dreams had an inappropriate quality.
27
WHAT had happened to A and C Companies after the Grand Ravine? The A Company commander survived, but I did not meet him till chance threw me into his company at Oxford, and by then he could not remember, or remembered something which made me feel we were talking of different people.
“Do you remember what happened to Green?”
“Green; oh yes. I remember him very well. That fat fellow with rather piggy eyes?”
“I always thought him one of the wittiest and most cheerful people I ever met.”
“Yes”, rather vaguely. “Yes, wasn’t he! I remember him very well.”
“Do you remember what happened to him?”
“Yes, very well. He got killed. It was at Cambrai, or it may have been just before; Vlamertinghe perhaps. No, it was Cambrai, because I remember there was some question of his kit. He was a chartered accountant.”
“No, barrister.”
“Something like that—one of the learned professions; awfully good chap I thought.”
What had happened to them? Stokes? Yes, I know, killed at Cambrai, but—is that all? He had gone to South Africa as a farmer and was nearly ruined, lost all his capital through five years of drought in a row. Then the rain came and all was saved—more than all. “It’s all a matter of luck; if you have five years drought straight off you’re for it. Still, I mustn’t grumble. It taught me to be jolly careful when my luck turned. I saved something; then this business! So back I came.” He was always cheerful in a sober way; always modest and unassuming.
Despard? I knew what happened to him of course. But I knew nothing of him before I saw him lying there, sweating, with a deathly pallor on his face. “I’m done for; I know it. That mag-pie… all up.”
What, for that matter, had happened to me? Something queer—and this is how it happened. Some time during those eight weeks with the infantry my section and I had to go and hold a village at all costs. The place was alive with shell-splinters and bullets that flicked by like wasps. The sapper officer in command told me where he wanted the section. I got them into position and set them to dig a trench. I then reported to him again, telling him that I had left Second Lieutenant Bridges in command because I had to go back to Company HQ to report. He was too harrassed to pay much attention but told me to come to him on my way back. I gave Cook and Carter my position, showing them on the map, by which time two billycans of soup, hot beef stew, were packed into hay boxes to take to the section. I felt very grateful for Tipledy’s old-womanly efficiency but had no time to find him to tell him so. I was in a hurry; I had to hurry my orderlies too, with their slip-slopping loads in the hay boxes. We must have gone a hundred yards, nearly to the village, when it became clear that something was wrong. The village was being shelled. So what? Boche machine-guns, on our side of the village! This was wrong. Our infantry came falling of the boundary of the village—on our side. The blasted place, to be held ‘at all costs’, had fallen.
The infantry fell into already prepared trenches—real, not tape this time—and there they stayed. No one had heard of my men; my section had simply disappeared. Captured? What did ‘captured’ mean? I was never able to discover. Not until after the war did I hear they had been taken prisoner.
Chinese Wall, Messines, Wytschaete, Mont Kemmel: all those eight weeks were spent with men I did not know—just remnants of a battalion. Had they just held up their hands? The question haunted me. In my deepest heart I felt and still feel that that is what I would do. Amazingly it did not happen; the circumstances were never quite right. Either I was not there, or the enemy was not where I was.
The next day, as there were no men, we were cleared out. I came out of it with a horrible load of guilt. Every explanation was specious, whether of guilt or of innocence. There was no relief. I was a more efficient soldier, but I was not the soldier I had been. I tried once or twice to discuss it with Hauser, with Carter. They seemed to understand the feeling but they had nothing to say. I learned that when no one has anything to say the time has come to be silent.
The debate with myself did not cease. That was not so easily dealt with then or since. Sooner or later one is faced with the fact that there must be something which is greater, more important than one’s own death. However great a coward one is one cannot on that or any other ground claim exemption. The obvious answer is ready to hand: life is more important and death only an unimportant terminal event. But for the coward this is not true. In the period of rest I had experiences—like a bed and clean sheets—which I long remembered. There was the green grass in which I tried to carry out section exercises in fighting; there were blue skies. But the comfort had oozed out of the sheets; the green did not remind me of the far-off hills where it was greener; the blue skies no longer reminded me of the lark-song with which they were filled in a certain field in Hertfordshire, but only that they ‘sing so out of tune’.
The state of mind which I experienced bore some resemblance to states spoken of by religious people. The resemblance was close enough to stir a revulsion against and rejection of any religious idea known to me. In so far as I had changed since Cambrai, and of that I had no doubt whatever, I had become closer to, and more sympathetic with, the views of those who regarded the pious as canting humbugs—myself very much included. Quainton had not been killed; he had become the shadow of a shadow. Cohen when I saw him was an ugly joke; so was the story of the advantages of having one boot less to clean. Still, that story was not a part of Holy Writ, not even of the apocryph to the Apocrypha; it was rather a piece of dirt clinging, as it were, to the religious boot. More to the point perhaps was the story attached to Corporal Smith’s burial.
When I had finished my walk through the shell-fire by being pu
lled into the trench, I started shouting instructions to Smith. I remember being impressed and comforted by his sturdy, cheerful demeanour. While I was facing him he seemed to stop paying attention; his face became flabby and lifeless. It was peculiar to discover that the lifelessness of his expression was due to his being lifeless; he toppled forward onto me and slithered into the trench. So the bombardment, like the bullet which had shattered Captain Edwards’ brain, was dangerous. Of course he had not been wearing one of those bullet-proof Bibles or prayer books, but no more was I. There was the ‘whole armour of Faith’; Cohen certainly had worn that; as a Jew converted Christian he had paid a high price for it—Quainton told me so, having been on such terms with him that he could discuss those things. God knows what had hit Cohen; somehow it managed not to kill his body, but killed him. Perhaps he was one of those whose graves are known only to God.
Smith—or had he now qualified to be called only It?—was an infernal nuisance. In the middle of this clearly dangerous bombardment, while we expected the enemy infantry at any moment, we had to bury him (It?) While I took over the main duty of watching at the parapet the others dug. Of course it was ridiculous; anyone, any soldier would know that Smith (It) could wait. “No hurry at all”, he might have said with a cheerful grin. But It (late Smith) left it all to us. Rigor set in very fast. He seemed to have arms everywhere, stiff and unaccommodating.
“Smith-y? Smithy?” For a moment I thought that his friend Grayson had gone mad and was trying to get him to co-operate. He said afterwards he was making sure he was dead.
Into this shallow scraping we finally forced him. It was too shallow and this was what finally caused trouble. He would have to be re-buried properly. Four or five of his friends, when they came to hear of what had happened, wanted to go back to the line as soon as we had been relieved and re-bury him—with a religious service.
I referred the matter to Cook because I said I thought it was risking the lives of the men unnecessarily. Cook reluctantly agreed to let them go if it were practicable. Unfortunately it was. A temporary hush had settled on the front. They went to collect the padre. It would only take an hour, they said—and that indeed was one of Cook’s conditions. The padre refused—there was no shortage of good reasons and I thought Cook was quite wrong to agree anyway.
The men knew of a private, not of Smith’s persuasion, Church of England, but a baptist, who agreed (since he was by profession a minister of religion) to go with them and conduct the service.
They went; Smith was properly, that is to say, deeply (and of course religiously) buried and there were no casualties. There the matter might have rested but for two facts: Smith was popular; the padre was not. There followed a rambling and rumbling debate of which snatches would from time to time float up to my ears. After a week or so I was finally able to put the bits together.
The Captain played cards ‘a damn sight too much’. This I had heard before; he was usually the main organizer of the Battalion HQ bridge fours. He never did anything; what he was expected to do was not stated, but the refusal or failure to bury Smith was clearly a point on which the charges could be hung. The Divisional RC padre was not like that: he jolly well had to go.’ The comparison did not suggest that the RC Chaplain was a nice man—in fact he was unpopular—but that he was under orders and had to obey them. If Gunner Smallman could bury Smith why couldn’t the C. of E.? Again, it was not suggested that Smallman was a nice man; he was somewhat unprepossessing, censorious and smug, but for the time being he was almost popular. This debate continued sporadically and now and then bubbled to the surface until the participants themselves faded away.
28
ONE day on a route march we were approaching the crest of a hill which was decorated by the unusual sight of two horsemen. Even from a distance they seemed to be spectacularly smart; one of them was carrying a lance from which a pennant fluttered. As the head of our column, now a company almost at full strength, neared the crest a commotion of orders broke out—clearly ‘some ruddy general’. For the life of me I couldn’t think whose army we were supposed to be in. We were all marching at attention and just before it was my turn to give the order, “Eyes right”, I saw that the officer we were saluting was General Haig.
I suppose we were all glad, for once, that the order gave an opportunity for a long, hard, legitimate stare. The tramp of marching boots and the faint rustling patter of the lancer pennant in the breeze—that was all. As we marched away we heard the clatter of the horses’ hooves and Haig and his escort were gone.
Amongst tank men it was held against Haig that he blamed the hold-up of the advance at Cambrai on the tank which destroyed a bridge by crashing through it. He was not ‘good old Haig’ as Flumer was ‘good old Plumer’. He was too soldierly for one thing. He was suspect, like the rest of the Staff, but not as suspect as the politicians; no one would have said ‘good old Lloyd George’.
Nor for that matter would it have occurred to anyone to think, let alone say, ‘good old God’ or to have any ideas about His Staff. A padre had to be pretty bad to excite any interest whatever. Corporal Smith’s ‘funeral’ soon became one man’s obsession and then faded out—just another unfinished story.
Our last Church parade in England was addressed by the Chaplain General to the Forces. His sermon had as its text ‘Soldiers be content with your wages’. “Some of you”, he said, “may think this a queer thing for me to talk about when you are about to leave for the Front.” Well, yes, we did a bit; I almost began to think the closing hymn would be ‘Goodbye Dolly I must leave you, for I’m off to face the foe’.
May drifted into June; June into July. Then, at full strength in men, we drew our full company strength in tanks—twelve. We were once more doing tank training.
The training did not last—no one had any ideas on the subject. What was clear was that in battle tanks drew fire. That we did know, but how did one train for that? How were Hauser, Carter and I to discuss training before action?
A special angel committee might say, “One of you had better go into training. Who’s for getting killed? Well, no good discussing that; we had better leave it to the luck of the draw. No good bothering about the etceteras.”
“Etceteras be damned. You forget the people with the etceteras go on living.”
“Well then, odd man out:
Heart ache, belly ache, shell-shock, death, Head wound, leg off, blinded, death, Rich man, beggar-man, hero, thief… OK?
All got your parts? Now, what about the training? Fall out on the right all those for death. Parade at the padre’s tent at 11.30 for Holy Communion and short course in letters to the bereaved. The others will attend the last part for writing to the family of the deceased after the action.”
“Oughtn’t those for life to go to the padre too7”
“Life? Let me see now”—the committee anxiously study the pamphlet of instructions—”Ah, here we are now. Life… Life Everlasting…”
The officers in unanimous horror, “Oh no! Not that…”
Certainly Hauser, Carter and I scouted such an idea though I felt some residual belief adhering rather as egg-shell adheres to the newly hatched chick. Carter had just been awarded the Military Cross. No one had the least idea what for, though no one had the slightest doubt that he deserved it. Hauser had been recommended for the MC ‘as usual’, and as usual he had not been awarded it. All three of us were now really exempt from the heavy odds of the tank crew stakes because we were now all section commanders and went into action on foot, outside the tank. In a way this solved our problem for we had all learned to walk and there appeared to be no other qualification. As I discovered later, map-reading remained useful to meet the requirements of the fiction that we were going somewhere.
Where we were going, when we were going and what for, was beginning to be asked just as the need for secrecy had become apparent to all except, according to the army, the Silent Service.
The immediate destination was not secret and all the office
rs knew it was a devastated village, Berle-aux-Bois, in which by some accident the ‘Bois’ retained its leaves. The entire battalion moved together for the last time. We knew no one in other companies; we travelled at dusk, detrained at ten-thirty and drove our tanks some three miles from rail-head to Berle-aux-Bois. There we concealed our tanks under some trees and spent the time in polishing them—which was as good a way of preparing to ‘draw fire’ as any.
A Guards regiment was somewhere near. The sentry over our petrol dump challenged a marauder, was not answered and fired. Our Company Commander, Aitches, who had just been appointed was rightly furious.
“Don’t you realize, you damned fool, that you might have set the petrol dump on fire?”
“Well sir, my orders were to keep watch and challenge anyone. If they didn’t reply I was to shoot.”
Of course he was quite right. We had forgotten all that peacetime nonsense. No one had fired a rifle since we had first gone into action; no one had considered them as anything but a part of the ritual of going into battle.
“Did you hit anyone? My God, I hope you didn’t. You’re jolly lucky to have missed hitting the dump.”
Sergeant-Major Cannon replied for our now terrified sentry. “Yes sir; he wounded Guardsman X in the leg.”
“Did you do it on purpose?” asked Aitches with ashy lips.
“Yes sir”, replied the sentry, “as near as I could aim at where I heard the man. I thought it might be an enemy.”
The naivety of the man created a stir; we had not yet reached the stage of connecting war with sentry duties and enemies—but we did know something about ‘drawing fire’. There was nothing for it but to pass the ghastly news to the Guards Battalion. And though we were now fearful of the consequences there did seem to be some sense, in an old-fashioned way, about the sentry’s behaviour.
“Yes, but this chap wasn’t an enemy. It’s a damn serious thing to shoot one of our privates.”
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 25