“Get back all right?”
“Yes, nobody hit. But there’s a hell of a lot of gas about. Don’t go out without putting on your gas-bag.”
“Goodnight, old man.”
“Goodnight, old boy.”
9
THREE more nights passed rather more tranquilly. There was comparatively little gas, but the German heavies were persistent. They, too, quieted down on the third night, and Winterbourne got to bed fairly early and fell into a deep sleep.
Suddenly he was wide awake and sitting up. What on earth or hell was happening? From outside came a terrific rumble and roaring, as if three volcanoes and ten thunderstorms were in action simultaneously. The whole earth was shaking as if beaten by a multitude of flying hoofs, and the cellar walls vibrated. He seized his helmet, dashed past the other runners, who were starting up and exclaiming, rushed through the gas-curtain; and recoiled. It was still night, but the whole sky was brilliant with hundreds of flashing lights. Two thousand British guns were in action, and heaven and earth were filled with the roar and flame. From about half a mile to the north, southwards as far as he could see, the whole front was a dazzling flicker of gun-flashes. It was as if giant hands covered with huge rings set with searchlights were being shaken in the darkness, as if innumerable brilliant diamonds were flashing great rays of light. There was not a fraction of a second without its flash and roar. Only the great boom of a twelve-or fourteen-inch naval gun just behind them punctured the general pandemonium at regular intervals.
Winterbourne ran stumbling forwards to get a view clear of the ruins. He crouched by a piece of broken house and looked towards the German lines. They were a long, irregular wall of smoke, torn everywhere with the dull red flashes of bursting shells. Behind their lines their artillery was flickering brighter and brighter as battery after battery came into action, making a crescendo of noise and flame when the limits of both seemed to have been reached. Winterbourne saw but could not hear the first of their shells as it exploded short of the village. The great clouds of smoke over the German trenches were darkly visible in the first very pallid light of dawn. It was the preliminary bombardment of the long-expected battle. Winterbourne felt his heart shake with the shaking earth and vibrating air.
The whole thing was indescribable – a terrific spectacle, a stupendous symphony of sound. The devil-artist who had staged it was a master, in comparison with whom all other artists of the sublime and terrible were babies. The roar of the guns was beyond clamour – it was an immense rhythmic harmony, a super-jazz of tremendous drums, a ride of the Walkyrie played by three thousand cannon. The intense rattle of the machine-guns played a minor motif of terror. It was too dark to see the attacking troops, but Winterbourne thought with agony how every one of those dreadful vibrations of sound meant death or mutilation. He thought of the ragged lines of British troops stumbling forward in smoke and flame and a chaos of sound, crumbling away before the German protective barrage and the Reserve line machine-guns. He thought of the German front lines, already obliterated under that ruthless tempest of explosions and flying metal. Nothing could live within the area of that storm except by a miraculous hazard. Already in this first half-hour of bombardment hundreds upon hundreds of men would have been violently slain, smashed, torn, gouged, crushed, mutilated. The colossal harmony seemed to roar louder as the drum-fire lifted from the Front line to the Reserve. The battle was begun. They would be mopping-up soon – throwing bombs and explosives down the dug-out entrances on the men cowering inside.
The German heavies were pounding M—with their shells, smashing at the communication trenches and crossroads, hurling masses of metal at their own ruined village. Winterbourne saw the half-ruined factory chimney totter and crash to the ground. Two shells pitched on either side of him, and flung earth, stones, and broken bricks all round him. He turned and ran back to his cellar, stumbling over shell-holes. He saw an isolated house disappear in the united explosion of two huge shells. He clutched his hands together as he ran, with tears in his eyes.
10
WINTERBOURNE found the other runners buckling up their packs and fastening their equipment with that febrile haste which comes with great excitement. Even in the cellar the roar of the artillery made it necessary for them almost to shout to each other.
“What are the orders?”
“Stand by in fighting order, ready to move off at once. Dump packs outside billets.”
Winterbourne in his turn feverishly put on his equipment, buckled his pack, and cleaned his rifle. They stood, rifles and bayonets ready, in the low cellar, ready to spring up the broken stairs as soon as they were warned. In a moment such as this, a kind of paroxysm of humanity, the most difficult thing is to wait. They dreaded the awful storm thundering above them, but they were irresistibly hallucinated by it, eager to plunge in and be done with it. The German shells thudded continuously all round them, muted by the vaster clamour of the attacking artillery. No orders came. They fidgeted, exclaimed, and finally one by one sat silent on their packs, listening. A large rat ran down the cellar stairs and began to nibble something. The beast was exactly level with Winterbourne’s head. He shoved a cartridge into the breech of his rifle, murmuring, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and they no breath at all?” He aimed very carefully and pulled the trigger; there was a terrific bang in the confined cellar, and the rat was smashed dead in the air. Not ten seconds later a red, perspiring face under a steel helmet was anxiously poked through the cellar entrance. It was the Orderly Sergeant.
“What the fuckin’ hell are you doing, down there?”
“Having a spree – didn’t you hear the champagne cork?”
“Spree be fucked – one of you buggers fired his rifle and fuckin’ near copped me. Fucked if I don’t report the fuckin’ lot of yer.”
“Wow! Put a sock in it!”
“Fuck off!”
“Ord’ly sergeants are cheap today!”
“Well, you fuckers got to report to yer officers at once. Op it.”
They ran up the broken stairs, pretending to poke their bayonets at him, and laughing, perhaps a little hysterically. The fat, good-natured little Sergeant went off, shaking his fist at them, shouting awful threats about the punishment awaiting them, with a broad affectionate grin on his face.
For Winterbourne the battle was a timeless confusion, a chaos of noise, fatigue, anxiety, and horror. He did not know how many days and nights it lasted, lost completely the sequence of events, found great gaps in his conscious memory. He did know that he was profoundly affected by it, that it made a cut in his life and personality. You couldn’t say there was anything melodramatically startling, no hair going grey in a night, or never smiling again. He looked unaltered; he behaved in exactly the same way. But, in fact, he was a little mad. We talk of shell-shock, but who wasn’t shell-shocked, more or less? The change in him was psychological, and showed itself in two ways. He was left with an anxiety complex, a sense of fear he had never experienced, the necessity to use great and greater efforts to force himself to face artillery, anything explosive. Curiously enough, he scarcely minded machine-gun fire, which was really more deadly, and completely disregarded rifle-fire. And he was also left with a profound and cynical discouragement, a shrinking horror of the human race…
A timeless confusion. The runners scattered outside their billet and made for the officers’ cellar through the falling shells, dodging from one broken house or shell-hole to another. Winterbourne, not yet unnerved, calmly walked straight across and arrived first. Evans took him aside:
“We’re going up as a company, with orders to support and cooperate with the Infantry. Try to nab me a rifle and bayonet before we go over.”
“Very good, sir.”
Outside was an open box of S.A.A., and they each drew two extra bandoliers of cartridges, which they slung round their necks.
They moved off in sections, filing along the village street, which was filled with fresh debris and ruins reruined. It was snowing. They c
ame on two freshly-killed horses. Their close-cropped necks were bent under them, with great glassy eyeballs starting with agony. A little further on was a smashed limber with the driver dead beside it.
In the trench they passed a batch of about forty German prisoners, unarmed, in steel helmets. They looked green-pale, and were trembling. They shrank against the side of the trench as the English soldiers passed, but not a word was said to them.
The snowstorm and the smoke drifting back from the barrage made the air as murky as a November fog in London. They saw little, did not know where they were going, what they were doing or why. They lined a trench and waited. Nothing happened. They saw nothing but wire and snowflakes and drifting smoke, heard only the roar of the guns and the now sharper rattle of machine-guns. Shells dropped around them. Evans was looking through his glasses, and cursing the lack of visibility. Winterbourne stood beside him, with his rifle still slung on his left shoulder.
They waited. Then Major Thorpe’s runner came with a message. Apparently he had mistaken a map reference and brought them to the wrong place.
They plodged off through the mud, and lined another trench. They waited.
Winterbourne found himself following Evans across what had been No Man’s Land for months. He noticed a skeleton in British uniform, caught sprawling in the German wire. The skull still wore a sodden cap and not helmet. They passed the bodies of British soldiers that morning. Their faces were strangely pale, their limbs oddly bulging with strange fractures. One had vomited blood.
They were in the German trenches, with many dead bodies in field grey. Winterbourne and Evans went down into a German dug-out. Nobody was there, but it was littered with straw, torn paper, portable cookers, oddments of forgotten equipment, and cigars. There were French tables and chairs with human excrement on them.
They went on. A little knot of Germans came towards them holding up their shaking hands. They took no notice of them but let them pass through.
The barrage continued. Their first casualty was caused by their own shells dropping short.
Major Thorpe sent Winterbourne and another man with a written duplicate message to Battalion Headquarters. They went back over the top, trying to run. It was impossible. Their hearts beat too fast, and their throats were parched. They went blindly at a jog-trot, slower in fact than a brisk walk. They seemed to be tossed violently by the bursting shells. The acrid smoke was choking. A heavy roared down beside Winterbourne and made him stagger with its concussion. He could not control the resultant shaking of his flesh. His teeth chattered very slightly as he clenched them desperately. They got back to familiar land and finally to Southampton Row. It was a long way to Battalion Headquarters. The men in the orderly-room eagerly questioned them about the battle, but they knew less than they did.
Winterbourne asked for water and drank thirstily. He and the other runner were dazed and incoherent. They were given another written message, and elaborate directions which they promptly forgot.
The drum-fire had died down to an ordinary heavy bombardment as they started back. Already it was late afternoon. They wandered for hours in unfamiliar trenches before they found the Company.
They slept that night in a large German dug-out, swarming with rats. Winterbourne in his sleep felt them jump on his chest and face.
The drum-fire began again next morning. Again they lined a trench and advanced through smoke over torn wire and shell-tormented ground. Prisoners passed through. At night they struggled for hours, carrying down wounded men in stretchers through the mud and clamour. Major Thorpe was mortally wounded and his runner killed; Hume and his runner were killed; Franklin was wounded; Pemberton was killed; Sergeant Perkins was killed; the stretcher-bearers were killed. Men seemed to drop away continually.
Three days later Evans and Thompson led back forty-five men to the old billets in the ruined village. The attack on their part of the front had failed. Further south a considerable advance had been made and several thousand prisoners taken, but the German line was unbroken and stronger than ever in its new positions. Therefore that also was a failure.
Winterbourne and Henderson were the only two runners left; and since Evans was in command, Winterbourne was now company runner. The two men sat on their packs in the cellar without a word. Both shook very slightly but continuously with fatigue and shock. Outside the vicious heavies crashed eternally. They started wildly to their feet as a terrific smash overhead brought down what was left of the house above them and crashed into the duplicate cellar next door. A moment later there was another enormous crash and one end of the cellar broke in with falling bricks and a cloud of dust. They rushed out by the steps at the other end, and were sent reeling and choking by another huge black explosion.
They stumbled across to another cellar occupied by what was left of a section, and asked to sleep there since their own cellar was wrecked. Six of them and a corporal sat in silence by the light of a candle, dully listening to the crash of shells.
In a lull they heard a strange noise outside the cellar, first like wheels and then like a human voice calling for help. No one moved. The voice called again. The Corporal spoke:
“Who’s going up?”
“Fucked if I am,” said somebody; “I’ve ’ad enough.” Winterbourne and Henderson simultaneously struggled to their feet. The change from candle-light to darkness blinded them as they peered out from the ruined doorway. They could just see a confused dark mass. The voice came again:
“Help! for Christ’s sake come and help!”
A transport limber had been smashed by a shell. The wounded horses had dragged it along and fallen outside the cellar entrance. One man had both legs cut short at the knees. He was still alive, but evidently dying. They left him, lifted down the other man and carried him into the cellar. A large shell splinter had smashed his right knee. He was conscious, but weak. They got out his field-dressing and iodine and dripped iodine on the wound. At the pain of burning disinfectant the man turned deadly pale and nearly fainted. Winterbourne found that his hands and clothes were smeared with blood.
Then came the problem of getting the man away to a dressing-station. The Corporal and the four men refused to budge. The shells were crashing continuously outside. Winterbourne started out to get a stretcher and the new stretcher-bearer, groping his way through the darkness. Outside their billet he tripped and fell into a deep shell-hole, just as a heavy exploded with terrific force at his side. But for the fall he must have been blown to pieces. He scrambled to his feet, breathless and shaken, and tumbled down the cellar stairs. He noticed scared faces looking at him in the candle-light. He explained what had happened. The stretcher-bearer jumped up, got his stretcher and satchel of dressings, and they started back. Every shell which exploded near seemed to shake Winterbourne’s flesh from his bones. He was dazed and half-frantic with the physical shock of concussion after concussion. When he got back in the cellar he collapsed into a kind of stupor. The stretcher-bearer dressed the man’s wound, and then looked at Winterbourne, felt his pulse, gave him a sip of rum and told him to lie still. He tried to explain that he must help carry the wounded man, and struggled to get to his feet. The stretcher-bearer pushed him back:
“You lie still, mate; you’ve done enough for today.”
11
THE battle on their part of the Front died down into long snarling artillery duels, gas bombardments, fierce local attacks and counter-attacks. Further south it flamed up again with intense preludes of drum-fire. What was left of the Pioneer Company returned to more normal occupations. So far as they were concerned, one great advantage of the battle was that the Germans had been driven from the long slag-hill, and from a large portion of Hill 91. By fierce counter-attacks the Germans regained much of the lost ground on Hill 91, but they never came anywhere near recovering the slag-hill. The ground they had lost further south made that impossible. Consequently, some of the worst features of the salient were at last obliterated, and they were no longer under such close obser
vation or enfiladed by machine-guns.
They had a day’s rest, and were then put on the cushy job of building a new track up to the southern fringe of Hill 91 across the old Front lines and No Man’s Land. They were outside the range of vision of the German observation posts, and it was two days before the German airplanes discovered them – two days of comparative quiet. Then, of course, they got it hot and strong.
In clearing away the wire they made a number of gruesome discoveries, and examined with great interest the primitive hand-grenades and other weapons of 1914 – 15 which were lying rusting there in great quantities. Winterbourne took an immense interest in building this track, an interest which puzzled and amused Evans, especially since this was the first time he had ever seen Winterbourne show any enthusiasm for their labours.
“I can’t see why you’re so keen on this bally old track, Winterbourne. It’s one of the dullest jobs we’ve ever bad.”
“But surely you can see, sir. We’re making something, not destroying things. We’re taking down wire, not putting it up; filling in shell-holes, not desecrating the earth.”
Evans frowned at the phrase “desecrating the earth”. He thought it pretentious, and with all his obtuseness he had an instinctive resentment against Winterbourne’s unspoken but unwavering and profound condemnation of War. Evans had a superstitious reverence for War. He believed in the Empire; the Empire was symbolized by the King-Emperor; and the King – poor man! – is always having to dress up as an Admiral or a Field-marshal or a brass-hat of some kind. Navydom and Armydom thereby acquired a mystic importance; and since armies and navies are obviously meant for War, it was plain that War was an integral part of Empire-worship. More than once he clumsily tried to trap Winterbourne into expressing unorthodox opinions. But, of course, Winterbourne saw him coming miles away, and easily evaded his awkward booby-traps.
“I suppose you’re a republican,” he said to Winterbourne, who was innocently humming the Marseillaise. “I don’t believe in Republics. Why, Presidents wear evening dress in the middle of the morning.”
Death of a Hero Page 35