No Hero-This

by Warwick Deeping

  * * *

  I go down to Gully Beach to see Frost. He has two new officers posted to his ambulance, one of them a somewhat celebrated gynæcologist who appears to suffer this new world with bored and depressed bewilderment. Petticoats are unknown entities in Gallipoli, though doubtless they are dreamed of as symbols by sex-starved men. Personally I find that the sex in me has gone to sleep. I remember discussing the phenomenon with Frost.

  He asks me how I am getting on, and I strive to maintain a shallow cheerfulness. I am not going to whimper, for I feel quite the veteran in the presence of these two new men. They are just as astonished as I was at discovering the apathy and stagnation which embalm this dead body of a war.

  Frost shows me a letter from some cheerful fool at home. It is full of brass-band tosh and pompous optimism. How impossible it seems for the people at home to understand what war is in its elementals.

  News. I get it from Carfax. There is a stunt on and we are to be the stunt-merchants. A mine is to be blown and our crowd are to seize the crater and attack and occupy a section of a Turkish trench. Riddle of B Company is to be in charge of the actual attack. He is a tough if turgid soul.

  Carfax is looking glum. I ask him what can be the use of such a show, sacrificing lives to possess ourselves of a few square yards of ground when our situation here is one of complete frustration.

  “Oh, morale, doc., keeping up the offensive spirit, blooding the new men. If you ask me, I think it is just damned silly.”

  “Isn’t it rather more than that?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. Organized suicide, if you like, but war can be a sort of suicide club run by charming old gentlemen who do not have to share in the throat-cutting.”

  “Shall we have many casualties?”

  “Perhaps a hundred or so. It will depend upon how our friend Abdul reacts. If he is feeling nasty, things may be a bit sticky, but the men will get their rum!”

  The news worries me. What will my share be in the show? I suppose I shall be kept busy dressing wounded in my aid-post, but as the space in a battalion aid-post is limited, I may have to work in the trench. It has been impressed upon me that wounded must be passed on as quickly as possible to the Field Ambulance, and that a bearer post may be established in the line to help me. I hope it will not rain, and I hope the Turks will not shell my aid-post. Skinders asks me whether I have indented for an additional supply of dressings, and I tell him that I have done so. He is in a state of fuss and flurry. But why have they chosen Skinders and our crowd to perform this stunt? Is it flattery or punishment?

  Carfax tells me privately that he has long suspected the powers that be of wanting to break Skinders. They would like to get rid of him, but in spite of his windiness he clings to office, and is quite convinced that some day he will command a brigade.

  * * *

  The attack is to be staged to take place at dusk. The nearer I approach it, the less I like the prospect. I suppose I am windy, but I am obsessed by the feeling that I am to be involved in some tragedy. A parcel from Mary reaches me on the night before the battalion returns to the line. It contains a cake, tobacco, a new pipe, and a packet of safety-razor blades. Mary does not yet know that I have left the Field Ambulance, and she writes very cheerfully.

  If I could only see her and speak with her before this show, but I suppose such a meeting would only make us both suffer.

  I feel dreadfully homesick.

  I take the cake to the mess for tea. Skinders deigns to eat two large slices of it, but half the cake is left, and I present the remaining half to Sergeant Shrimpton and my battalion stretcher-bearers.

  I spend part of the evening in writing to my wife. It is a long letter, but I do not tell her that I am with a battalion and that we are to make an attack, but when I read the letter through I realize that it is too emotional, and may make her suspect something. I tear it up, and write a second letter, and try to keep my emotional self out of it.

  * * *

  We are back in the line. The attack is timed for to-morrow at dusk. Our guns and the monitors are to share in a brief and furious bombardment of the Turkish trenches. Poor devils, do they suspect? I go to see Riddle to wish him luck, and find him in a confident and arrogant mood. No doubt he is a tough customer and the right man for the job.

  “If I get hit, doc., you’ll ruddy well see that I get a good ticket.”

  Carfax is depressed and his depression affects me. He tells me that half the attacking party is to consist of men who joined us in the last draft. They are raw and inexperienced, and the ordeal will be an ugly one for them. Carfax hints that he rather dreads a panic. The attack itself may prove a straightforward affair, but holding the ground under concentrated shell fire and bombing may be a bloody business for new men to suffer.

  I sometimes wish that Carfax wouldn’t be so candid.

  * * *

  I have everything ready in the aid-post. The ambulance is sending up bearers to help in the evacuation of wounded. I have had the trench outside the aid-post widened so that I can dress men there if things become too congested.

  * * *

  I receive a message saying that Colonel Skinders wants to see me. I find him alone in the mess. He tells me that he has asked for a Field Ambulance officer to be sent up to take over the aid-post, and that I am to follow the storming party into the crater.

  I stand and stare at him. This is a horrible prospect! What can I do in a dark and dirty hole crowded with men, and full perhaps of fear and confusion?

  I say, “Do you think that will help, sir?”

  He stares at me.

  “Those are my orders.”

  Has he the right to give me such orders? But I have no time to appeal, and I know that if I argue the question he will accuse me of trying to shirk my duty. He has me in a cleft stick, and Carfax’s warning was justified.

  I say, “Very well, sir. Do I take my stretcher-bearers?”

  “Of course. Your proper place will be with your bearers.”

  Half-past four, and a clear, cold steely sky. I am terribly strung up, but less scared than I had expected to be. The men who are to attack are assembled waiting for the fireworks to go up. I and Shrimpton and the bearers wait in a sap. Milsom has come up and taken over the aid-post. When I told Milsom what Skinders had ordered me to do, he had said, “Why didn’t you ask him to mind his own business?” Shrimpton and I have haversacks full of dressings, also a monkey-box and morphia. Immediately outside our sap a party of men are waiting with picks and shovels ready to dig a communication trench to the mine crater. The order is “No talking.”

  Noise, sudden, terrifying, stunning noise. Shells rush over our heads and burst on the Turkish trench. The twilight seems torn with this winged death. There are other shells, huge things that make a sort of snoring sound as they come, and whose explosions are like the erupting of a volcano. These are the monitors’ shells. There is a rumbling roar; the earth shakes, and I can see a cloud of dust and debris billowing up into the sky. The mine has been fired. I hear Shrimpton say, “Now they’re over the top.”

  My mouth feels dry, and my stomach tight as a drum. I realize that our turn has come.

  I am aware of scrambling over the parapet, with Shrimpton pushing me behind. Will there be rifle fire? The crater is only a few yards away. We stumble across in the half darkness; a few bullets go stinging by, but no one is hit. I find myself slithering down the soft earth into the crater. It is full of confused and crowded activity. I hear Riddle’s voice shouting, “Dig, you blighters, dig like hell. Come on with those sandbags. Now then, the trench party forward. Come on.”

  I find myself in the bottom of the crater. Shrimpton has slipped and come rolling down against my legs.

  I shout, “Any wounded?”

  Nobody pays any attention to me. Apparently there are no wounded. Riddle and half the storming party have gone on into the Turkish trench to clear a section of it and block it. The men left behind are working furiously to consoli
date the crater.

  It is difficult for me to give an adequate description of this most horrible night. It has become suddenly and strangely quiet. Our guns have ceased firing. There are no sounds but those made by the spades of the men who are working furiously in this great saucer of earth. I hear heavy breathing, grunts, an occasional curse, one of the stock army adjectives. How absurdly quiet it is! I sit down in my mackintosh on the soft soil, and wonder whether I should be justified in going back. There is nothing here for me to do. But if I venture back over the open I may be hit by a stray bullet; moreover, I suppose that I am intended to stay here. The working party is digging the new communication trench to link up the crater with our front line, and that, in the end, will be a safer way home.

  I hear Riddle’s voice again, and I get up and manage to find him in this dim hollow.

  “Any wounded?”

  “That you, doc.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not yet. Abdul did a bunk. But the fun is only just beginning.”

  How right he proves. There is the report of a gun in the distance, and the sound of a shell coming nearer and nearer, and the beastly thing bursts just outside the crater.

  “Heavy stuff, doc. Better get down under the bank where my chaps are digging.”

  I go and squat there. More heavy shells burst outside the crater, making the earth quake, and raining down clods on us. It is horrible this waiting. A man near me complains of a bruised back and I am in the act of getting up to see whether he has been hit by a shell fragment or a clod when a shell bursts just inside the crater. I throw myself down. Earth flies; something strikes the soil above me; I hear a sharp cry, groans. Now, there are wounded.

  Shrimpton and I get busy as best we can, but my hands are so shaky that I fumble. I hear the sergeant say, “They are through with the new trench. We can get ’em back, sir, to the aid-post.” He shouts for stretcher-bearers.

  It is at this point that I become confused. There is more noise, explosions, shouts. Somebody yells, “He’s coming over.” Bombs are being thrown. There is a sudden rush of men and I hear Riddle cursing. I find myself involved and hustled away in a bullocking stampede, and I am swept out of the crater by this human flood and along the new communication trench to the old front line. I am like a sheep among sheep crowding and jostling in a lane. Something flashes on my face, the light of a torch. I hear Skinders’s voice.

  “Get back, you damned cowards! Doctor, what are you doing here?”

  I blurt out something about having been carried along in the scrimmage.

  He says sarcastically, “So I see.”

  His torch is unsteady, and its light wavers across my face. I cannot see Skinders’s face, but my impression is that he is savage and scared, a dangerous mixture. His voice snarls at me.

  “I’ll speak to you later, Brent. Get back to the aid-post and tell Captain Milsom to come up here. I want someone who can be of use.”

  The darkness is no respecter of persons. We are hustled apart by a sudden back-rush of the men who have panicked. Skinders is screaming, “Get back, you swine.” Then I hear Carfax’s voice, so much more calm and compelling. “Get back, you men, get back into the crater.” I am flattened against the trench wall, and Skinders’s wavering torch shows me Carfax brushing past; he has his revolver out. “Get back, you men, or I’ll shoot!” I let Carfax go by. I am bewildered, and possessed by a feeling of profound humiliation. Skinders has me skewered. He can accuse me of cowardice, and of deserting my post. How much of me was consenting when that rush of scared cattle swept me out of the crater? What was it Skinders ordered me to do? Go and fetch Milsom. I make my way in a kind of stupor of shame to the aid-post, and find Milsom dressing a wounded man. He looks up at me and his eyes seem to grow narrow and bright. Is it my face that shocks him?

  “Hallo, Brent!”

  I cannot speak for a moment, and my voice, when it comes, is not my voice.

  “Skinders told me to tell you to go up there.”

  His face grows thin and sharp.

  “I see. Better carry on here, Brent.”

  He gives me a glance of unfriendly pity, and goes out.

  I manage to regain my self-control, and for the next hour I am kept busy dressing wounded and trying to get them away. I cannot keep pace with the cases, and the trench outside the aid-post is crowded with casualties. One of Riddle’s second lieutenants is brought in with his right leg blown off below the knee. He is blanched, and strangely quiet, and he looks up at me with large and frightened eyes.

  “I don’t want to die, doc.”

  My hands grow steady as I do my best for him.

  Presently, Milsom comes back, and without a word joins me in the work. His silence is significant, and I can find nothing to say to him. My consciousness seems to be functioning in a kind of swamp of shame and of failure, but I do thank God that the man who was called to take my place has come back unscathed. But what is Milsom thinking, what will other men think?

  At last this silence becomes unbearable.

  “Is it all over up there?”

  He answers me laconically.

  “Yes. Stout man, Riddle. Got his men going again, and put Abdul back in his proper place. Bit sticky while it lasted.”

  I am aware of blood on my hands.

  * * *

  Some time in the night when everything is over, I sneak like a dog to its kennel, and lie down in my clothes. Almost I wish that I could die on this wire bed as Hibbert died. No one comes near me. I try to sleep, but my feeling of dreadful failure is like a pain that will not pass.

  * * *

  Daylight, and a clear sky. My man brings me water, and I find that it is tepid. I wash and shave. I know that I must go to the mess, but I shrink from confronting those other men. I sit on my bed, but at last I compel myself to get up and go out. I pass a squad of men shovelling up earth. They pay no attention to me. I arrive outside the sandbagged wall of the mess, and hear voices. Skinders is saying something to Carfax, and Carfax replies to him. “Well, sir, probably he was telling the truth.” Skinders snaps at him, “A case of sheer ruddy funk. I won’t have that sort of rotter in my mess. Get that letter off at once.” I stand in the mess doorway, and there is sudden silence. I take my place at the table, and the silence continues. Skinders ignores me. I meet Carfax’s eyes, and there is kindness and compassion in them, but I realize that I am in perilous disgrace. Skinders can make it as nasty for me as he pleases.

  Skinders has finished his breakfast. He lights a cigarette, gets up, and says to Carfax, “I’ll see to that letter myself.” As he is going out, he turns and speaks to me.

  “I am having the sick parade postponed. You can wait in your dug-out until you are relieved. I am applying for an officer to replace you immediately.”

  So that is it! Does this mean that there will be an official inquiry into my conduct?

  I leave my breakfast to go back to my dug-out. Carfax follows me. He says, “I’m sorry, Brent; I don’t believe you could help what happened, but our friend was waiting to catch you out. I’m sorry.”

  IX

  How pleasant to be at the mercy of a man like Skinders! I pack my kit, and begin to feel that I have some right to be rebellious. After all it was a piece of flagrant and stupid tyranny for Skinders to send a medical officer to deal with wounded in a place like that mine crater. Can he justify it, and can I be condemned for being the victim of a momentary panic?

  I sit down again on the wire bed and wait. I seem to sit there for hours. At long last I hear footsteps and Sturges’s solemn and spectacled face appears in the doorway of the dug-out.

  He says, “I have been sent up to relieve you.”

  Sturges is not pleased, and I am not surprised. I don’t suppose he welcomes the prospect of serving under Skinders. He takes an official envelope from the pocket of his trench coat, and hands it to me.

  “The fellows who carried my kit up can hump yours down.”

  I am reading the order. It is from
the A.D.M.S.’s office.

  “You will report to Colonel Frost of the 3rd Field Ambulance.”

  I do not like Sturges, but I feel that I want to tell him that I am sorry to have let him in for this job, but Sturges’s spectacled sulkiness does not encourage conversation. He has his kit carried in by two field ambulance bearers, and he tells them to remove my valise.

  “Better blow off, Brent. I hear I have your sick-parade to do.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’d get along if I were you.”

  I take his curt and unfriendly hint, and leave him there and make my exit from the line as speedily as possible. We reach the Gully, and to me it is a great Valley of Shadow. Just before arriving at Gully Beach I meet Loundes, the D.A.D.M.S. He stops me.

  “O, Brent, the A.D.M.S. will want to see you later. I have been sent up to interview a certain person.”

  He looks at me kindly, and I am grateful.

  “Am I to report to the A.D.M.S. at once?”

  “No, later, after I have got back.”

  I am on the road along Gully Beach. The sea is tranquil, ironically so, and it costs me an effort to walk along that familiar road. Every man in the ambulance will be able to infer that I have been returned to them as bad money. As we near the mess Frost himself comes out. He gives me one curious and somewhat enigmatic look, but his voice is the voice of a friend.