The Golden Virgin

by Henry Williamson

  “’Ospital, sir. Shrapnel in m’ arm, sir, not enough for a Blighty one.”

  “Bad luck.”

  “It’s all in the game, sir.”

  “May I sit by your fire?”

  Half a dozen men eagerly moved to make room. He sat by the cheering flames, and sipped the strong sweet tea. He had been delegated by Bason to pay five francs to each of the men—there was a Y.M.C.A. marquee in the camp, and wheeled canteens from Division—the previous afternoon, and had made a point of speaking to each man by name, as he gave to each a green note. He must imitate the Duke’s way, in the Gaultshires, according to “Spectre” West, of asking questions about their homes, encourage them to speak. He had learned that they had been out from England for six weeks, and had had several spells in the trenches; he acted as though they knew more than he did. They seemed to like him; had Pimm given them a picture of him as a proper toff—all because he had played the sahib in the guardroom and spoken amiably to a poor devil up against it?

  He wanted to leave while the good impression of him remained. Should he say Goodnight, men, as was correct, or Goodnight, you fellows? Which?

  “Goodnight, boys!”

  “Goodnight, sir!” in instant chorus. He felt himself to expand in the darkness, the darkness now glowing alive with a spirit beyond death, as he walked back to the bell tent he shared with three other junior subalterns, all near-strangers, all recently joined, and ready to defer to one who had been out in ’14, and ’15. Bason must have told them; he had kept to his role of quiet veteran, determined to make no mistakes this time. Jubilant that, at last, he felt that he belonged to the men of his platoon, as they to him, he washed and cleaned his teeth, got into his camel-hair bag and said a prayer for himself and others before trying to sleep. Nightingales were singing in the wood, and through the open flap of the bell-tent shone the pale moonbeams.

  *

  The next afternoon, when the marching battalion approached the turn-over point of a long slope leading up to the sky, suddenly upon the air fell the intermittent rumble of guns; and during a 10-minute halt, the rumour came down the recumbent men that Lord Kitchener had been drowned in the North Sea, on his way to Russia, in H.M.S. Hampshire, which had struck a mine. This added to the stillness of thought within Phillip as, later, he waited for dusk on the northern slope of a hill overlooking the tributary river, with its marshes and watery cries of wildfowl; for now it was known that the battalion was going into the line, for a tour of duty, to relieve other troops. Phillip lay near his men, listening to the singing of larks through the thuds of howitzers, the remote corkscrewing of shells travelling east into the height of the sky. Poppies shook in the evening breeze, with marigolds and scabious. Below the hill, to the north-east, lay the ruinous town of Albert. To the left of its red-brick sprawl was a large building, which might have been a church, with shell-holes in its fabric; and towering above the walls was a campanile with something upon its summit glinting in the western sun. Focusing his field-glasses upon it, Phillip saw a figure, which once had been upright, but now was, upon its iron frame, inclining downwards at an angle, so that the object held in the figure’s arms seemed about to drop into the void below. With a shock of recognition he saw that it was what he had seen photographed in newspapers—the Mother of God with the Babe in her arms. The iron frame supporting the figure had been struck by a shell, and had remained half-broken in that position, to be seen by all going into the line, month after month, to inspire the legend that the war would end only when the Golden Virgin fell into the ruins below.

  *

  They spent the next week providing working parties for the Engineers, while occupying support trenches. One of the fatigues was the digging of ditches for the burying of water pipes. Phillip enjoyed the work of supervising his platoon, and learning about something he had never thought about before. Water, it appeared, was quite a problem when hundreds of thousands of men and animals had to be provided for. A friendly captain, entertaining him to lunch in the sappers’ mess, explained the set-up.

  On the staff of the Chief Engineer of the Fourth Army was a Water Supply Officer, with three assistants, and each Corps had a Water Officer. For many months they had worked to improve existing water-supplies, and build and bore for new points. The Engineer-in-Chief at G.H.Q. had bought a large quantity of water-supply machinery and equipment from England—pumping sets of every description, including powerful steam fire-engines from the London County Council. Two water-barges, fitted with purification plant and large rotary pumps for forcing filtered water through pipes, had been sent up the Somme from Amiens. Trenches had been dug for iron pipes of 4 in. and 6 in. bore, eventually to be laid up to the British front line and beyond into re-conquered territory. Water-points, led off the main pipes, filled canvas troughs for horses and mules, and provided other points with taps for refilling eighty extra water-carts or G.S. waggons fitted with 200-gallon tanks in each Corps area, in addition to the regimental water-carts.

  “A pity the water has to taste so filthy,” said Phillip.

  “We can’t run risks. One carrier of paratyphoid ‘B’ in a village, chucking the old slops into a stream, might bring down the corps.”

  “Even so, the chlorinated water, with the petrol taste, makes me feel sick.”

  “The remedy is to dry out the petrol cans thoroughly before filling them with drinking water, surely?”

  “I’ll speak to the Adjutant about it.”

  The engineer went on to say that a Fourth Army Water-tank Column had been formed, for when the advance moved forward. To give an idea of the amount of water required, he said the Column consisted of 192 three-ton and 111 one-ton lorries, each carrying 550-and 135-gallon tanks respectively. Each lorry carried chloride-of-lime purification apparatus, for dealing with surface water, and water in shallow village wells. Attached to the Water-tank Column was a Flying Repair Column, with special tools and steel bandages with which to repair pipes gushing water out of breaks made by gun-fire.

  These lorries, together with tens of thousands of other wheeled vehicles, could move properly only on metalled roads; and the problem of keeping roads in repair, and of building new ones across what would be a devastated area, was one of some concern to the engineers. For the French railways behind the battle front, largely an agricultural area, were insufficient for the needs of the Fourth Army which required, every day—the engineer captain said—eleven trains to carry supplies, fourteen for ammunition weighing over 5,000 tons, and six trains for reinforcements, remounts and stores; while the Third Army up north, which was to fight part of the battle, required twenty-eight trains.

  Once the Push had started, he said, it had been estimated that the daily total of trains needed would rise to one hundred and twenty-eight, including Red Cross trains for the wounded.

  This number of engines and waggons was not available upon the broad gauge of the Chemin de Fer du Nord, unless the carrying of stone for the roads was cut out.

  “So it will be rough going, at first, for the transport. We’ll have to re-metal the roads across the area of annihilation, as we call it, as best we can. In the back areas of the Fourth Army there is only one solitary quarry, and that’s nine miles back, at Corbie. The stone is inferior, too, with a lot of clay between the strata. In peace-time the metal for the Picardy roads came all the way from Belgium, you see.”

  *

  Later, metalling for the destroyed roads had to be brought by ship from the granite quarries of Jersey and Cornwall.

  Chapter 15

  THE RAID

  At the end of the week “A” Company went into trenches upon the gently rising downland nearly two miles north-east of Albert. Phillip looked across a no-man’s land of tall grasses, thistles, docks, and wild flowers and saw—nothing: no movement, no sign of life. Half a mile away was a village of skeleton roofs, and some trees in leaf, forsaken upon a fossilised chalky landscape, void of life and movement. Yet the pale summer sky of morning was suspended in a feeling of te
rror: within the delusion of forsakenness a thousand hidden eyes watched with the invisible sharpness of death. The sniper’s bullet cracked as it passed faster than sound, sometimes sparkling at night upon the chalk-filled bags of the parapet—the bleached and grey hessian bags, some broken with rot, with fatigue, and not renewed; for their purpose was almost served.

  The British front line lay upon a plateau one hundred metres above sea-level. It faced the German lines on the slope, rising imperceptibly past the two fortified villages of Ovillers and La Boisselle to the horizon of one hundred and forty metres, where lay, beyond periscope visibility, the third enemy line. Behind and hidden below that downland crest the towers of Bapaume arose in open country between the rivers Somme and Scarpe. There, he thought, was the open country awaited by the cavalry for more than a year now.

  There were moments when Phillip’s imagination overwhelmed him. He wanted to feel all the excitations, the hopes, the determinations, the fears of every soldier in khaki and feld-grau. With fascination, with glamour, with occasional tremulous thoughts of glory, he imagined the hundreds of thousands of hidden men, dusty with chalk, in khaki on the one side, mingled with an equal fascination of curiosity and romantic wonder about, and innocent pity for, the hundreds of thousands of men in coal-scuttle helmets and feld-grau on the opposite side—men lost to home upon that ancient bed of the sea raised by elemental cataclysm aeons since. Father Aloysius had said that there had always been war; that the surface of the earth would not be fertile without death and decay. Beyond such seeming destruction was the harmony of God, striving that men should see clearer, and live happier, according to their true natures. The eternal processes of decay and redemption had never ceased; they were eternal. He imagined the rain falling under the ocean winds from the south-west, and dripping through the chalk, to break out upon the hillsides as springs of water which, falling, falling, falling to the sea, widened the valleys in whose sides and upon whose plateaux, at that very moment of time passing through his brain, millions of men were digging and tunnelling, one race against another, reinforcing shelters above ground with concrete and steel, protecting them with barbed-wire strung on angle-iron and screw-picket, behind which machine-guns, mortars, gas cylinders and flame-throwers were hidden from view, in chalk-bagged bay and traverse, against blast; steep wooden steps leading down through timber-framed doorways to rooms and corridors panelled with wood, as in the flash of a torch he had seen during a static moment of raging hot coolness during a raid to get a prisoner for identification: a raid carried out in silence on both sides until Mills bombs had been lobbed down dark rectangular holes below the German parapet, ominous with wooden steps disappearing down into—what? Back! Back! he relived the moment with thin tense steel-wire fear, as a prisoner, gibbering and slavering, was kicked and prodded out of the deep trench, a young soldier with shaven head laced with blood after being hit by an entrenching-tool handle enwound and weighted at the end with barbed wire. What had happened? Where were the other Germans?

  They had crept across no-man’s land, guided by little posts, in the split tops of which hens’ feathers had been stuck. They had known the way by feeling the quill-ends; they had got into the trench, without a shot being fired; they had scrambled back, ripping hands, sleeves, trousers, puttees on trip-strands of loose wire, swearing with fear and interior galvanic flashes of terror in illumination from the bursting of green and red rockets over no-man’s land, rising above scores of calcium flares, soaring up from the German lines, a moment before sheet-lightning from the east told that the German protective barrage had started, to add coarse buzzing and swishing of howitzer and field-gun shells, with red-stabbings of rifle fire from ground-level and distant flashless enfilade of machine-guns firing north across Mash Valley from Y Sap just over the Bapaume road, also from higher ground in front of Ovillers. When he got back or rather fell into the British front trench he could not speak, his throat being dried up and partly closed, while the sweat from his armpits soaked the arms of his flannel shirt almost to the wrists; but the release from fear was exhilarating, the feeling of being alive most wonderful; for all of the raiding party had returned safely, bringing the prisoner, who had held up his hands in supplication, that his life be spared. He was very young, and soon calmed down, on being given a drink and a smoke, despite Divisional Routine Orders, while waiting to be sent down under guard to Brigade headquarters.

  “The new C.O. is expected tonight,” said Bason, “and the Adj. wants to hold the prisoner, who won’t be seen by Army Intelligence anyway until tomorrow morning. I’ve sent your report down. By the way, Major Kingsman wants to see you at the Post.”

  “What about, skipper?”

  “Search me. He’s just telephoned. That’s all I know.”

  Major Kingsman’s headquarters were in the support trenches six hundred yards behind the firing line, at the cross-roads known as Ovillers Post. Behind the Post the road led on down to Aveluy village across the river marshes, a mile north of Albert.

  Major Kingsman was standing behind a hurricane lamp at a table in a dugout four steps below the grassy surface outside. He said “Well done”, and then he said towards the haze of the hurricane lamp, “This is the officer who was in charge of the raiding party, Colonel. Mr. Maddison.”

  “Thank you, Major Kingsman. Will you be ready to go round the lines with me in half an hour, please? Sit down, will you?” said a voice spoken through jaws nearly closed.

  His sight still dazed behind smarting eyeballs, Phillip sat on a ration box. Across the table was a figure with a black patch over one eye, and a pink scar drawing together the flesh below it. The hand of the arm laid on the blanket-covered trestle-table was hidden under a black glove; and around the wrist of the black hand was a strap with swivel, which could be fastened to a ring on the tunic. He had a glimpse of a silver rosette upon the riband of the Military Cross, and looking up, saw a pale blue eye in a pallid face.

  The black hand pushed over an enamel mug, a voice said “You need a drink; help yourself, Phillip,” which was another shock on this night of shocks, so that he felt that his life floated unreal in waves of remote nothingness. He was unable to speak or to move. The reaction to intense stimulation was still upon him. He held up the mug of whiskey and chlorinated soda water with shaking hand, and then he felt tears running down his cheeks, why, he did not know, other than that he could not believe that he was in the presence of “Spectre” West. He drank, and the mug was taken from his hand.

  “Have some more.”

  The Sparkler syphon hissed. The mug was put before him. He drank, and began to feel his glassy self thawing.

  “I want to hear about your raid, Phillip.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  While he was trying to speak coherently there was a commotion outside. A sergeant’s face leaned down and said, “Beg pardon, sir, but the prisoner’s in a fit, sir.”

  The prisoner lay with bitten tongue, and snoring; he recovered for a moment some minutes later, and sat up, to glance wildly around and to cry “Mutter, Mutter” before dropping back and lying still. When the doctor arrived, he felt the prisoner’s pulse; then with his stethoscope confirmed that the heart was not beating.

  “Too bad he died on us before he could be interrogated,” said the doctor, adding, “Otherwise the only good Hun is a dead one.”

  “Bloody fool!” muttered the Colonel, as the M.O. left. Then Phillip was asked questions, before a trench map spread upon the table. He was asked about the direction of machine-gun lines of fire, direct or indirect. He was told that observers in the trench and behind it had been trying to spot them, but no flashes had been seen. The Spandau guns were thought to have been firing down pipes, from fixed positions behind the front line, and from the strong point to the south called Y Sap. While the questions were being asked, Captain Milman came into the dug-out.

  “I’ll be ready to come round with you in ten minutes, Captain Milman. I want to talk to this officer alone, if you please.”r />
  Captain Milman looked surprised at the curt tone of voice, and went out again. Then “Spectre” West, his eyes fixed on Phillip’s face, began again, somewhat curtly, to ask more questions. How long before he had gone over had he known of the raid? Had any details been discussed or imparted by telephone from battalion headquarters to his company commander’s dug-out? Had any been telegraphed on the buzzer? Had he seen any Hun sentries in the trench? Had any stick-grenades been thrown? Any rifles fired?

  “I didn’t hear any, Colonel.”

  “It looks as though they knew of the raid. The question is, how?”

  Captain Milman came back. He bowed to the Colonel as he saluted, and smiled at Phillip.

  “I’ve sent in a report about the raid to the Brigade-major, sir.”

  “Spectre” West said evenly, “In future it will be my reports that will go to Brigade, Captain Milman.”

  “Certainly, sir.”

  “I think, too, that, except on parade, I would prefer to be addressed by all my officers as ‘Colonel’.”

  “Certainly, Colonel.”

  “That, I need not say, will not appear in orders.”

  “Certainly not, Colonel.”

  “Now will you be good enough to ask the Brigade-major, from me, if someone from Army Intelligence can be sent here to identify the dead prisoner as soon as possible?”

  “The Brigade-major has already asked me to get the kadaver down to Albert tonight, Colonel. Intelligence from Army is coming to examine details tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow? God’s teeth! Why not tonight?”

  When Captain Milman had gone, “Spectre” West said, “I want to ask you a particular question, a personal question. I have a reason for asking it. It is this. Why did you tell ‘Crasher’ Orlebar that you were up at Cambridge University before the war?”

  Phillip remained silent.

  “It was untrue, wasn’t it?”