“I expect it’ll be rather a sticky do. The old Boche is pooping off whizz-bangs all day and night up there. And I’m banged if I can find out exactly where our new Front line is supposed to be. It’s a network of Boche trenches up there, and we don’t want to go barging into their line.”
They struggled up Southampton Row and skirted M –, which was being shelled heavily and reverberantly. They got into another trench on the fringe of Hill 91. Whizz-bangs kept cracking all round them, in little masses of about a dozen – several batteries firing together. Evans and Winterbourne were leading. Winterbourne paused:
“There’s a curious smell about here, sir” (sniff, sniff), “like pineapple or pear-drops.”
Evans sniffed the air.
“So there is.”
The smell rapidly became stronger after another salvo of whizz-bangs.
“By Jove, it’s tear-gas!” said Evans. “Pass the word along to put on gas-goggies.”
The line halted, while the men fumbled in the darkness for their goggles, and then slowly stumbled on. Winterbourne found he was practically blinded by his goggles in the darkness; they kept going dim with perspiration. He took them off.
“We shall be here all night at this rate, sir. May as well be blinded with tear-gas as goggles. I’ll keep mine off and reconnoitre.”
Evans pulled off his goggles, and the two went on ahead, telling the Sergeant to follow straight on until he came up with them. Tears poured from the two men’s eyes as they toiled up the muddy trench. They kept dabbing their eyes with pocket handkerchiefs, like a couple of mutes at their own funerals.
Crash, crash-crash, crash, crash-crash-crash-crash, came the whizz-bangs; and the pineapple smell became stronger than ever.
“It’ll be a jolly look-out for us,” said Evans, “if they poop over poison gas too. We shan’t be able to smell it with all this stink of pear-drops. Peuh! It’s like being in a sweet factory.”
They laughed. And then dabbed their streaming eyes again.
In ten minutes they came up to the largest of the mine-craters. The wind was fresh on the hill-crest and there was no gas. Their smarting eyes began to recover.
“Here we are,” said Evans, “and there’s the old No Man’s Land; but where in hell our Front line is, I don’t know. You stay here, Winterbourne, and tell Sergeant Perkins to halt until I come back. I’ll go and reconnoitre.”
“I’ll go back, sir, and bring them up.”
“All right,” and Evans vanished in the darkness. Winterbourne returned to the line of men, dismally groping their way through the gassy trench. They waited for Evans, who led them over the old No Man’s Land to a very deep trench. They turned to the left. Evans whispered to Winterbourne:
“There’s nothing here but a network of Boche trenches; look how deep they are. I couldn’t see a soul, and there are still Boche trench-notices up. I’m hanged if I know where we are. For all I know we’re in the Boche lines.”
Winterbourne unslung his rifle and bayonet, and walked in front of Evans. Verey lights went up occasionally, but most mysteriously seemed to come from all sides, behind them as well as in front and to the flanks. The trenches were immensely deep and dark, except when lit dimly by the glow of Verey lights or the abrupt flashes of whizz-bangs. They went on and on, constantly passing cross-trenches, completely lost, probably returning on their footsteps. They could hear the men muttering and cursing behind them. At another cross-trench they halted in despair. Winterbourne stood on a large hummock in the middle of the wide trench, peering ahead through the gloom. Evans looked at his luminous wristwatch.
“Good Lord! We’ve been wandering in these blasted trenches for nearly three hours. It’ll be too late to do any work unless we get there at once.”
Winterbourne grabbed his arm:
“Look!”
Several shadowy figures were silhouetted against the skyline, coming along the trench towards them. Too dark to distinguish the helmets. English or German?
“Challenge them,” whispered Evans. Winterbourne threw his rifle forward:
“Halt! Who are you!”
“Frontshires,” said a weary voice.
“Ask which company.”
“Which company?”
“A, B, C, D – what’s left of ’em.”
They were now close enough for Evans and Winterbourne to see they were in British uniform. Evans passed down word to his men to stand to the left and let the outgoing party pass. The Frontshires staggered rather than walked down the bumpy trench.
“We ‘ung on until nearly all of us was killed, sir,” said one man huskily to Evans, as if apologizing.
“When the Springshires were wiped out, we got enfiladed, sir,” said another; “there’s on’y one of our officers left.”
About fifty men, the flotsam of the wrecked battalion, stumbled past them. Then came the Sergeant-Major and a young subaltern. Evans stopped him, and asked the way to the front line, explaining briefly their job. The subaltern seemed dazed with weariness. He kept swaying in the darkness.
“It’s up there.., up there… somewhere…
“But how far?”
“I don’t know.., not far… I can’t stop… mustn’t leave the men.”
And he stumbled on again. Evans turned to Winterbourne:
“Well, Winterbourne, you might as well get off the body of that dead Boche you’re standing on, and we’ll push along.”
Winterbourne sprang away with a sensation of horror, and saw that he had indeed unconsciously been standing on a dead German.
They wandered about until nearly dawn, without finding the Front line. They came on a couple of wounded Germans, whom Evans put into stretchers. Just about dawn they found themselves back at the point where they had entered the old German trenches, and recrossed to familiar ground. The wounded Germans groaned as the stretcher-bearers stumbled and bumped them on the ground.
The remnant of the battalion of the Frontshires very slowly made their way into M—. Zwiiing, CRASH! CLAANG! went the great crumps, but they hardly heard them. They were too tired. They went through the town in single file. On the straight road the subaltern halted them, formed them roughly into fours, and took his place at their head. They shambled heavily along, not keeping step or attempting to, bent wearily forward under the weight of their equipment, their unseeing eyes turned to the muddy ground. They stumbled over inequalities; several times one or other of them fell, and had to be dragged laboriously to his feet. Others lagged hopelessly behind. Time and again the young subaltern and the R.S.M. paused to allow the little group to re-form. Hardly a word was spoken. They went very slowly, past the slag-hill, past the ruined village, past the Pioneers’ billets, past the soldiers’ cemetery, past the mined chateau, past the closed Y.M.C.A. canteen; and just as the fresh clear Spring dawn lightened the sky they came to the village where they had their rest billets. The firing had quieted down, and the larks were singing overhead in the pure, exquisite sky. In the pale light the men’s unshaven faces looked grim and strangely old, grey-green, haggard, inexpressibly weary. They shambled on.
Outside of Divisional Headquarters a smart sentry was on duty. He saw the little party wearily stumbling down the village street, and thought they were walking wounded. The young subaltern stopped about thirty yards from the sentry, and once more re-formed his men. The sentry heard him say, “Stick it, Frontshires.”
Already the news had reached the back areas that the Frontshires had been nearly wiped out in a desperate defence – fifty of them and one officer left, out of twenty officers and seven hundred and fifty men.
The sentry sprang to attention and took one pace forward. Sloped arms – one, two, three, as if on parade – and remained rigid. As the little group drew level, he sharply brought his rifle and fixed bayonet to the “present arms”.
The young officer wearily touched the brim of his steel helmet. The men scarcely saw, and did not comprehend, the gesture. The sentry watched them pass, with a lump in his throat.
There was still nothing to report on the Western front.
8
AFTER a few hours’ sleep and a hasty meal, Evans and Winterbourne started for the Front line again. Evans was very much ashamed at having lost his way the night before, and the Major had strafed him for incompetence. Evans had not replied, as he might have done, that since the Major knew so well where they ought to have gone, he might have taken the trouble to lead them there.
It was about two on a sunny, cold afternoon. They skirted M – with its everlasting, maddening Zwiiing, CRASH! CLAANG! In the trenches on the edge of Hill 91 they met two walking wounded, unshaved, muddy to the waist. One had his head bandaged and was carrying his steel helmet; the other had his tunic half off, and his left hand and arm were bandaged in several places. They were talking with great gravity and earnestness, and hardly saw Evans and his runner. Winterbourne heard one of them say:
“I told that fuckin’ new orrficer twice that some fucker’d get hit if he fuckin’ well took us up that fuckin’ trench.”
“Ah,” said the other, “foock ‘im.”
Evans and Winterbourne paused at the old Front line on the crest of the hill to take breath, and looked back. The blue sky was speckled all over with the little fleecy shrapnel bursts from Archies, pursuing three different enemy planes. The heavy shells fell reverberantly into M— at their feet. They looked over a broad, flat, grey-green plain, dotted with ruined villages, seamed with the long, irregular lines of trenches. The wavering broad ribbon of No Man’s Land was clearly visible, blasted to the white chalk. They could see the flash of the heavies, and enemy shells bursting on cross-roads and round artillery emplacements. A Red Cross car of wounded bumping its way from the Advanced Dressing Station in M— was shelled all down the road by field artillery. They watched it eagerly, hoping it would escape. Once or twice it disappeared in the smoke of the shell-burst and they felt certain it was done for; but the car bumpingly reappeared, and finally vanished from sight in the direction of Rail Head.
“God! What a dirty trick! I’m glad they didn’t get it,” said Winterbourne, as they scrambled out of the trench.
“Ah, well,” said Evans, “Red Cross cars have been used as camouflage before now.”
They easily found the new Front line in the daylight. Directions in English had been hastily scrawled on the old German trench notices, and they wondered how on earth they could have missed the way the night before. The Front line was full of infantry: some on sentry duty, some sitting hunched up on the fire-steps; many lying in long, narrow holes like graves, scooped in the side of the trench. They found an officer, who took them along to show them where the new communication trench was wanted. Winterbourne, turning to answer a question from Evans, struck the butt of his rifle sharply against a sleeping man in one of the holes. The man did not stir.
“Your fellows are sleeping soundly,” said Evans.
“Yes,” said the officer tonelessly; “but he may be dead for all I know. Stretcher-bearers too tired to take down all the bodies. Some of ‘em are dead, and some asleep. We have to go round and kick ‘em to find which is which.”
The new trench they were to dig had been roughly marked out, and ran from the old German front line to the lip of Congreve’s Mine-crater, now used as an ammunition dump. A salvo of whizz-bangs greeted them as they went out to look at it.
“I don’t altogether envy you this job,” said the Infantry officer; “this is about the most unhealthy spot on Hill 91. The Boche shells it day and night. Your Colonel had a hell of a row about it with the Brigadier, but our fellows are too whacked to do any more digging.”
Over came another little bunch of whizz-bangs, in corroboration – crash, crash-crash, crash. The grey-green, acrid smoke smelt foul.
“They’re going to call it Nero Trench,” he added, as they left him, “because the ground’s so black with coal-dust and slag. Well, goodbye, best of luck. And, by the by, look out for gas.”
The Nero Trench job was an intensified nightmare. The Germans had it “taped” with exactitude, and shelled it ruthlessly. Five minutes was the longest period that ever passed without salvoes of whizz-bangs. Evans and Winterbourne, Hume and his runner, walked continually up and down the line of men, who toiled hastily and nervously in the darkness to make themselves a little cover. When the shells came crashing near them, they crouched down on the ground. It was found after the first night that each man had simply dug a hole for himself instead of regularly excavating his three yards of trench. On some nights the shelling was so intense that Evans withdrew the men for a time to the shelter of a trench. They had several casualties.
And then the Germans began a steady, systematic gas bombardment of all the ruined villages in the advanced area. It began on the second night of the Nero Trench job. They had noticed on Hill 91 that a pretty heavy bombardment was proceeding from the German lines, and all the way down from M— they heard the shells continuously shrilling overhead. It puzzled them that they could not hear them exploding.
“Must be bombarding the back areas,” said Evans.
“Let’s hope it gives ‘em something to think about besides sending us up tons of silly papers.”
But as they came nearer their village they could tell by the sound in the air that the shells must be falling close ahead of them. Soon they heard them falling with the customary zwiiiNG, followed by a very unaccustomed soft PHUT.
“They can’t all be duds,” said Winterbourne.
A shell dropped short, just outside the parapet, with the same curious PHUT. Immediately a strange smell, rather like new-mown hay gone acrid, filled the air. They sniffed, and both men exclaimed simultaneously:
“Phosgene! Gas!”
They all fumblingly and hastily put on their gas-masks, and stumbled on blindly down the trench. Winterbourne and Evans scrambled out on to the road and got into the edge of the village. A rain of gas shells was falling on it and all round their billets – zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, zwiing, PHUT PHUT PHUT PHUT. Each took off his mask a second and gave one sniff – the air reeked with phosgene.
Evans and Winterbourne stood at the end of the trench to help out the groping, half-blinded men. As they filed by, grotesques with india-rubber faces, great, dead-looking goggles, and a long tube from their mouths to the box respirators, Winterbourne thought they looked like lost souls expiating some horrible sin in a new Inferno. The rolled gas-blankets were pulled down tightly over the cellar entrances, but the gas leaked through. Two men were gassed and taken off in stretchers, foaming rather horribly at the mouth.
The gas bombardment went on until dawn, and then ceased. Winterbourne fell asleep, with his gas-mask just off his face. Hitherto they had slept with the box respirator slung on a nail or piled with the other equipment; after the experience of this and the subsequent nights, they always slept with the respirator on their chests and the mask ready to slip on immediately.
The heavies began again soon after it was light. Winterbourne was awakened by one which crashed just outside his cellar. He lay on the floor for a long time listening to zwiilING, CRASH, of the shells. He heard two ruined houses clatter to the ground under direct hits, and wondered if the cellars had held firm. They hadn’t. But fortunately they happened to be unoccupied. Presently the German batteries switched off and began bombarding some artillery about five hundred yards to the left. Winterbourne profited by the lull to wash. He ran out of the cellar in his shirt-sleeves and gas-mask, with the canvas bucket in which he washed; and found that a shell had smashed the pump outside his billet. He knew there was another about three hundred yards to the right, although he had never been there.
It was another cold but sunny morning, with the inevitable white shrapnel bursts all over the sky. He was now so accustomed to them that he scarcely noticed their existence. Occasionally a very faint rattle of machine-gun fire came from the war in the air, of which he was nearly as ignorant as people in England of the war on land.
He took off his mask and snif
fed. A fresh wind was blowing, and, although there was plenty of phosgene in the air, it was not in any deadly concentration. He decided to risk leaving the mask off. The ground was deeply delved with the conical holes made by the big shells thrown over, and pitted everywhere by the smaller holes of the gas shells. He found a dud, and examined it with interest. A brownish-looking shell, about the size of a five-nine.
The cottages were rather scattered, and unused as cellar-billets in this direction. The top storeys had gone from nearly all, but in several the ground floor was fairly intact. He looked into each as he passed. The wallpaper had long ago fallen and lay in mouldering heaps. The floors were covered with broken bricks, tiles, smashed beams, laths, and disintegrating plaster. Odd pieces of broken furniture, twisted iron beds, large rags which had once been clothes, and sheets, protruded from the mass. He poked about and found photographs, letters in faded ink on damp paper, broken toys, bits of smashed vases, a soiled satin wedding-gown with its veil and wreath of artificial orange-blossom. He stood, with his head bent, looking at this pathetic debris of ruined lives, and absentmindedly lit a cigarette, which he immediately threw away – it tasted of phosgene. “La Gloire”, he murmured, “Deutschland über alles, God save the King.”
The next cottage was less damaged than the others, and its rough wooden shutters were still on their hinges. Winterbourne peered through, and saw that the whole of the inside had been cleared of debris, and was stacked with quantities of wooden objects. He shaded his eyes more carefully, and saw they were ranks and ranks of wooden crosses. Those he could see had painted on them R.I.P.; then underneath was a blank space for the name; underneath was the name of one or other of the battalions in his division, and then the present month and year, with a blank space for the day. Excellent forethought, he reflected, as he filled his bucket and water-bottle. How well this War is organized!
Death of a Hero Page 33