The Somme

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

  In a few minutes he must have been asleep, for, opening his eyes again, he found that night had fallen. The train was motionless, but he had no notion if it were still in the clearing-station. The compartment, dimly lit by a shaded lamp round which moths were dancing feverishly, was eerie enough in the gloom. Occasionally a groan or a curse came from a man suffering beyond endurance. The air was rank with exhalations, hot, stuffy, and intolerably offensive. Dirt, stale sweat, dried blood, varnish and a smell of drugs and food contended together in a sickening medley. Outside the guns still boomed in harsh chorus, softened by distance from a bark to a roar, but tireless as ever. Someone said it was ten o’clock and consigned the Red Cross to Hell for the delay.

  A little later came the Doctor and Sister on their rounds. In that crowded box there was little they could do – largely their duty was to change essential dressings, make minor adjustments for comfort’s sake, and, principally and above all, to speak a cheering word to souls sorely in need of it. Always the men tried to catch the Sister’s eye, eager for a word, and grinning with gratification when they received it. Once again they were all ‘sonny,’ and it was not only the five ‘Woodbines’ that made them glad to see her. With their departure Everitt dozed and waked and dozed again. At last a jerk told him that the train had started, and that Jerry had once again been cheated.

  The night’s journey was a nightmare. At the time Everitt was perhaps too tired to think about what he saw, just as, in the line, the need for violent action between bouts of bemused exhaustion had drugged his brain to numbness. But afterwards every detail grew vivid to memory. At home in England he would go over the whole journey again from Les Bœufs to Rouen, visualizing every detail, trembling and growing sick with horror at these vivid night-thoughts, shaking with panic to think of dangers that were passed.

  The train took thirty hours to reach Rouen – from midnight on Tuesday to the early hours of Thursday morning, and they had been eight hours in their cots before it started. Everitt passed the time in broken dozes, which at first seemed to refresh him, but afterwards served only to exasperate him by their brevity. Several times during the night a doctor or a Sister visited them, asked in a whisper if all were well, and passed on noiselessly. Some of the men near him were desperately injured. The tattered thing in the cot opposite on the lowest tier was bandaged from neck to waist, and lay there hour after hour groaning through set teeth, too ill to move so much as a finger. Only the most desperately urgent operations could be attempted in a moving train, and all they could do for him was to inject morphia and sponge his face and lips. Another man was mangled so ruthlessly with shrapnel in the back and buttocks that he could find no position of comfort. Howsoever he tossed and shifted, he could not relieve the pressure on the wounds – great raw surfaces as though he had been flayed.

  All the night long the orderlies were busy bringing draughts of water to burning throats, changing bandages when necessary, talking to those whom pain made garrulous. The grotesque horrors of the night made Everitt sick to see; the Sisters and orderlies performed for helpless men the vilest offices. And always the train was rumbling through the darkness, while the cots swayed and rocked, and men grew light-headed with pain and fever.

  As far as Amiens the line was blocked with every kind of traffic – fodder for the Push in the shape of men, horses, guns and stores. On their journey southwards Everitt had been astonished by the volume of the traffic behind the rail-heads, and had counted the ambulance-trains with something like personal dismay. Thus the present delay was readily explicable.

  The grey morning found them still jogging towards the north-west. The day was passed principally in waiting for meals. The kitchen, for convenience’s sake in respect of water, lay immediately behind the engine, and the orderlies must utilize the frequent halts for the carrying of the pails of tea and porridge and trays of bread and bacon along the track from coach to coach. Thus much of the food was cold by the time it reached its destination.

  There were no platforms between the coaches, and doctors and Sisters alike swung themselves from one to another by means of the stanchions beside the doors. Only thus had they been able to follow their night-rounds. Everitt, of course, had seen nothing of this, and now only learned it from the friendly orderly together with other vivid details of what he called a dog’s life. The gymnastics involved in rushing up and down the track beside the slowly moving train and in swinging the heavy pails to and from the coaches were alone almost enough to tire a man at the end of a day. Add to this the vile duties of the sick bays, and it was clear that even the Red Cross behind the line had its strenuous moments. Their rest, it seemed, came on the return journey to the clearing-station, but before they could ‘get down to it,’ it was necessary to scrub and scour every corner of the train and every article in it.

  Dinner was an affair of stew and potatoes, bread and rice; tea copied yesterday. Between these sole breaks in the monotony Everitt dozed and exchanged jerky conversation with the man opposite. Also he hoarded scanty cigarette-ends, and once nearly fell headlong in trying to reach across the gangway for a match. Someone loaned him a magazine, bursting with War jokes, and crammed with optimism and robust cheer. But he found reading difficult, and dozed the more as the day grew warmer.

  As the chill morning brightened towards noon he was perplexed to notice the air more and more strongly infected with a hideous carrion reek, such as was already only too familiar. The stench seemed more offensive whenever in his twistings and turnings he raised the folds of the blanket on his cot. The sickening sweetish odour filled him with a shuddering disgust, and appetite fled. The strangeness of the thing puzzled him, but it was only in Hospital at Rouen that he learned its meaning. Apologizing shamefacedly to an orderly there, the latter replied cheerfully: ‘Not a bit of it. Of course she’s hound to hum after all those hours in the train with never a dressing. They’ll clean it out for you to-morrow in the butcher’s shop, and you’ll be as sweet as a bloody rose.’ He realized that he had no cause to feel shamed like a detected leper. His wound had turned septic and that vile odour of decay was part of the day’s work.

  All that day the train jolted through the hot plain of Normandy, and the men grew languorous in the heat. In that polluted air the coolness of evening was doubly welcome, but it was not until ten o’clock on Wednesday night that they reached the sidings and ghastly flickering arc-lamps of Rouen. The delay there was exasperating. Six times they passed the illuminated face of a clock below a signal-cabin, each time on a different pair of rails. Complicated manœuvres of shunting followed, and the train entered the station three times before reaching its destination.

  Excitement now kept every one awake, and rumour declared that a boat was waiting at the quay to ship the whole trainload to England. Jerked downwards and outwards on the stretcher, Everitt found himself on a long platform paved with wounded. The arc lamps showed the dimly lighted train disgorging streams of helpless and grotesquely bandaged men, the platform crowded with strange-looking figures arrayed in rags and tatters of muddy khaki and white linen, and a long line of Red Cross Ambulances filling rapidly and driving away into the darkness. It was early morning before Everitt found a place in one of them, and by then nothing seemed to matter but a bed. There were stories of spring-mattresses, sheets and feather pillows, and filthy as any tramp though he knew himself to be, he felt perfectly willing to crawl contentedly into such a nest of bliss and sleep indefinitely.

  At this hour of the morning the town was dark and silent, and their destination uncertain: England was obviously as remote as ever. The night air was cool and refreshing; the flash and roar of the guns were quenched at last. In half an hour they saw lights beside the road and on a board the legend ‘No. 1 General Hospital’; and there followed a long succession of similar boards numbered consecutively. The Hospital area covered many acres, but in the gloom it was impossible to see anything save the grey shapes of buildings.

  At No. 5 board they swung away from the road a
nd halted before a brightly lit double doorway. Here they were carried into a long bare waiting-room already occupied by fifty stretchers. Following the inevitable Inquisition came the night-Sister in the silent ward, clean, sweet-smelling sheets, the discarding of the grimed rags of the journey, and billow upon billow of slumber and sweet forgetfulness.

  Here was the Base at last, after a journey of thirty hours from the rail-head, and sixty hours form no-man’s-land. For Everitt at least ‘The Somme’ was a memory.

  But not far away the fires of hate burned red as ever, and the long agony quickened with the days.

  THE COWARD

  ‘He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

  Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,

  And rouse him at the name of Crispian.’

  —KING HENRY V

  I

  We two were alone in the carriage and entire strangers. The War-to-end-War was already a memory, and we were travelling together from London towards the West. Falling easily into talk after the garrulous manner of holiday-makers, we drifted from the time-honoured conventions of the weather gradually but surely towards the Great Tragedy. There followed the inevitable question – ‘What were you in?’ and we fell to discussing War in the abstract, the ethics of it, and the alternatives promised by the League of Nations.

  My companion professed himself so rabid a Pacifist that I could not help asking him how it was he had ever worn khaki. He replied with unexpected fierceness that he had been bullied into soldiering, and had only joined the Army to avoid ridicule. He had always hated War, and realized the horror and folly of it; but better these things than the degradation of white feathers. For the same reason he had joined an Infantry battalion – ‘so that they shouldn’t mock me any longer.’ It seemed that his subsequent adventures had served merely to confirm his prejudices.

  The talk turned to cowardice, and to what extent it is a crime in War. I noticed that my companion was growing strangely excited, and, on my remarking that a deserter could expect no mercy, he cried out at me that it was a pity that those who framed such harsh judgments could not themselves be put to the test. Experience would probably broaden their charity.

  Seeing myself to be treading on dangerous ground I hastened to admit with due humility that I had spoken without knowledge. A civilian had obviously no experience of these things. He seemed mollified by my apology, and asked me if I cared to hear a story. Scenting a yarn of the War, I laid aside my newspapers, and he needed no further encouragement.

  II

  When the Germans made their big Push in the spring of 1918, we were on the right flank of the British line, leading a gipsy life in the forest country between Noyon and Laon. Immediately in front of us lay La Fère, hidden in the woods of St. Gobain, and our own position was that of support-battalion in the Bois de Coucy, just south of the Oise River. I say that this was our position, but in point of fact I knew little about it. For more than a fortnight, thanks to the prosaic infliction of a sore leg, I had been resting in a field-hospital.

  On the 20th March the ambulance brought me back to the horse-lines, three or four kilometres behind no-man’s-land. My feet had barely touched ground when the old familiar atmosphere of surmise and vague suspicion closed round me like a fog. For weeks, you will remember, the Allies in the west had been kept on the knife-edge of suspense. When would the Germans launch their offensive? When and where? No one knew, but the humblest private had his theory, and the nearer you were to the line the wilder and more circumstantial grew the rumours. Even before my holiday we had more than once been the victims of a premature alarm. ‘Jerry’ was coming over to-day, or to-night, or to-morrow at dawn. Orders and counter-orders circulated dizzily, elaborate preparations were made and cancelled; the waiting and uncertainty keyed men’s nerves to an intense pitch of apprehension; and always nothing happened.

  The Fifth Army had recently taken over a wide sector from the French, and, as is now well known, the available troops were insufficient to hold it. The system of defences in a notoriously quiet region had been long neglected, and were now entirely inadequate. Foch’s strategic Reserve (for even thus early we called it his) was doubtless ready and waiting to go wherever it might be called, but local supports of our own were an unknown quantity.

  Since the 6th February the battalion had been out of the line only four days, and these were spent in moving from one place to another. Moreover, be the line never so quiet, the life in cramped and stuffy dug-outs, the long days passed in patrol work and sentry duty, the makeshift rations, the lack of baths and clean clothes – all these things tell on men’s nerves and weaken their stamina. Over and above these normal troubles was the sense of great and terrible events in preparation, of a storm soon to burst no one knew where. On our front the Germans were quiet enough (too quiet according to the experts), but we spared no efforts to strengthen our defences. Night and day we dug new trenches, and wired and camouflaged them feverishly. At other times we carried strange burdens from the transport lines to the trenches, where, thanks to hard work, we slept like logs and fed like famished savages. And each day we ‘stood-to’ in the frosty dawn for an attack that was always postponed to to-morrow.

  For myself, I was a disconsolate schoolboy at the end of his holiday, and, the spell of routine broken, I came back to the line perhaps stronger in body, but in spirit more than ever unwilling. Almost at once I learned that I had returned at an unlucky moment. As I left the Chauny highway for the road that climbs the hill to Sinceny, a divisional-signaller told me that all troops were ‘standing-to’ and that stragglers had been recalled to quarters. After the freedom from toil and worry that makes the roughest field-ambulance so desirable a refuge, this news sent my spirits to zero. The mouse was safely in the trap again, and this time the cat was waiting for him. For a solitary journey such as mine breaks a man’s courage; it is only when he is alone that such sickly imaginings have him at their mercy. Among his chums he has other things to think of.

  Our Reserve Company was billeted in huts by the wayside and the men were standing to arms, ready to march. Dispatch-riders raised clouds of dust on the road, and a Brigadier passed in his car like a pale image of evil tidings. A sergeant-major, with a great show of unconcern, gave me his opinion that the whole thing was ‘pure wind up.’ Brigade Headquarters was near at hand, however, and there I sought out a friend whose duties in the canteen brought him into close touch with the Mighty. But although attaching superstitious importance to any news from so exalted a quarter, I could learn little from him. Certainly an attack was expected; it might materialize or it might not. That was the sum of his knowledge; but I could see from the anxious faces of the satellites that hover ever in the shadow of the Staff that this time something was going to happen.

  Nothing out of the way marked my journey to the line. Sinceny village had been smashed and gutted from end to end – deliberate damage effected by the Germans in their retreat to the Hindenburg Line a year ago. An empty doll’s carriage stood crazily upon a heap of broken bricks. The gaudy wirework decorations in the tombs in the churchyard were broken and strewn upon the ground. The gravestones themselves were torn and shattered.

  The usual rumours were afloat at Battalion Headquarters, and I heard that after this present spell in the line the Division was going to Italy, Egypt and Salonica. Like many another unit, we were always on the point of departure for the Antipodes, but a perverse destiny never allowed us to start. We discussed the possibilities of leave, and decided that recent declarations in Parliament could not but improve matters. As to the enemy’s offensive, perhaps it would never come; and if it did, it would fail and be a thing of the past long before midsummer. It would be his last effort and, once we had weathered it, the end could not be much longer delayed. The coming of a group of R.A.M.C. men, detached from a field-ambulance for special service, sobered us a little, but we had heard the cry of ‘Wolf’ too often and laughed at their fears. Within a week the joke was a sour one.
<
br />   Headquarters lay in dug-outs beneath twin hills known as the Buttes de Rouy, and the road threaded the valley between them to the village of Amigny-Rouy, where I hoped to find my Company. At dusk I followed the ration-carts through the deserted village, smashed like Pompeii of old, smashed in cold blood by bomb and mine and fire. The bright moonlight could not lighten the sombre sadness of its desolation, and memories and regrets lurked sadly among the shadows. Each house was a mangled skeleton – the windows blown out, the walls for the most part ruinous. In several places an interior lay exposed in section like a builder’s plan, the intimacies of wall-paper and furniture clinging crazily to the tottering walls. Piles of rubble surrounded these grotesque ruins, and only the main road had been cleared for traffic.

  It was a still and peaceful evening. Not a gun was firing, and the crack of a sniper’s rifle or the quick chatter of machine-guns broke rarely through the silence. Woodland odours scented the air and, away from the shattered husk of the village, the smirch of War could easily be forgotten. But as dusk grew to dark, bright Verey lights soared high above the trees, climbed and hovered and fell, and changed the dark forest into fairyland.

  My platoon I found in one of half a dozen intercommunicating dug-outs, dark narrow caverns, buried thirty feet below ground and, unless shell-fire blocked the entrances, safe from everything but gas. My return was hailed as a miracle of ill-fortune, for up here in the line every one seemed resigned to the worst. Letters and rations distributed, we exchanged contradictory rumours, and tried to draw comfort from a local theory that no German attack could by any possibility reach us through the thickly-wired forest.