The Somme

by Gristwood, A. D. ; Wells, H. G. ;

  At first Everitt tried to crawl, but the uneven ground twisted his injured leg unbearably. Then he attempted a kind of grotesque shuffle in a sitting position, stretching his left leg stiffly ahead and working himself forward by his hands. But by this means progress was painfully slow and infinitely exhausting, and it proved impossible to preserve under such circumstances the least sense of direction. Myers could obviously have found his way easily enough, but it seemed never to occur to him to do so. At last they pooled their resources. Using his rifle, barrel downwards, as a kind of crutch, Everitt threw his uninjured arm round Myers’ neck and, thus locked together in a drunkard’s embrace, they steered a twisted course west-wards. It was a partnership in infirmities. Everitt, helplessly lame, found a clear head and a keen pair of eyes; Myers, dizzy and partially blinded, supplied the motive power. Every hole and ridge was a trap, and a dozen times in five minutes they fell headlong. Again and again they must pause and rest, and in one such respite Everitt in vain attempted to propound an epigram that might be worthy of the occasion. But he tried in vain. It was no time for wit, and sarcasm must wait for safety.

  Despite their snail’s progress all sound of the working party died behind them. Snipers’ rifles cracked like whips through the silence, and always the cold white flares were rising and falling. Overhead stray shells moaned and rumbled continually, but the zone of their danger lay far to the rear. They steered entirely by the Verey lights, aiming always to leave them behind, but finding, after the manner of traffickers in no-man’s-land, that the flares rose obstinately on three sides of them. Now and again they passed dead men, men of the Loamshires side by side with Fusiliers, and once clay upon clay beside a riven thorn-bush. This bush Everitt thought he remembered, and they were encouraged to greater efforts.

  But the intense exertion of their journey sent the sweat from them in salt streams, and soon their throats were dry as kilns. Once more they must rob the dead. Twice they drew blank, but the third attempt yielded a bottle nearly full of lemonade, made that morning with powder sent from home. ‘He likes lemonade so much.’ And now strangers were drinking it, and they knew nothing, and he lay staring at the stars. The tang of the drink restored them and again they struggled onwards.

  After a time Everitt felt himself so ill that he begged Myers to go ahead while he rested. In ten minutes the latter returned triumphantly. He had discovered a trench, not a hundred yards distant, occupied by men of a Rifle battalion, who, with the characteristic haziness of the ‘forward area,’ had told him they ‘rather thought they were holding the front line.’ At all events they knew nothing of any occupied trench to their front. It seemed that the Loamshire’s original position lay farther to the left in this same trench, and that the Riflemen formed a flanking battalion to the attack. The whole position was incredibly hazy. For all they knew the Germans might be sharing the trench with them, and the revealing dawn might involve an instant struggle. But such a state of things was inherent to the forward fringe of the Push, and in the meantime the Riflemen were anxious chiefly for rum.

  Thus advised, Myers had walked along the trench leftwards until he found a dump of wounded in charge of two stretcher-bearers. These were all Loamshire men, who told him that the casualties were being collected there until some arrangement could be made for their removal by carrying-parties. This news brought him back hot foot to Everitt, whom, since all sense of direction was lost in an instant in so trackless a wilderness, he only found after five minutes’ hoarse shouting and stumbling into holes. A last effort carried them to the lip of the trench, to which arose mysterious whispers from utter darkness. Letting himself slide as gently as might be over the parapet, Everitt found himself caught safely in the arms of invisible strangers and stowed forthwith recumbent on a muddy fire-step. There were several wounded men lying on the floor of the trench, but the gloom gave no idea of their number. Wrapped in great-coat and ground-sheet, Everitt was exhausted enough to be careless even whether there was any chance of further progress. He fell asleep instantly, and it was bright daylight when he awoke.

  At once his thoughts turned to breakfast. Once again Myers’ famous lozenges were alone available, and their ravenous neighbours shared in the feast. (Here was material for a notable advertisement, entirely wasted in the absence of a camera.) The stretcher-bearers had disappeared in the darkness, and the talk turned solely on what was next to do. All save Myers were so badly hurt that walking was out of the question, and the Guillemont road seemed infinitely remote. As the sun climbed higher, thirst grew upon them, and the flies, banished by yesterday’s wet weather, resumed their loathsome visitations. Evidently nothing could be done until dusk; and they must resign themselves to a further twelve hours’ meditation. As far as Everitt was concerned, so long as he lay motionless, his leg gave him no pain, but he avoided instinctively the smallest movement. Words were few in the hot stuffiness of the trench, and hunger and thirst made it easy to quarrel. At last someone found a muddy Royal Magazine, and the treasure was divided into eight fragments. But reading made the men sleepy, and their thoughts flew continually towards possibilities of escape. Also the haphazard rationing of the book had been effected regardless of literary continuity. The crux of a story was invariably in a neighbour’s hands.

  For four hours no one came near them, but about eleven o’clock the two stretcher-bearers returned with heaven-sent rations of bread, jam, cheese, and bully-beef, together with full water-bottles. Jack-knives and fingers made short work of the food, which was wolfed by ravenous men as though it were the choicest meal in the world. Everitt’s arm was now so stiff that he was unable to bend the elbow, and his one-handed manœuvres left him hideously bedaubed with jam and grease.

  Hunger satisfied, they besieged their benefactors with questions. ‘How did we get on yesterday?’ ‘Where’s the batt.?’ and above all ‘How are we going to get away?’ But the good samaritans had no definite news. (They seemed doomed to a limbo of Rumour.) The rations they had obtained from a Company of the Rifles near by. Evidently units were hopelessly mixed, and all they could learn of the Loamshires was that they were ‘out in front somewhere.’ Every one asked in chorus whether the Rifles would carry them out, but the stretcher-bearers could tell them nothing. It was indeed all too probable that other battalions would be fully occupied with their own affairs.

  At length the bearers disappeared again, ostensibly to ‘have a look round,’ perhaps to make arrangements for the evening. With their going Everitt fell helplessly into black depression. It seemed to him that they were marooned in that narrow trench indefinitely – isolated, forgotten, cut off alike from friend and foe. Among that helpless knot of strangers, gathered haphazard from the storm outside, it was easy to believe that the ordered machine of the army had no longer any concern with them. Why hadn’t they been carried away last night? Why should it be any more feasible to-night – or any other night? Suppose the Germans came over. They were utterly helpless and hopelessly exposed. Who knew what would happen before nightfall, or for the matter of that, after it? What were stretchers and stretcher-bearers for?

  All this, in place of thankfulness for so many dangers cheated, and the miracle of their survival inducing no optimism for the future! Yet, to their jangled nerves, this ebb of courage seemed perfectly natural, and shame came only long afterwards. Everitt remained obstinately pessimistic, and refused to be comforted by any argument. To all and sundry he replied that they were ‘in the cart.’

  Thus, quarrelling, dozing, reading, and dozing again, the long hours dragged slowly towards the evening. No one visited them: every scrap of food and drink was gone: they were unable to raise even a cigarette between them. And, as Myers said, if the Angels of Mons should appear to him that moment, the only manna he would ask would be a ‘Woodbine.’ One thing seemed to Everitt extraordinary. Not a Chaplain had he seen since he was wounded. This was notoriously out of keeping with tradition. Every one knew that no-man’s-land during an attack swarmed with Chaplains, administeri
ng consolation spiritual and spirituous, and picking up Military Crosses like so many gooseberries. Everitt’s experience of these men of God must have been exceptional, for he never saw one of them in front of reserve trenches, and associated them chiefly with Concert Parties and Church Parades. A gramophone was the sole social stock in trade of the Loamshire’s Chaplain. He would deposit this instrument among the men’s bivouac when they were out ‘resting,’ and lounge near it, smiling foolishly while it blared brazen versions of ‘Roses are blooming in Picardy,’ and ‘Colonel Bogie.’ For the rest, he made an occasional point of asking men ‘how they were getting on,’ and, receiving only colourless and embarrassed answers, retired with obvious relief to the more civilized shelter of the officers’ mess. There at least he would find whisky and bridge and the conversation of educated men. On the not infrequent occasions when the Battalion’s daily duties called it into unpleasant localities, the reverend and gallant gentleman was less in evidence. What he did no one seemed to know. Rumour declared he pressed the Colonel’s trousers, but more probably he merely laid low like Br’er Rabbit. At long last he was trepanned by a fire-eating Colonel into a burial party in front of Ypres, and immediately afterwards returned to England for a prolonged rest. But doubtless Everitt’s experience was exceptional and unfortunate.

  In a traversed trench, where a man can never see ten yards in any direction, a new-comer must needs arrive without warning, and there now appeared with sufficiently dramatic suddenness a visitor more welcome than any number of chaplains or angels. This was Lieutenant Mackie, thin, pale, keen-eyed and sarcastic. A Distinguished Conduct Medal for once summarized the man who wore it. Only yesterday he had persisted in promenading the line while the shelling was hottest, scattering chaff on the tremblers in the trench below. Call this unnecessary, foolhardy; Gascon bravado; yet it was good to see and mightily heartening. It was this same Mackie who later lost his adjutancy by indulging, under the stimulus of rum, and clad only in pyjamas, in unseemly gestures on the parapet in the moonlight. But that is another story.

  On this occasion he came as an angel of light. ‘How are you chaps getting on? Rough house, eh! You’ll be out of it to-night; stretcher-bearers will be on the job soon after dark. Keep the home fires burning! So long.’ You may say that this was theatrical, and self-consciously melodramatic, but it was the very thing to raise dashed spirits. Everitt had the grace to wallow in shame of his cowardice, and conversation flourished on the fertile theme of Mackie’s adventures. Soon the stretcher-bearers returned with orders that all wounded must move a dozen bays down the trench towards the Riflemen. It seemed that the stretcher-party that night had appointed a rendezvous at a point where a track from the road crossed the trench, and there were further suggestions that the near neighbourhood of friends would prove desirable in certain unspecified eventualities. The hint was enough, and since Myers could walk, he was the first to leave. For twenty-four hours Everitt saw no more of him, and then only for a moment, but six months later they met again in their reserve battalion in England, where it was a terrible joy to live that day again in memory. To his friend’s utter confusion and indignation Everitt ever afterwards regarded him as his preserver, and indeed it is hard to say how he could have reached the trench unaided. Such is the whirligig of war that Everitt’s last news of him told of his elevation to the dignity of Assistant Town Major of Mons. At the same epoch Everitt had attained to the sole custody of a particularly foul incinerator.

  One by one the men disappeared round the traverse, and soon it was Everitt’s turn. There were no stretchers, and without them two men were unable to carry a third, but in any event the sharp angles of the trench would have made their use dangerous. First he attempted to crawl, and next he essayed hopping, but the clinging mud making this impossible, he made use of a nameless form of progress dependent on a foot and elbow wedged into the side of the trench. This at first answered better, but soon the banks of the ditch sloped outwards, and the wider space mocked his efforts. Also in places where the parapet was low, any such gymnastics involved exposure. His final plan was to sit down on the floor of the trench, facing his destination, and to work himself forward by a series of thrusts with his hands, the injured leg held stiffly aloft to avoid injury. The bearers followed slowly, lending ineffectual aid.

  The procession must have made an amazing spectacle, but at the time the joke was hard to savour. The distance cannot have been more than a quarter of a mile, but, such was the exertion of these unusual acrobatics, that he reached journey’s end utterly spent. Breathless and bathed in sweat, he seemed to spend hours in propelling himself round the muddy traverses, and, when at last he was suffered to rest, exhaustion left him for some time like a log.

  The new stretch of trench was exactly like the other, and once more the little company settled down to wait for nightfall. The Rifles, it seemed, were only a few bays distant now, but none of them came near. By this time it was afternoon, and the stretcher-party was due at eight o’clock. Only another half-dozen hours!

  The time dragged more and more heavily, but at dusk the monotony was rudely broken. Someone suggested that ‘the guns were waking up a bit,’ and in less than five minutes the whole line was under heavy fire. Whizz-bangs skimmed the trench, sending down showers of earth as they scraped the parapet. The shells came with the sudden venom of lightning. It seemed to Everitt that Fate was playing with them, and that it was only in cruel caprice that they had been permitted to escape thus far. What was that ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ at home? It has never been agreed whether the last turn of the rack consists in ‘going over’ or holding out under a bombardment. Certainly the latter ordeal implies a greater helplessness, and on this occasion the victims could not even move a yard towards an imaginary shelter. Shrinking to the floor of the ditch, it was impossible to avoid visualizing the effect of a shell. All of them had had experience of a direct hit among closely packed men, and the sight is not to be easily forgotten. Everitt in particular ever held his most dreadful memory to be the appearance of a concrete block-house after a high explosive shell had actually passed through the door and exploded among six men. The walls were splashed with blood and brains, and the victims were torn to tatters of cloth and flesh that for a few minutes writhed dumbly in the smoke and dust of the explosion. And a weak will saw the sight again continually.

  Soon some pessimist chose to ask what was the cause of the ‘bumping,’ and at once everybody suspected it to be cover or preparation for an attack. Dusk is the plausible time for a raid, and they were miserably conscious of the empty trench on their left. Suppose the Germans reached it and bombed their way round the traverses towards the Rifles. Wounded men could expect little mercy in a hand-to-hand fight, and a blindly thrown grenade makes no discrimination. Unanimously they asked the stretcher-bearers whether they ought not to move nearer to the Rifles, and in their trepidation even suggested that some of the latter should occupy the unguarded trench. But their guardians were optimistic – ‘it’s only an evening hate – you’re safe as houses. Our boys are just round the corner. This bumping’ll wash out in ten minutes.’ In point of fact it did, but their fears were not entirely groundless.

  With darkness the shelling slackened to desultory shooting from the howitzers, and their spirits rose as the shattering explosions moved slowly away to the rear. Followed the calm of night-time, rarely broken by the crack of a rifle, and lit always by the rising, hovering, falling radiance of the Verey lights. Excitement grew vivid as seven o’clock crawled towards eight. In less than an hour they would be actually on the way ‘out,’ and the journey through the shelled line of communications might well be regarded as the last of their troubles. It would doubtless be a frying passage, but at least it would be progress towards a world where men walked upright and unafraid, where trees and houses stood unbroken, where there were other interests than death and wounds. Only thirty hours had passed since they had been wounded, but it seemed many days since they had seen a normal world. The thought th
at perhaps after all they might reach it again unloosed all tongues, and, perhaps to drown forebodings of that shelled track across the fields, every one fell to discussing their hopes of the base and Blighty. One man with a broken leg grinned appreciation of the congratulations of the others that he would spend Christmas in England. The less-fortunate less-injured men regarded him almost angrily as unjustly favoured, and secretly hoped that their wounds too would prove severe enough to reach the base at least. Someone said that the field-hospitals must needs be jammed with casualties from the Push and that the field-ambulances and Corps clearing-stations were used purely as evacuation-centres for all save desperate cases requiring instant operation. Here was the advantage of a ‘lively’ front. On a quiet section all save what were euphemistically known as ‘long jobs’ were retained in the net of the clearing-station, where the ample supply of beds made it possible to cure many a premature optimist. But in the crowded stream of a ‘Push,’ the necessity of keeping the field-hospitals free from congestion was a golden key to the base, where the same good fortune sometimes worked further miracles. And to crown these rosy dreams came pat the stretcher-party.