I found Hauser. On one of his tanks was a dixie fixed to the exhaust so that boiling water was available for his shave. He was now scraping away.
“Do you always shave before action?”
He looked at me in surprise. “Of course. Why not?”
“Oh”, I said, “I don’t know why not; only it just hadn’t occurred tome.”
“Hadn’t occurred to you? Why, what do you suppose all these parades, kit inspections and stuff have been about then? I always have boiling water kept ready.”
I told him how worried I was about the fog; he agreed that it was very thick. I said I thought we might lose direction; he agreed that he thought it very likely. I said I was afraid we might end up finding ourselves in the river Luce. “Anyway, it won’t matter if we do. Didn’t you say it had no water in it?”
I felt it was time I got back to my section. A thought suddenly occurred to Hauser. He shouted it after my disappearance. “By the way, what bloody fool led us into these positions?”
“Don’t know; we just came I suppose.” I did not feel up to discussing the matter just then.
The fog was worse then ever. It came in great billowing masses that swirled around one’s face and bandaged one’s eyes and choked one’s lungs. Here and there men were coughing and trying to stifle their coughs. The silence was uncanny. Could these coughs come from German sentries? I propped myself up against Corkran’s tank. At least I did not have to be inside the cursed thing.
The brigade Intelligence Officer had said there were no less than four heavy guns—9.2’s—in the corner of the wood opposite us. Such guns were useless when fired by us; they made colossal craters where the high explosive shell plunged into the ground. Then the enemy put barbed wire round the top and a couple of machine-guns inside, and the British advance would be held up for days by this ready-made fortress presented by our gunners to our foes. But now? We were going to use six 12inch howitzers to concentrate on that small patch. An infantryman had told me, “The joke about an artillery duel is that they don’t fire at each other—they fire at us.” This time apparently these monsters were to fire at each other.
The infantry were to give the wood a wide berth because of this bombardment which was to destroy not the big guns, but small anti-tank guns which in turn were believed to be there to protect the machine-guns. It was the job of two of my tanks, Asser’s, and Corkran’s against which I was leaning, to enter that wood at zero plus twenty minutes, by which time our guns would have ceased fire and all enemy guns would have been silenced. To deal with the machine-guns was thus the function of these two tanks. But why would not the smallest, least significant guns have been silenced by all this concentration of fire? The dinosaurs of the artillery would have destroyed themselves—the 9 inch because they were not so powerful as the monstrous 12 inch howitzers; the 12 inch howitzers because their own enormity and power destroyed them, made them immobile and useless. The machine-guns survived because the soft and feeble slaves serving them contained something even softer and feebler, the human brain, which was liable to ooze out of the back of the skull if that skull were deliberately perforated by yet another gun held by an even more vulnerable and feeble animal who had had enough soft human brain to imitate his ancestors and climb up a tree. So the machine-gunners, having had the wit to emulate their ancestors and live in holes in the ground, would emerge from these holes, dug deeper and yet deeper, when the gunners had done their dinosaur-like worst, and shoot the infantry.
Other machine-gunners, drawing on their brains, particularly the simian, tool-making and using qualities, evolved a machine-gun with a tougher skull—a tank. What happened then I—as I leant against the one containing Corkran, Hayler, OToole and Forman—could not imagine, then or for many years afterwards, because I was interrupted by fear, fear which became suddenly acute as the engine roared into life and at once settled into a gentle purr.
34
SOONER or later my parents would be bound to have the telegram announcing my death; the war had only to go on long enough. Already I had exhausted my quota of chances of survival. My mother and father, particularly my mother… There was no time and this was no place in which to pursue such thoughts. The soft, caressing mist, the great pall of blackness which had now begun to grey with the approaching dawn, was matched by the silence turning to the pulsating throb of the engines along the front. I watched the minute hand motionless, creeping, rushing headlong to zero hour.
The two men who were to be with me as runners, the Sweeting brothers, and I lifted our eyes from our hatches to where behind us were the heights of the plateau from which we had descended to the Luce. The great wall of fog was suddenly illuminated and given shape by the stabbing white flashes of our guns. For a time it was soundless like summer lightning; then the shrill, demented screaming air above and the roar of the barrage. We turned to our front; the tanks had gone and we were three men alone.
We hurried, the fast, loping Ypres walk, but on firm ground, not duckboards. It was almost a run, as if we were going somewhere. We were not; were were only getting away, as far as we could and as fast, from the ground on which we stood. I had an idea that we could somehow escape the zone of the enemy’s counter-barrage. What a time he took! What had happened to him?
Then it came. It was exhilarating, like my walk along the trench top at Messines. Two of us went on. “My brother!” he screamed above the din. “Come on!” What the hell had happened to him? Lost in the fog? Stopped to do up his bootlaces? His disappearance was complete.
We couldn’t ‘come on’. There was a shell-hole apparently deep enough to hold both and into this we stumbled and fell, keeping our heads down as close to the earth as we could. There I tried to think. I had two hours in which to reach the rallying point where I was to meet Asser and Corkran. A quarter of an hour later I was to meet the other two tanks commanded by Greene and Robertson.
This place seemed to afford immediate shelter—for all I knew as good a place as any other in which to spend my time till I was due at the rallying point.
In this supposition I was entirely wrong; it was based on the experience of Ypres where any shell-hole could be regarded as good as any other. As Carter had said, this was not Ypres and my lack of experience and sheer terror of moving once I had got into the shell-hole led to the most dangerous solution I could have chosen. The shell-fire was intense; lying there in the dark I supposed it to be universal as it would have been in any of the battles I had so far experienced.
Gradually I tried to get my head up enough to form some idea of where I was. On one of these occasions the fog and shell-fire momentarily cleared sufficiently to see away in the distance what I thought were the poplars of the Amiens-Roye road—running straight as a die into the distance. I could scarcely have believed that the sight of the road would bring so much relief. It was almost immediately destroyed; the road, now completely hidden from sight, was in an entirely wrong direction.
I could not understand it; I was too dazed by the shell-fire. Worse still, every lucid moment offered me only one explanation, and that one too terrible to entertain. With my head jammed to the earth I gradually worried it out.
The trees showed that Sweeting and I were walking parallel to the front, not towards the enemy. I tried to loosen my compass. As far as I could tell we had kept the same direction as the tanks. But the tanks, our whole battalion, had taken direction from this same compass.
Sweeting was trying to say something. He looked horribly anxious, almost ill. “What?” I shouted, putting my ear to his mouth to catch his reply.
“Sir! Sir, why can’t I cough?”
What a question! What a time… I looked at his chest. His tunic was torn. No, it was not his tunic; the left side of his chest was missing. He tried to look. I stopped him. I found his field dressing and pretended to fix it across the gap. And then he saw, under his left arm… He sank back as if relieved, then started on a new tack.
“Mother, Mother, Mother…” Well, thank God
for his damned mother. Now at least I could have some peace and pay attention to the shell-fire. 1 pressed myself as low into the shell-hole as I could.
If the Amiens-Roye road was behind us the tanks would be enfilading the French advance, and the Canadian Corps would be without armoured support—that is assuming that tanks were any damned good anyway.
Sweeting was trying to sit up. “For Christ’s sake… try not to be a damned fool man! Lie down blast you I” My anger must have impressed him even if he couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear either but I could see his lips moving.
“Mother… Mother… Mother…” Then he saw me looking. “Why can’t I cough sir?”
I could not stand it. Those tanks—perhaps they were enfilading the Canadian Corps?—the French First Army without support looking for that joke Englishman who understood French? I began to whimper.
“Sweeting, please Sweeting… please, please shut up.” He shut up. I knew he would start again. I caught a glimpse of the poplars, waving. There must be a strong wind. Why did it not blow the fog away?
“Why can’t I cough sir?”
Why can’t you cough it away? Why can’t… 1 began to vomit but I had nothing to vomit.
“Mother… Mother… Mother”, he was muttering. How then could I hear him? I looked up. The shelling had stopped. The sun was shining. The fog, the night, had gone.
The Amiens-Roye road had resumed its proper place on our left. We were in a shell hole at the edge of a cart track and the track was edged on the other side by tall grasses, not the poplars of the Amiens-Roye road.
I was not relieved. “God damn it God! That was not funny.” Utterly exhausted, I said “Sweeting, I’m very sorry. There will be some bearers shortly. They will take you to the casualty clearing station. You’ve got a Blighty.”
He was too far gone to call me a liar. His eyes were glazed over. Enough life flickered into them at my words for him to say, “You will write to my mother? You will write sir, won’t you?” He was alive now and urgent. “Sir! You will write to my mother? Won’t you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Her address is…”
“Don’t. I have it. We have it in the office.”
And then I think he died. Or perhaps it was only me. I handed him over to some infantry. “Sweeting, I have to go now—to the other tanks…”. Thank God he was paying no attention to my drivel. Two men, one on either side, draped his arms over their shoulders and stumbled along with him to the casualty clearing station. Sweeting. Gunner. Tank Corps. Died of Wounds. That, for him, was the end.
35
IT was a glorious afternoon. Marvellous—just the day for a battle. And now, let me see. Yes, I could get on with my job. The ground too was perfect; no mud, just right like Cambrai for tanks. In fact there was one just ahead of me—burning, burning fiercely. Every so often it seemed to be hiccoughing with indigestion as a fresh packet of shells exploded. ‘It was not possible to get near it’.
In fact it was quite possible; I could have got in at the door which was open on the far side and finished it all. Out of the door hung three blackened bodies like disembowelled entrails. I knew it was Corkran’s tank. So—that was the last of those of my original crew who had remained with the battalion; the last of Sergeant OToole.
On my right I could see the French Foreign Legion sitting in an extended line. I found an officer and asked why they were not getting on. Was it lack of one of my tanks? He could speak better lycee English than I could speak French. “Yes, we are held up. There is a machine-gun in that village there.” He pointed to a village in front. “When we have had our lunch we shall not be ‘held up’. We shall get him.”
I waved him good luck and good-bye and set off to look for Asser. The Canadians on the left of the Roye road had swept on far in advance, apparently unobstructed either by machine-guns or lunch.
A short figure, made to look even shorter by his trying to run with his arms above his head, waddled towards me with surprising speed. He fell on his knees in front of me and tried to clasp my legs. “Kamarad kaput! Kamarad kaput!” What was the matter with me I do not know. Although I was late for my rendezvous I allowed this crazy fool to drag me by my tunic to a dug-out about twenty yards away; it was not much more than a scooped out improvisation with a tin roof on which some turves had been planted. He invited me to go in. I pulled out my Colt. I was not so mad as to walk into a booby trap; I pushed him in first. Inside he fell on his knees again by the side of another German who was lying with his body on the floor, his head jammed against the side of the dug-out, his left leg bent sharply from the hip joint and his left boot above and behind his head. He was dead; he couldn’t possibly be more dead. The kneeling German wanted me to bend down and feel his heart. I was frightened. “No—nein, nein… tod”, I said. He burst into tears and again tried to hold me. Cursing myself for a fool I tore myself free and left him to blubber by himself. I was shaken. Obviously I was not fit to be a soldier, let alone an officer—decorated at that.
I found Cook at the rendezvous. “What the hell have you been up to? You’re twenty minutes late.” I told him I had been held up by the barrage; that Corkran’s tank had had a direct hit; that the French had been held up but were just resuming their advance. Put like that it sounded as if I had had quite a busy day. At least Cook appeared to be satisfied. In the next war they would not dress up people like me as soldiers.
All our objectives had been taken and the infantry, gunners, engineers and signals were in pursuit. For the first time Greene, Robertson and Asser, our surviving tanks commanders, could meet as a victorious unit with less than one out of three killed. Unlike Cambrai there was no point on our front where we had been checked. The army was far beyond its day’s objectives.
Cook, Carter, Robertson, Aitches and I stood beneath a tree, Greene and Asser not having rejoined us yet. “Look there!” said Carter pointing back down the road to Amiens, “Reserves!”
We had not seen reserves before. The road was a mass of troops stretching mile after mile down to the valley of the Luce. Here and there transport and guns had left the road to press on faster than the infantry. It was a clear, sunny afternoon. On the hard ground the gunners, the horse limbers, had nothing to prevent them from travelling fast on the wide open spaces. I had not seen troops marching in column since Le Havre. It was a marvellous sight—but too late. We watched in silence, all dejected.
Aitches referred to Cook. “We’ve got to keep up haven’t we?” Yes, those were our orders. Grease up, fill up with petrol, keep in close touch with the advancing infantry for action when we were needed.
The night the sky in front was lit up by fires, not ours but the enemy’s as the retreating troops set fire to their dumps; for once it did not signify disaster. It might earlier have been a sign for rejoicing, but now it was only a sign for ‘what next?’
Asser’s crew were sleeping under the tank. I pulled one out and told him to wake the crew. I found Asser under the overhanging snout.
“You have to go up the road and support the French on the right and the 42nd Division on the left.”
I realized he was not awake. He was stiff with pain from lying on the hard, cold ground; they had all fallen asleep before having had time to put anything under them. “Do you hear me?” He assured me he did. I repeated the orders.
His crew were all asleep. I was furious and propped the first man against the tank. Now, I thought, he will hurt himself if he falls asleep again. I told Asser to help me rouse his crew. By the time we had them all standing Asser seemed to have become permanently awake. I therefore repeated the orders—this time in detail.
“You are on your own. I shall be with Greene and Robertson and two tanks from C Company to make up the section. Don’t bother about the 42nd Division—you support the French. They attack at dawn. The crazy loons in command of the 42nd Div., in spite of what I had told them, will not attack till ten-thirty—without smoke—so as to make sure our tanks will be smashed before they ge
t to the starting point. But you”, it was four-thirty and still dark—”can start now. Make the crew walk and don’t let them into the tank till the last moment. That may wake them up a bit. Try to…”. I changed my mind and said no more. I was horribly afraid that the moment the crew went into the warmth of the tank they would fall asleep. Asser was now his cheerful self, amused and excited; I did not want to tell him my horrible fears. What was he to try to do? The crew were not fit to fight.
For two days we had followed the Canadian Corps with no fighting but endless hard work to keep up and maintain the tanks in fighting trim. As I had told Asser, it had been resolved to make up my section with the two C Company tanks. Hauser’s section had had one day’s fighting since August 8th; Homfray’s and Carter’s had also fought on the 10th. Direct hits and mechanical failures left them now with three tanks between them. The proportion of killed to living remained one in three.
Clifford, mercifully, had at last been transferred to a new company to be formed in England. It was likely that Greene would be given his section when it was re-formed. Carter, Hauser and I were the only originals left.
I found my four tanks, collected together the tank commanders and went over the orders. They were not orders; they were sentences of death. Cook and Aitches had tried the previous evening to insist to the divisional command that zero would have to be at dawn. When the mind will not receive the obvious there is nothing to be done.
The tanks were hidden, each under a small clump of trees very conveniently placed, separated by an average interval of fifty yards from each other. At 10.25 they emerged and drove to cross the front line of the division at 10.30. There was no gunfire, no machine-gun fire. As the tanks crossed the line the enemy machine-guns opened up. I walked behind Greene’s tank hoping, by being as close as possible, to escape the machine-gun fire.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 28