The Somme

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

  Gradually they left the roar of guns behind them, and at last the ambulance stopped at a cross-road, where the passengers were unloaded into a field largely devoted to picketed mules. It seemed that the motor-ambulances ran from here rearwards, and already there was some fifty stretchers awaiting removal. They were back in the old ‘line behind the line,’ an ugly region of dumps and stores, horse-lines and light-railways, huts and tents and tangled telegraph wires. Traffic of lorries and ambulances covered the road, muddy indeed, but at least unbroken. The country crawled with troops coming and going. Everitt noticed that shrapnel helmets were no longer in use and cast away his own as a contribution to the local salvage-dump. Another link broken!

  For an hour they lay there in the hot sunshine. Near by, a man shot through the lung tossed and tumbled in hopeless search of ease, and could find no one to help him. A few wandering samaritans administered water and cigarettes, and exchanged with them arid speculations on the ‘duration.’ High in the sky an aeroplane was surrounded with innumerable puffs of white cotton-wool, and near at hand an asthmatic anti-aircraft gun coughed with vicious impotence. In Everitt’s ears the rush and hiss of shells still sounded continually. Sometimes he could hardly persuade himself that the sound was pure imagination, and the sudden rush of escaping steam from an engine near by sent him cowering in an agony of dread. It was twenty-four hours before the shells ceased rushing through his brain.

  But the bustle of the motor-ambulances revived him. By this time he was used to being treated like a parcel, and excitement grew with every stage of the journey. Naturally he was separated from his companions on the horse-ambulance, and indeed throughout the day he was continually cheek by jowl with strangers. Over firmer ground the going was easier, but on open stretches of road the greater speed of the car made the jolting as severe as ever. Sometimes they were delayed by traffic, and, raising the rear curtain, it was possible to look out upon the scarred wilderness beside the road, and the variegated multitude upon it. For some distance they were followed by the limbers of a battery of howitzers, and the gunners were quick with sympathy. Water and cigarettes were all they had to give, but they gave generously.

  Everitt noticed that the gunners seemed impressed with the contents of the ambulance. Wholeheartedly they cursed the war, and, driven apparently by present evidence to a rare concession, even admitted that ‘the infantry had the worst time of it.’ For this is a sore point and an unending debate. The infantryman is doubtless prejudiced but, after all, he alone has the privilege of seeing each and every phase of active service, and can thus best judge the relative trials of the gunners, engineers, transport, and ambulances. The flying-corps (or that inconsiderable part of it that flies) is alone outside his ken, and for the rest, at one time or another, he shares the work of all. On the other hand none but himself know the full-fledged joys of the front of the front. Grotesquely enough, Everitt plumed himself complacently on his membership of the ‘P.B.I.,’ and, in face of this astounding confession, now felt more than ever competent to look down upon every other branch of the service. It is the same with every foot-slogger. He will curse his job wholeheartedly – ‘all the work, most of the danger, and none of the trimmings,’ but he never fails to remind all and sundry that the infantry, and the infantry alone, is winning (or losing) the war.

  As they travelled along the crowded roads, Everitt hugged the thought that all these toiling hundreds were envying the men in the ambulances. Certainly he had always looked upon the wounded as lucky devils, and slowly he was becoming aware of his amazing good fortune. For some of the men in that particular ambulance the good fortune was not so obvious, but, despite his horrified sympathy for them, he could not repress an egotistical gloating over the unfortunates left to carry on. ‘Damn you, Jack, I’m all right’ is the Army’s creed, and yet this callousness is inextricably mixed with the noblest self-sacrifice and a hundred odds and ends of altruism.

  In less than an hour they reached a camp of large marquees, much like an old-time circus in appearance, lying close to the road, and on the site of the old front line. Beyond the tents a line of battered poplars only partly hid the roofs of a village, sadly enough ruined, but at least still recognizable. Here the Somme desert came abruptly to an end, and here grass was growing over the wounds of war. A large Red Cross flag waved over the marquees, and denoted the ‘Collecting-Station’ for the area. Once again the stretchers were unloaded, and the green canvas of a low-pitched marquee gave welcome shelter from a sun now hot enough for discomfort. Everitt found himself ranged on the earth floor on one side of a long range of intercommunicating pavilions. Once more he suffered qualms lest some enthusiast should experiment upon his leg, and again the air was charged with the odour of iodine and lysol.

  In a little while he was placed upon a table for examination, and the dressing upon his leg replaced by a thick wad of bandages wound puttee-wise. A sketchy attempt to wash the wounds was exquisitely painful, and Everitt noticed that their hue had changed ominously to dark mulberry colour. Some one told him dispassionately that he was ‘for the needle,’ and before he had had time to speculate upon this terrifying announcement, an officer jabbed a hypodermic syringe into his right arm, squirted a measured quantity of serum into the wound, and marked his wrist with a large ‘T’ in indelible pencil. This ‘T,’ being interpreted, signified Anti-Tetanus Injection – an inoculation against lockjaw, to which dirty wounds are normally susceptible. Undoubtedly the treatment is efficacious, since lockjaw was almost unknown in France, while in other campaigns it has slain more men than battles. Everitt was soon to grow used to the formality, but on this first occasion he was amateurishly interested.

  Immediately afterwards he submitted to the ordeal of the question – that wearisome catalogue of particulars taken and retaken henceforwards at every stage of the journey. Also he was provided with a Field Casualty Card, whereon were scribbled all possible particulars of his name, rank, regiment, number, age, religion, length of service, and (all that really mattered) the nature of his injury. With a particularly silly thrill of pride – for the rôle of living target is far from Homeric – he saw himself grandiloquently described as a ‘battle casualty.’ Decidedly the pride of the latter stages of casualty-hood was a balm to the indignity of the earlier proceedings. A doctor glanced at the card and scrawled upon it something illegible which an orderly said was ‘evacuation.’ The blessed word was a passport to the Base, and incidently precluded interference until he should reach that haven. For fear of pain had now taken the place of fear of danger, and Everitt was discovering that safety did not after all fill full his cup of desire. The Base was now his Mecca, and he felt utterly incapable of rest until he reached it. And already it was plain that on arrival there, Blighty in turn would usurp its place as the true Island of the Blessed.

  And so out into another tent, where tea and bread and butter (marvellously cut into slices) made what seemed a glorious meal. It was the first food he had tasted in comfort since leaving Meaulte. Then out to another fleet of ambulances, and away to the Casualty Clearing-Station!

  This second journey was longer, and soon all traces of war’s wreckage were left behind. The houses were no longer ruined, nor the trees lopped and shattered, nor the fields ploughed naked by the shells. This was the normal world again, a smiling country-side, ordinary enough in ordinary times, but now by contrast seemingly the fairest land beneath the sun. Not that evidence of the furnace was wanting. Camps and dumps encroached upon the fields, and all the roads were crowded with lorries, but these things now seemed excrescences upon the natural beauty of the landscape. A mile or so away they were rather an essential part of another dispensation.

  It was little enough that Everitt saw of this, for the warmth of the day made him glad to lie flat upon his back in vacant contemplation of the roof a foot above his eyes. The travelling was easier over improving roads, and a cushion beneath his knee gave him ease at last. The convoy turned off the road into a zone of tents, large enou
gh almost to make an independent town. He was carried into a large marquee, perhaps a hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, filled everywhere, save for narrow gangways, with stretchers mounted on low trestles. This gave them the appearance of beds, and marked another stage towards civilization. Here too were Sisters in grey uniforms and crimson capes, cheering every one by their very presence, and calling all and sundry ‘sonny.’

  Almost the first words one of them spoke to Everitt were that if he felt able to write she would let him have a field-card or even a blank post card. To use the former he knew would raise a tempest of fear and doubt at home, for the bald statement, ‘I am wounded,’ may mean anything. Scribbling with the stump of a pencil, he achieved the following barbarous letter:

  ‘DEAR MOTHER, –

  ‘I have caught it in the leg, and am now in a field-hospital en route for the Base. I will write soon. DO NOT WORRY.’

  – this last imbecility in capital letters. It was vilely crude, but in such circumstances there was little else to say. The censor would delete ruthlessly any hint of locality, and no one wishes to rhapsodize on a cruelly public post card. At the same time he was given a gaudy linen bag in which to store his belongings for safe transit. After the abandonments of the past two days these consisted of a jack-knife, a letter-case and letters, a Bible, a purse containing 7 francs and 50 centimes, a pocket edition of Omar Khayyám, a filthy khaki handkerchief, and an identity disc on a greasy piece of string round his neck. The Casualty Card remained tied to his tunic as a kind of Open Sesame.

  No sooner was Everitt settled in his place than he was hailed by a neighbour. ‘Why, Tom!’ ‘Hullo, Jack, what are you doing here?’ ‘Oh, same as you!’ It was Jack Munro, of his old training platoon in England. They had slept as neighbours for six months at Salisbury, piled their bedding as a pair, grumbled in the same section, and marched in the same four. Munro was Scotch, dour, more than a little morose, and yet strangely given to spasmodic freaks of practical joking. (As when he upset every bed in the hut an hour after midnight.) Pawky and solemn and slow, it was rarely that he saw a joke, but when he did his sudden explosive guffaw frightened strangers. They had shared their parcels (one Kershaw making a third – their section-commander, promoted lance-corporal and long since returned to the Base with a weak heart), and it is remarkable that they had never quarrelled. They had been separated on joining the Tenth Loamshires overseas, and had since seen little of each other. And now they were thrown side by side by Fate and the Prussians.

  For an hour there was no lack of talk between them. They compared notes of their experiences – they were both hit in the leg – and speculated wistfully on the future. Munro had got to know Everitt well enough to confide in him his love for the dearest girl in the world. Hardly a day passed (in England, at all events) when he neither wrote nor received a letter, and even her photograph had been dragged from its hiding-place. And when a Scotsman shows you his lassie’s picture you may say you know him well. He was full of the prospect of seeing her soon, and told Everitt they were only awaiting the arrival of a train to be evacuated immediately to the Base. They plotted to ask the orderlies to place them in the same ward on the train, and even hoped to reach the same hospital.

  The magic news of ‘train up’ followed hard upon a second meal. A fever of impatience possessed them when the first man was carried out – would the train be full before their turn came? The Sister’s encouragement failed entirely to pacify them, and more than once Everitt felt like crawling to the train. At last they were carried to the door, and the stretcher placed upon frames mounted on wheels. Four stretchers, two above and two below, made a kind of coach, and orderlies pushed this along rails to the dark green ambulance-train that was waiting not a hundred yards away.

  The light railway ran close beside the train, and Everitt and Munro grinned cheerfully on the journey. There was a spice of the Scenic Railway about it, and, to add to their sense of holiday, Everitt recognized the place as that same clearing-station they had seen packed with ominous crowds of wounded on their journey southwards.

  As the men were lifting him from the train, Everitt caught sudden sight of Myers, in a snow-white head-bandage after the manner of an Arab sheikh, walking slowly towards the train not a dozen yards ahead. There was only time for a hurried shout: ‘Good luck, old chap – you managed it, then,’ and Myers, in his astonishment, could only grin hideously beneath his linen casque. Yet, even as he spoke, Everitt remembered guiltily his petulance of yesterday, and his almost incredible bad temper. What must Myers have thought of him? But there was no time now for talk, and their conversation was unavoidably delayed for six months. Munro, too, had disappeared into the train, and Everitt found himself separated from both friends at the same moment. They had not even time to say good-bye, and Everitt never saw him again. In England they maintained a strenuous correspondence, but by the time Everitt had rejoined his reserve battalion, Munro was in France a second time. The day after he rejoined the Loamshires he went over the top with the others and was killed outright. Just bad luck – a day’s delay, and he would certainly have missed the attack! And the best girl in the world? History is silent, and in any case, what is one sorrow among millions?

  V

  Entraining was a complicated business. The rolling-stock was French, and consisted of converted corridor-passenger coaches. Thus there were none of the double sliding-doors of a genuine ambulance-train, and it was necessary to lift the stretcher through the narrow doorways at the ends of the coaches, and then sideways round sharp corners to the compartment within. Further, there was no platform or staging available, and the two foot-boards of the train gave only a precarious foothold to the bearers. The complicated manœuvre of loading was only accomplished slowly and with difficulty. Half a dozen people seemed concerned with each transhipment, and the luckless stretcher rocked and swayed like a boat in storm. Everitt as nearly as possible fell out bodily, and only saved himself by clinging to whatever knobs and handles came within his reach. At last, the stretcher having been slued round into the carriage, it only remained to hoist the occupant into his allotted berth.

  The partitions of the compartments had been removed, and each coach was divided into two sections. On either side of a central corridor the berths were arranged longitudinally in three tiers – six berths to a section. To Everitt was assigned a place on the top row, two feet from the roof. The bearers raised the stretcher on their shoulders to an elevation that was even then far from adequate. Amid a chorus of guidance and encouragement he grasped straps hanging from the roof and hauled himself upwards and sideways into the berth above. The empty stretcher receded downwards to what seemed an immense distance.

  The berth was a broad canvas hammock slung on frames, but, after the sharp discomfort of a succession of stretchers, it seemed a couch for a prince. There was a pillow, and four thick blankets, two above and two below, and the folds of these last successfully smothered the angularities of the frames. From this high perch Everitt could see that the other berths, to judge from groans and restless tossings, were occupied by serious cases: naturally the lighter casualties were stowed near the roof. Behind him a door gave admittance to some kind of store-room for dressings and utensils, and in front was the narrow pass by which he had entered. He lay so close to the roof that the windows were beneath him, but across the corridor he could glance downwards to the busy tramway.

  He did not know how long it would take to load the train, and no one seemed able to enlighten him. By this time it was four o’clock, and the hot afternoon sun made the carriage intolerably stuffy. Everitt began to believe the journey might prove less amusing than he had been given to understand. There was nothing whatever to do, and he could only watch the movements outside at the expense of a crick in the neck. The man on the top berth opposite was too badly hurt to give any answer to his attempt at conversation, and Everitt in his loneliness discovered that he was incredibly tired and sleepy. An orderly approaching, he learned that the train was
now fully loaded. ‘But she never starts before midnight – else the Jerries ’ud see us, and there’d be dirty work.’ Whether from guns or bombs he did not say, but the prospect of eight hours’ delay was sufficiently depressing. Something of this must have appeared in his face, for the other was impelled to cheer him. ‘Tea’s at five and you’ll be at Rouen to-morrow morning.’

  This was news indeed. Rouen he had seen several times – a wide-spreading town standing finely in the broad Seine valley, noteworthy in passing for the steep wooded hills over the river, the grey Cathedral with its curiously truncated tower, and the iron suspension-bridge that carries the railway. He would rather it had been Abbeville or Boulogne, whence Blighty was obviously more accessible, but were there not ambulance-ships sailing direct from Rouen riverwards to Southampton? The orderly confirmed this, and, learning the extent of Everitt’s hurts, told him he was ‘a dead cert for Blighty.’ ‘They’re bunged up with bad cases at all the Bases – too bad to move – and they daren’t keep any others there long.’

  This was better still and a third meal went far to bind the spell – hot tea in enamelled bowls (blue outside and white within), bread and butter spread with liberal jam, and actually a hunk of cheese to follow. The friendly orderly – a pale, weedy, spectacled youth in baggy trousers – brought him another pillow to ease his injured leg, and in something very like contentment Everitt pulled the blankets over his head to chew the cud of comfort.

  For to be in repose of mind and body after long weeks of suffering is perhaps the greatest blessing the weary world can show. He must have seemed an object pitiable enough, soiled with dirt and sweat, ragged and unshaven, but to lie there in comfort, free for the time from pain, secure from danger, exulting in the knowledge that in a few hours he would be carried away from all the complicated horrors of war, was a very fair substitute for Heaven.