The Somme

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

  Everywhere the road was blocked with artillery, and even the ‘Archies’ were pausing only to fire half a dozen rounds by the wayside. Horses, men, guns and transport were streaming towards the west, packed more and more closely as they left the line farther behind them. The paraphernalia of two armies mingled pell-mell together. French infantry in horizon-blue straggled over the road, overburdened by their mountainous equipment; a string of cantankerous mules pressed hard upon a battery of ‘seventy-fives’; and close on their heels came a jumble of British field-kitchens, transport-wagons, camouflaged eighteen-pounders, ambulances, staff-cars, and innumerable lorries.

  It was a sunny, cloudless afternoon. The dust powdered the clothes of the men, and sweat drew shining muddy channels on their faces. The air was heavy with the stench of men and mules and petrol. Sometimes the men sang, and sometimes they swore; but always they gave me a friendly nod, and more than once a priceless Woodbine. ‘Cheerio, chum. Caught one?’ A ‘walking-wounded’ is privileged indeed. For the moment he is his own master, and concerned with nothing except his own safety. Thus he is in some sort a care-free spectator, and, cheered by the knowledge that he is leaving all this maddened welter behind him, he is encouraged to notice details that at any other time would pass unheeded and unseen.

  Despite persistent rumours to the contrary, the Oise bridges at Chauny were still intact, and the sergeant of Engineers in charge of the demolition-party there gave me from his water-bottle the finest draught of red wine that ever gladdened the heart of man. I am thus hyperbolical deliberately, for mere words were inadequate to thank him. This good Samaritan, like a thousand others we met in France, helped me and passed on, and stayed not for gratitude. We never saw them again, and whether they lived or died we knew not.

  Divisional Headquarters was evacuating Quirczy, and the field-ambulance, where not long ago I had spent a lazy week of convalescence, was preparing to follow it. When last I saw it the orderly activities of a ‘forward area’ seemed set to run for ever, but now nothing but was out of joint. In the dismantled reception-room a solitary staff-corporal examined my hand, washed and rebandaged the wound, and gave me the inevitable injection against lock-jaw. Now that I had escaped from the battalion I could safely assert that my trouble was a point-blank bullet-wound. Hence the scorching. ‘I can see you’ve been mixed up with them,’ said the corporal with an air of admiration, but my sense of the humour of the occasion was sadly blunted by shame.

  In a marquee near at hand three men, with but two useful hands between them, managed to cut up some hunks of stale bread, and drank cold tea from a sooty dixie. While we were eating, a wandering sergeant amused us with cheerful conversation. ‘This ambulance has been a ruddy shambles since the morning of the 21st. Hardly a man of us has had a wink of sleep for three days. Now we’re off somewhere towards Noyon, but God knows where we’re going. You chaps had better hop into anything you can find on wheels. The Jerries’ll be here in an hour or two, and if you don’t look slippy you’ll catch another bumping.’

  This was sufficiently explicit. We made haste to claim a place in a waiting ambulance, and so rode back another fifteen kilometres along roads dusty with a variegated traffic to the Casualty Clearing-station at Noyon. In the fields men were digging shallow emergency-trenches and mounting machine-guns behind the hedges. Civilians reappeared on the roads and, as we drew nearer to Noyon, we came upon parties of peasants in carts and farm-wagons, crouching wretchedly among bales and crates and boxes that held all that they had been able to save from homes suddenly abandoned. Old women were pushing along the dusty road wheelbarrows and mailcarts piled high with bundles, toiling forward slowly and hopelessly, while the tears ran down their faces. These were adventurous souls who had returned to their ruined villages after the great German retreat of 1917. No sooner had they settled themselves to the long task of restoration than the new blow fell, and once again they must abandon everything and trust to the charity of strangers.

  It was no wonder that they looked sourly on us – the Allies who seemed to have failed them. The bad news had spread like the shadow of black clouds, and roused the countryside. ‘English no bon,’ yapped the emigrants as we passed them, and it was hard to blame their anger. Everywhere was the same atmosphere of incredulous anxiety. Had all our boastings come to this? On the faces of a group of staff-officers I thought I saw an expression of shamefaced rage – as though they suspected us of cursing their fine linen, and the strategy that had led to a débâcle.

  The clearing-station at Noyon lay, of course, close to the railway, and thither the wounded had filtered by a hundred streams. Built originally by the French, the place was made up of some dozens of wooden huts and large canvas marquees, with wood-paved paths between them and lawns and flowerbeds beside the paths. A throng of men crowded every corner, and order and discipline had long since vanished. In such a hurly-burly there could be no systematic examination of new-comers, and only desperate cases – mangled shreds and patches of men – were admitted to wards already paved with stretchers. There was a rumour of bread and tea in a canteen beside the railway, but such was the shouting and turmoil round the entrance that it seemed hopless to join in the struggle. We threw our ‘tin-hats’ into a huge growing dump by the wayside and waited with what patience we might for the train to the base. Always the crowd was growing larger: always the bearers were carrying to the mortuary something hidden from sight beneath a blanket.

  But it did us good to see the Sisters. To keep a stiff upper lip in such surroundings; to force a smile when tears long to come; to treat grown men tenderly, as a mother treats her baby; to persevere under the utmost pressure of emergency – what does it cost to do these things? One of the nurses told me that a hospital ward tried to breaking-point her trust in God, while it strengthened immeasurably her faith in man. Such sufferings borne in grim, tight-lipped silence or with quaint facetiousness! The heroism of the ordinary man! The persistence of courage against all odds! Yet it was man that inflicted these torments, and one at least of that unhappy multitude could claim no share in their praise. But even to him the sight of these brave women carried a message from a better world, and from the moment he set eyes on them he realized again the meaning of home and England.

  We had been promised a train by eight o’clock; but nine came, and ten, and eleven, and still not a sign of it! Long before dark we were wild with impatience; the aimless lounging, the flying rumours and bartered tales of horror exasperated us to desperation. A story gained ground that the Germans were within an hour’s march of the town, and as dusk grew to darkness, the men crowded round the officers’ quarters and shouted for ambulances as an alternative to trekking. Military police were powerless to check them, for not even the ‘red-caps’ could do anything drastic to wounded men.

  It was a weird scene in the moonlight (for not a lamp could be lighted for fear of aeroplanes) where some thousands of wanderers lay scattered in every stage of dirt and rags and maiming. Excitement kept them garrulous and lurid yarns of adventure inflamed their fears. An uncontrollable restlessness sent them prying and peering into corners, feverishly wandering and looking for they knew not what. Sometimes they sought rest on stretchers or tumbled piles of blankets, but always the rumour of a train disturbed them, and they dared not sleep lest they should lose their chance of safety. Several poor fellows only partially crippled were crawling and hopping desperately in a crowd which seemed inclined rather to hinder than to help them.

  For we were strained to the last pitch of endurance: nerves were on edge and tempers raw to distraction. All that evening I heard sounding in my ears the hiss and roar of the barrage. We were light-headed with anxiety and the fever of wounds, and the sleep that alone could cure us seemed banished from the world.

  Several times we wandered aimlessly to the railway station, where a scared crowd of civilians clamoured impotently for trains and stared at us wide-eyed as at wild beasts from a menagerie. (And they had cause.) At the Y.M.C.A. hut, still bravely
open, and at several estaminets we sought in vain for food and drink. Stocks were everywhere exhausted, and all men concerned chiefly with dread of to-morrow. Their fears were well-founded, for next morning the Germans captured the town and seized the clearing-station for billets.

  It was long after midnight when our train at last arrived. For more than an hour there had been a noise of shunting in the distance, and we were not surprised to find that the journey was to be made in cattle-trucks. The last Red Cross train, crowded with stretcher-cases, had left soon after nine o’clock, and no other transport was available. Already many of the seriously wounded had been evacuated in wagons and lorries. To enjoin haste a few shells fell haphazard on the town.

  Yet even now we must resign ourselves to further waiting. We were marshalled in a long line by the rail-side, and made our way slowly down the length of the train, thirty men clambering into each truck. And then there followed an intolerable and inexplicable delay. For two more hours we were kept in gusty impatience outside the station, and then, in the small hours of the morning, at last began our journey to the sea. The moon had vanished and the closed trucks were as black as a cave at midnight, but we were leaving behind us the welter of the line, and looked eagerly forward to to-morrow.

  Thirty men in a French cattle-truck without their equipment can rest in comparative comfort. Forms or seats there were none, but we sorted ourselves as best we could in the darkness into two long lines on either side of the wagon, our feet meeting in the middle. Few had overcoats or ground-sheets, and in our anxiety we had left the blankets behind us. By hugging together in pairs we made shift to keep almost warm, however, and a philanthropist even sought to cheer us with a mouth-organ. There were no rations and, above all, no cigarettes, so that his cheerfulness was the more praiseworthy.

  The journey to the Base took fourteen hours. Most of the men in my truck were only slightly injured, and the jolting of the train was thus to them no more than annoying: those with body-wounds were, I imagine, less happy. Sleeping in broken snatches, we somehow tossed and turned and swore our way through the five hours of darkness, and, when day broke, pulled back the sliding doors to find the train grinding slowly through an unfamiliar landscape of wide flat cornlands. The sunlight did not flatter us. The sorry-looking crew of scarecrows in the wagon were dirty and ragged and unshaven, with dark rings under their eyes and the wolfish ill-temper of men tried wellnigh past endurance. The truck stank horribly of blood and dirt and the air was rank with fetid exhalations.

  Early in the morning we halted at a small country town, where ladies of the French Red Cross Service brought out to us mugs of steaming café-cognac. The warm drink cheered us mightily, but beyond a shamefaced ‘Merci’ and ‘Très bien’ we could do little to show our gratitude. The Sisters, I thought, showed their courage in approaching the menagerie thus fearlessly.

  While we waited there passed us a French Division ‘going up the line,’ and with them also our conversation was sadly limited. Loudly proclaiming the obvious, we shouted to them that we were ‘blessé à la ligne,’ and they replied with the familiar shibboleths of ‘Sale boche’ and ‘C’est la guerre.’ We understood one another well enough, however, and seemed to find an irrational pleasure in the meeting. This must have been one of the Divisions that filled the gap between Amiens and Soissons, and a few hours later they were doubtless in desperate action.

  Soon after noon we drew up at a siding beside a Y.M.C.A. hut and a dressing-station. Mugs of hot tea hunks of bread, jam, bully-beef, cigarettes, field-cards – I cannot hope to convey to you the dizzy joy we found in them. We wolfed the food unashamed like starving animals, and lit our Woodbines with a fearful joy. The orderlies bandaged afresh those men whose wounds were bleeding from the jolting of the train, and cheered us with tales of the flesh-pots of hospital. As we left behind us the stark horrors of the line, we insensibly invested ourselves with something of the traditional gaiety of the wounded Tommy. We could hardly do otherwise: we only now began to realize the extent of our good fortune.

  We reached Rouen about five o’clock, but waiting ambulances shattered our hope of Blighty. Ten minutes later we were in hospital, but not the calm haven of our dreams. At this time the Base hospitals were hopelessly congested by the sudden pressure of casualties. An ever-rising tide submerged them, and train succeeded train by day and night. The huts and tents were full to overflowing, and convoys leaving daily for England did little to relieve them. Each empty bed had three men to fill it, and the routine of the place had gone all to pieces. The orderlies told me that since the beginning of the German offensive they had been working for twenty hours a day. Baths and meals and dressings were dispensed haphazard: there was no one to give orders, and for the most part we were left to our own devices.

  The throng in the steaming bath-house was so great that it was hard to find even standing-room. My left hand was of course useless, and thus disabled I tangled myself hoplessly in towels and clothing. Seen through the drifting clouds of steam, the crowded naked bodies of the men, and their halting, clumsy, fettered movements, made an excellent illustration for a canto of the Inferno. But an hour later we forgot all our troubles in the breathless luxuries of clean sheets, fresh linen and a soft mattress. Our shelter was a draughty and ill-lit marquee, but it seemed to us a palace. We were asleep almost before we were in bed.

  But that evening I had been warned for an operation, and about midnight my sleep was roughly broken: ‘Come along, chum, get a move on. You’re for the butcher’s shop.’ They do not believe in euphemism in a military hospital. Huddling on trousers and tunic, I groped my way down dark passages to the theatre and resigned myself to an hour’s meditation in the lobby. The floor was paved with stretchers, and those of us who could walk stepped gingerly over them to a bench in the corner. It was a dreary ordeal. Some of the men on the stretchers were in such agony that they could not keep still or silent for a single moment. The big swing-doors leading to the theatre opened and shut continually, and within we caught sight of red-stained horrors lying side by side upon the tables. The reek of ether and chloroform clogged the air, and through the doors came the sound of hoarse, stertorous breathing, broken sometimes by sudden strident shrieks that set us asking anxious questions. ‘Do they always give chloroform?’ ‘Oh yes; the chap that’s making that row doesn’t know what’s happening to him.’ But we would have been glad of stronger confirmation.

  There were six tables in the theatre, and the less serious cases were dealt with on stretchers on the floor. From an unconscious man on one of the nearer tables came a shrill, tireless, monotonous yelling, and not far away four orderlies were holding down another who was fighting desperately against the anæsthetic. Pale, tired-looking doctors examined me; the sweetish scent of ether filled my nostrils; somewhere inside my head a wheel began to spin dizzily; the wheel became confused with the beating of a drum; the drum beat more and more softly, and I floated away into a sea of darkness and silence, to awake, sick and giddy, in the familiar gloom of the marquee. To the doctors I had repeated my story that the wound was from a bullet fired point-blank, but my dread was that I should blab my secret under the anæsthetic. My fears were once more groundless, however. The orderlies assured me that I had opened my mouth only in harmless and normal blasphemy.

  In the morning the Sister recommended me to get my papers from the theatre and to see the officer in charge of the ward with a view to getting ‘marked for Blighty.’ Such freedom of action was unprecedented in my experience, but this was no time for diffidence. I interviewed a truculent major in the receiving-room, satisfied him that I was fit to travel, and emerged triumphantly bearing papers marked in red ink with the magic ‘E.’ Fortune favours the coward.

  Two days later I was officially warned for England. (In the Army you are ‘warned’ for everything – coal-fatigues, bombing raids, England, France, and your ‘ticket.’) In a delicious flutter of excitement, I changed once again from hospital-blue to khaki, claimed my papers in the
popular waterproof envelope, and travelled by ambulance with an exulting multitude to Rouen station. There we found a string of cattle-trucks luxuriously fitted with benches (obviously a leave train), received rations of bread, butter, beef and biscuits, and were told that our destination was Le Havre.

  This was sufficient to convert even the most obstinate pessimists, and our failure to recognize the familiar route through Barentin and Yvetot worried us not at all. But our high hopes were premature. In the midst of an animated discussion of the relative merits of Leeds and London we fell to earth abruptly in the unexpected terminus of Trouville-sur-Mer, a dozen miles from Havre on the other side of the Seine estuary. Obviously this was no port for Blighty, and we besieged the staff of the train for explanations. The latter at first professed complete ignorance, and then told us that our present position was due to a misunderstanding; in half an hour we should be returning to Le Havre by way of Rouen. This sounded too fantastic even for Army transport; but we clutched eagerly at any straw, and did our best to believe them. In the light of after-events, I believe they were merely afraid to tell us the unwelcome truth.

  But this meagre thread of hope soon snapped. On a range of hills towards the west was a long line of buildings, crowned by a Red Cross flag. We could not help realizing that this was a large Base hospital, and after two hours’ further delay the train backed out of the station and took a branch line towards the foot of the hills. In a few minutes it turned remorselessly into a siding, and we received orders to detrain.

  There were waiting for us some dozens of open trucks fitted with seats in the manner of a switchback at a fair. A narrow-gauge railway climbed the hill-side in a series of zigzags, and carried us rapidly through fields of young corn and budding woodland. Wide views opened inland towards the south, but we were in no mood to appreciate them. We felt that we had been ‘sold,’ and it exasperated us to be treated like children who must do as they are told without the saving grace of reasons.