The Long Week-End 1897-1919

by Wilfred R. Bion

  It was a stupid appointment. The most senior of my tank commanders who should have had the job by automatic succession was Corkran. He was pasty-faced, rather like Osprey in appearance, but with even less stamina. I had put O’Toole in his tank because I thought the crew needed a good man to strengthen it to make up for its officer.

  After him came Robins, an ex-infantryman with a Military Medal. I thought he, though a very nice fellow and much superior to Corkran, was curiously dependent. Had I been more experienced I would have given the job to Greene; he lacked action experience, but was tough; he looked robust. He was not liked by any of the officers and men, but I think he, and not Asser, should have had the job. They were the same age. Greene came from a tough background and showed it. He was ‘what the army is coming to’, and those who didn’t like what the army was coming to would not like him.

  Asser was, despite his studious appearance, fiery. If it had not been out of date by that time to be aware of patriotism one would have said it burned in him with a pure flame. A brother, whom he adored, and a father who was an even greater though more romantically shadowy figure, had both been killed in action, his father in late 1914.

  He was bubbling with cheerful excitement. He told me the whole section was ready, ammunition all sized, engines and guns tuned up to perfection. He was proud and happy. Had I ever felt like it? I couldn’t believe it. Greene I might have resembled, but Asser—never!

  I congratulated him and advised him to go and get some sleep if he could. I was sure he would not be able to sleep, but I did not want him near when I went to see Corkran and his crew. Corkran was glum and sore at having been passed over; it was partly because I felt he was that kind of man that I did not want him. Osprey and Corkran had been alike in this; they did not seem able to feel with their men and yet retain their awareness that although they were men like their men, they were paid to be gods, very minor gods perhaps, but gods.

  Osprey had faded away; there was a path leading away from the battlefield which was well-worn but soon became lost as streams are lost in dry land. Osprey had been sent back to administer the remains of the company, the ‘administrative details’, a job for which an officer was necessary, but for which an officer could not be spared. My driver Allen found the same facility available for the non-commissioned ranks; he had had to go on light duty after Cambrai. From that point of vantage he made himself useful as a tank driving instructor to a school for ‘refresher’ courses in driving. With great difficulty we got him back to the battalion. But back with us his driving capacity seemed to deteriorate. He was too slow, too conscientious, too careful; at the same time the driving school did not hesitate to deplore the loss of a man who was too good to be wasted on fighting tanks. His instruction was too good and his manner too amiable to be lost from a job in which some tact, especially with senior officers, was a sine qua non. The last point was decisive; I had to admit that tact was lost on the Germans. Bagshaw, our original section commander, was the first of the officers I knew intimately to seep away in this discreet and tactful way. They were not robust enough to get shell-shock; they got nothing at all.

  After Messines a vacancy had occurred for a Company Sergeant-Major. O’Toole and a Sergeant Cannon from A Company were candidates for the post. Cannon was a smart—to my mind too smart— little man. O’Toole with his red face, hideous flapping ears and ungainly physique had everything but his looks to commend him. He was a disciplinarian of whom they made fun—to his knowledge—but they did not dare to disobey. He had compassion too as he showed when he had to deal with my gunner Allen. “I don’t know what’s come over him since Cambrai sir. He has a silly grin. Sometimes I think I’ll run him in for ‘dumb insolence’, but it isn’t really that sir. I told him to report sick but he isn’t sick.” I saw Allen; it was as O’Toole said. He did not talk but every so often a private smirk would flicker across his pasty pudding face. He had never made a lively impact but this was new; he was out of this world.

  Cannon, to my sorrow and annoyance, got the job. I had told O’Toole I was sorry but could say no more without compromising Cannon, now our Company Sergeant-Major. I knew he was bitterly hurt by his rejection. I went to find him.

  “Well Sergeant, how is the crew? You have still got Gunner Hayler of our original crew I see. Have they shaken down well now do you think?”

  He was ill at ease and so was I. He made conventional replies and then said, “Do you mind if I say something privately sir?”

  “Go ahead”, but I had come to see him because I thought he wanted to say something privately, although I could not have guessed what.

  “Sir, I don’t want anything more. I don’t mean I want to be invalided out—no shell-shock for me. But this time sir, I feel I want six feet of earth and nothing else. I know it’s got to happen; I feel it in my bones sir. Will you write to my people sir?”

  I told him that of course I would but I did not think there was any need to think of that. I am amazed now that even allowing for my not yet being twenty-one I could say anything so silly. Both of us had had far more than our ration of escapes; both knew it.

  “I’m still very sorry you didn’t get the CSM job. After this show I’ll ask the Colonel if he can’t get you transferred.”

  “It’s not that sir. I don’t want a transfer. But I mustn’t keep you now sir. Thank you very much for letting me talk to you sir.” He saluted and went off.

  He was a kind man, however uncouth his exterior. His defiant assertions—”I’m an orphan!”—were flung out, at least when he was new to the battalion, as if they were a private banner.

  I went off to lie on the ground and get some sleep. The ground was hard, but I was tired. So I slept and I had a terrible dream. I awoke just as I was about to go into battle; it was unnerving to find that I was.

  The dream was grey, shapeless; horror and dread gripped me. I could not cry out, just as now, many years later, I can find no words. Then I had no words to find; I was awake to the relatively benign terrors of real war. Yet for a moment I wished it was only a dream. In the dream I must have wished it was only a war.

  I had to hurry for I had two jobs to do. One was to ‘repair’ the bridge, but before that I had to visit the HQ of the First French Division and have a word with some officers on the staff of the Nancy Division who were going to meet me there after the close of their conference at Army HQ. I told Sergeant Noyes to meet me at the bridge over the Luce with six men, picks and shovels and full battle order at 5.30 when I judged there would still be ample light for the job but not so much as to make our presence conspicuous to the enemy observers.

  Our position was on a high plateau, well wooded so the tanks had ample cover. From this there sloped down the mud track leading to the Luce crossing. The full distance was a couple of miles but I could point out almost the whole journey to Noyes from where we stood. I told Hauser I was off and hurried, hurried with the dread of the dream chasing me, sometimes walking by my side in the way figures at Ypres hurried along the duckboards beyond the canal.

  32

  FRENCH HQ was busy. The conference had finished and I found my officers discussing it in informal groups. They looked worn and anxious but showed no trace of the defeatism which many have professed to have seen since the news of the mutinies of 1918 became common knowledge. A junior officer came up to ask my business though it was clear he had been forewarned and guessed why I was there. I replied in dregs of sixth-form French. He spoke to his Major, a few hurried phrases. The Major kept looking in my direction; he did not look pleased. When I approached him it was evident that he had been led to expect a French-speaking officer; he satisfied himself at once that that was not what he had got. He was angry but polite, terminated his interview and went back to business.

  I stood alone amongst these tense men. I noticed that one of them was wearing the Medaille Militaire and was without his right arm. As I waited, at a loss to know what to do, it began to occur to me that I had been sent on the strength of my na
me. This I found to be the case when a French Intelligence Officer came to speak to me. Clearly he did not want to blame me for what I could not help, but it was evident that he thought French was taught in our schools and that the army staff would not send a ‘French-speaking officer’ without first finding out if he could speak French.

  By this time I too felt that I might have been asked; I did not like being the evidence for one more example of the incurable frivolity of the English. With aid of pencil and paper I made clear to him and a French infantryman what my section, the right of the British line as far as Tanks were concerned, were meaning to do and the precise hours at which we meant to do it. This I knew by heart; it was the bare bones of the operation orders covering the interval between zero hour and our rejoining the Fourth British Army—the Canadian Corps.

  My impossible, ever-so-funny ‘parlez-vous’ sixth-form French meeting his, presumably, ‘baccalaureat’ English, was not a suitably reassuring back-cloth for a serious dialogue. I did not feel frivolous; I felt in every possible way incompetent. We declared ourselves satisfied with the result of our laborious stammering match, saluted each other and parted.

  At the river Luce I met my men. I told them what to do to fill in the bed of the stream with rubble and fascines so the tanks would not sink. They had to work hard and fast because the entire battalion of tanks had to cross the Luce at this point without fail to reach their starting points. If they got bogged down in a swamp where the enemy gunners would have them helpless, concentrated like dinosaurs in a prehistoric catastrophe, the infantry of two whole army corps, one French, one British, would be left without armour.

  I sat conspicuously on the mound of bricks that marked the spot where the parapet of the bridge had once been. The men sweated and worked in the bed below. I did this because I knew that the enemy were said to shell this crossing every day and it would not do to leave my men there while I took up a safe position elsewhere. I sat motionless, but “Hurry, hurry, hurry…” I screamed noiselessly, tense and sweating within myself. Sometimes I tried to get relief by jumping into the rubble below to help with some unusually recalcitrant chunk of masonry. My watch hand had crept to six. This was the time the gunners were reported to open fire on the bridge each day; I knew that they were creatures of habit. I walked a few yards from the bridge. If only they would start while I was away! I came and sat down again and lit my pipe.

  It was a beautiful evening, calm and glowing. The trees on the plateau above us were untroubled, the great clusters of leaves drooped heavily on the branches.

  The men’s picks, the scraping of shovels, my breathing seemed to be all. One large lump of masonry on which my tanks might have been wrecked remained. I put the whole party onto trying to roll this away. Together we were shifting it. As I sweated and strained with them—one of my intervals of relief—I listened intently for the sound of a distant gun and the following rushing crescendo of the first shell of the evening ‘strafe’. The rock rolled over slightly. Once more—”one good shove”—and it toppled out of harm’s way. “Fine”, I said as calmly as I could, “knock off.”

  “And for Christ’s sake hurry up”, I added as I realized that they were not showing any urgency.

  It was 9.30—when the enemy usually terminated their nightly strafe. I did not let the men have a rest till we were at least half a mile away. There they could fall out for a break and a smoke.

  As I say, it was a fine evening. Even the heavy clouds which for three days had screened our army’s preparations, had cleared away. It was like the Norfolk Broads when the wind drops at evening after a day of fine sailing.

  Carter came down the mud track and joined me. “OK?” he asked. “OK”, I replied. I sent Sergeant Noyes and the men to rejoin their sections. “And you can take off your battle order as far as I am concerned. You’ve done a fine job.”

  Left to ourselves Carter and I went to look at the bridge. “No shelling?” “Not a whisper.” Still, there was no point in sitting on a spot which could erupt at any moment. We moved back to the mud track and waited.

  At 9.50 Handley Page bombers were to start flying along the front; the noise of their engine’s was to cloak the roar of tank engines so the enemy would not become suspicious. Soon we heard the characteristic pulsating drone.

  “Not bad. If you had never heard a tank engine and were a bit hard of hearing you might, if you were a bit drunk, just possibly think a tank engine was a Handley Page bomber.” I agreed. Just then from two miles away we heard the roar of the first tank engine starting up.

  “On second thoughts”, I said, “nobody could possibly mistake that row for anything at all. It’s just a 174 h.p. Ricardo Tank engine.” “So it is”, said Carter bitterly.

  The tanks, after the first one, helped to screen each other. As each engine started, the driver throttled down to slow speed so that the roar soon became a diffuse murmur, and the murmur became an undifferentiated noise like traffic on the roads; it was just possible to believe that the enemy could be deceived.

  Perhaps this is what some German officer reported—”There seemed a very considerable increase in road traffic behind the enemy lines.”

  Carter, to pass the time, spread out his map. “There on your left will be the Amiens-Roye road stretching dead straight, unmistakably, for mile after mile. It is lined with poplars so you can see its direction and check your own by it.” I had seen it myself even when I was lying on the ground taking a worm’s eye view of the front. “Amiens-Roye road—I suppose there are poplars lining it still?”

  “You just said so! Do get it out of your head that all battlefields are the same as Ypres!”

  “What has happened to those ruddy tanks? They should have been here years ago”. Carter looked at his watch. I hadn’t seen him so jittery before. “Oh well, I suppose not. They don’t seem to be making such a terrible row as they were. Still, it’s about time they showed up.”

  So it was; and so they did. The first of the huge shapes came out of the blackness, in low gear, hardly moving, so that the idling engines could easily propel the tank forward without strain. They were exactly to time. The intense relief… Something made us both look back to the bridge over the Luce. It had gone; utterly and absolutely vanished behind a dense wall of fog.

  33

  No one had mentioned fog. There could not be a fog; the river, the banks, the low ground, all were as dry as a bone. I myself had seen it. Why, oh why, had I not reported back from the reconnaisance that there was danger of fog? I had cursed the fools who acted as if forty tons of steel could float on Ypres mud. Yet here was I…

  I could see the report: ‘An experienced Tank Corps officer had been sent forward to examine and report on the suitability of the terrain for tanks. Unfortunately he thought of absolutely everything and even noticed that there was no water in the river bed, but still failed to see the obvious point that since the water had abandoned the river it must have taken to the air.’ There it was—thick, solid, impenetrable.

  “Now what?” said Carter. I heard my own voice talking. “Let’s go and have a look.” We walked down and came to the wall. The next step and we were trying to see our hands. At arm’s length they were out of sight.

  The first tank had” stopped with engine throbbing. There was the whine of a shell and the burst—a five-nine. Then more. I knew it was all up; they must have known all the time. Scared out of my wits I pulled out my lucky charm, the cabalistic figures, supposedly compass bearings, actually a record of my early afternoon fear. A torch made them just readable. I would pretend they were compass bearings, seriously taken for the express purpose of leading tanks.

  Carter had some white tape. Why had 1 not put it down in the afternoon? Of course, I had forgotten, we could not show tapes the enemy might discover and use to make his own conjecture.

  Back with the first tank I told him to stay halted and lend me three men. Carter had gone to Brigade to report the bad news at once. Another tank arrived; the ‘pile-up’ had starte
d. I could have murdered the commander when he said in a fatuous, carefree voice, “What’s up?”

  With the aid of the three men I translated the figures into a taped pattern on the ground. It led across the rubble that had been the bridge. It turned sharp left; it led straight, parallel to the Divisional front, at right angles to our line of advance. Then ‘parallel with the Amiens-Roye road, lined with poplars, straight as a die, as far as the eye could see’.

  I told the first tank to come on. Of course the tape would be chewed to bits. What would the second tank do? I did not know. I did not care. “Follow-my-leader”, I said.

  When our company was in position I went back to my section. I checked our company position by compass. Lumps of steel, each weighing forty tons, were disposed in a line with the correct distance in yards between them in accordance with the scheme laid down in battle orders so that the whole infantry attack was supported with tanks in correct proportion to infantry. The only problem was what the figures of compass bearing had to do with direction on the ground. I did not know what the magnetic lumps of steel had to do with the compass bearings.

  Cook came up. “Ah, there you are”. “Yes, where are you?” I asked. “It is thick”, he said. “You are sure you’ve got it correct?” he added as if a possible danger had just occurred to him.

  Aitches arrived. “Well, so long. I must be getting to Advanced Company HQ. It’s nearly time.” He walked off—or was he running? It must have been the mist that had swallowed him so fast. It was half a mile to Advanced HQ. According to me he had four hours in which to get there. Of course, it was foggy.

  A Company appeared and took their position from us. No one had taken compass bearings. I wondered how I had got into such a mess. Had I been ordered to reconnoitre the position? The tanks for one army corps were now relying for position and direction on… God knows what. I had not dreamed that my compass bearings would be taken seriously by me, let alone by Corps troops.