The night has been extraordinarily silent, but the dark silence is shattered like a sheet of glass by the sudden detonations of our guns. The steel shelter vibrates, and the shells rush over us. We sit and listen and wait. I smoke my pipe and wonder if Hallard is thinking as I am, whether there will be retaliation. This structure is not proof against a direct hit, and a shell-burst in this steel cave crowded with orderlies and wounded is a horror that does not bear thinking about. I try not to think. I sit and crave to be busy, to be able to forget in merciful action my own selfish fears, but the business is only just beginning, and we wait and wait.
I grow acutely restless, and I go outside to speak to Sergeant Sykes, and to see that the bearers are under cover. I find them squatting with their backs to the sandbagged wall.
“Anything coming over, Sergeant Sykes?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Did you get those other trollies?”
“I did, sir.”
“Any objection from the R.E.s?”
“We just annexed them, sir.”
“Good man.”
* * *
The first wounded are dribbling in. They are walking cases, men who were hit in crossing No Man’s land, and not too seriously. They are all very cheerful, as befits men who have escaped with their limbs and their lives. Gains has managed to dress some of them so capably that after examining the dressings we pass them down. Most of them are able to walk.
Our guns have ceased firing, and but for a stray shell nothing seems to have come our way. I don’t like this silence. It may be merciful to us, in this aid-post, but it seems to suggest that the cunning old Boche has prepared something more deadly for our people than mere noise.
Sykes puts his head in.
“Stretcher cases, sir.”
“Many?”
“We seem to have got it in the neck.”
What a night! Cases begin to pour in upon us. There are men lying on stretchers outside waiting to be dealt with. The wounds are mostly due to machine-gun bullets. From fragments of gossip we can piece together the complete picture. The Germans were prepared for the raid. They evacuated their front line, and let our men come over, but they had massed machine-guns on each flank, and when our raiding party turned to come back, Fritz shot them to pieces.
The heat in this steel cave is terrific. The place smells of blood and sweat and foul wet khaki. Hallard is working in one section, I in the other, but the pressure is so intense that we have to leave some of the less serious cases to be dressed by the orderlies. Hallard calls for me to help him try and stop hæmorrhage from a wounded artery; we manage to stop it. I go back to my section to find an officer being carried in. He has had a bullet through the head, and his face and hair are all blood, and the brain is protruding. A hopeless case. And then I notice something—a little faded patch of colour on the lapel of his tunic. It is the lad with the pansy. Heart’s ease! No lucky flower this.
I realize that I can do nothing, and the space is needed. He is breathing in snoring gasps, and it seems heartless to put him outside to die, but I have no alternative. I tell two bearers to carry him out and put him in some quiet place close to the trench wall.
An excited and emotional lad rushes in.
“Has my pal Todd come through?”
I have no time to spare for other humanities. I tell an orderly to look through the tally list, and order the boy to wait outside. No, his pal Todd has not passed through our hands, and I hear a voice say, “He’s out in No Man’s land. I’m going back.”
Apparently he does go back in a mad and magnanimous search for his friend, and half an hour later he is brought in to us shot through the chest, and dying.
I have no consciousness of the passing of time, nor any feeling of being tired. Wounded come in and wounded go, trundled away on the trollies. Their fortitude touches me; not a whimper, hardly a moan. I do not know how many wounded I have dressed, or what the hour is. I might have been working for five minutes or for five hours.
At last there is a lull. I wash my hands in a bucket of water, light a cigarette, and look in on Hallard. He is dealing with a case, and his face looks grey and grim. I go outside and am astonished to find that the dawn is breaking, a sweet, grey, stealthy dawn. Two bearers are starting off with two stretcher cases on a trolley, and the wheels make a gentle rumbling. The sky is primrose coloured in the east, and the roofs of the steel shelters and the bulk of the rampart stand out blackly. I see Sykes bending over something near the wall. It is the body of the boy with the pansy.
“Gone, Sykes?”
The sergeant straightens, turns sharply, and his face has a harsh, starved look. He is very tired.
“Yes, sir.”
“Any idea what our losses are?”
“We have had a hundred and thirteen cases through, sir.”
“How many killed? Heard?”
“I had a word with their S.-M. About thirty, sir. And not one ruddy German did they see.”
I stand looking at the dead boy. We have had about a hundred and fifty casualties, occupied an abandoned trench for twenty minutes, and killed nothing. The profit and loss account makes bad reading. And how silly it all seems!
Hallard comes out in his shirt sleeves, with a cigarette stuck in his mordant mouth, and his eyes like two hard marbles. He sniffs the morning air, for its freshness is very sweet after hours of fug in the aid-post.
“By God, Stephen, someone made a summer morning, but it was not man. Sykes!”
“Yes, sir?”
“Could you possibly raise a cup of tea?”
“I’ve got a dixie on, sir.”
“Great man.”
I realize that we have had no food since a meat-tea of yesterday, but for the moment I am beyond hunger. Moreover, we have one last duty to perform, to go through the pockets of the dead lad with the pansy, make a list of his poor possessions, and tie them up in a bag of lint. We have him carried into the aid-post. Sergeant Sykes empties all the dead man’s pockets and spreads the things on a stretcher, a cigarette-case, a pencil, a little tin of throat lozenges, a wrist-watch, a wallet in which we find two ten-franc notes and three five-franc notes, and an envelope containing a piece of dark hair and three photos of a girl. There are some letters, too, in his inner pocket. I pick the faded flower from his tunic, drop it into one of the envelopes, and call the items over while Hallard jots them down.
“This is going to help the war a hell of a lot, Stephen. Sykes, you and the men must be pretty done up. Get them back to headquarters and let ’em sleep.”
“Very good, sir.”
“You’ve done damned well.”
Sykes’s fierce, tired face suddenly softens.
“Thank you, sir. I feel I could sleep the clock round.”
“That’s the idea.”
The thing that strikes me as most strange about this summer morning is that no one in authority comes near us from the battalion whose wounded we have dressed. I can only suppose that gloom and depression prevail, and yet I do feel that the hard-bitten colonel might have walked along to inquire about the men who have been hit. The raid may have been a tragic fiasco, and there is nothing for authority to preen itself about, but that was not the fault of the men. Even Gains, their M.O., remains invisible. I hear later that this bloody adventure was ordered by higher authority, even against the advice of that hard-bitten C.O., and that they are all savage and sick about it, and sulking in their dug-outs.
It is ten o’clock when Hallard and I leave the empty aid-post and make our way back down the shallow communication trench to the lane leading to Country Cottage. It is a perfect morning, but to my tired eyes too full of glare. I am conscious of the beginnings of a cracking headache, and this green world seems to flicker. I look at Hallard, and notice that his face is all lined and bleached.
“Feel a bit swimmy in the head, Steevie?”
“Yes.”
“Same here.”
When we come to the willows and the group of lit
tle white houses we find Fairfax and Gibbs waiting for us in the road. Fairfax looks at us both like a father. He tells us afterwards that we were all eyes, and that both of us walked like men who were mildly drunk.
“Well done, you two. The bus is waiting.”
Gibbs puts an arm round me.
“Twelve hours’ sleep for you, my child.”
We get into a waiting ambulance and are driven to Hameau Farm. A cold lunch is on the mess table, but I have too much of a head to eat anything. I go upstairs to that quiet room at the end of the corridor, pull my clothes off, draw the curtains, and get into bed. I do not remember anything more. Every cell in me is crying out for sleep.
XVI
The war goes on.
We have left Hameau Farm and the land of poplars and of flat fields for chalkland country that makes me think of Wiltshire. Before leaving Hameau we heard the mines go up at Messines, and I think it must have made any human sound seem so small and irrelevant that I have not felt moved to produce infantile noises on paper. I suspect that I should soon come to despise the craft of the scribbler. It must be so full of poses and struggles for effect, the search for the precious word and phrase, and of an insincere urge to be original and different.
How many of us would be celebrities did we love our precious selves with a passion which could inspire us to transcend other men’s scorn? But it is heavy summer in this Somme country, and we dwellers amid the ruins left by the Germans after their retreat to the Hindenburg Line, know that this interlude is to be transient. The Division is in training for the ultimate offensive, and every morning in a field across the road I see boys in their grey shirts and brown trousers being perfected in bayonet fighting. They are taught to jab at the throat and to utter fierce cries, and look savage, and the grunts and the snarls that they utter come strangely and unconvincingly from those almost childish faces. I wonder if they will snarl like that at the German infantry when they meet them in wrecked trenches and shell-holes.
This ruined village lies in a deep valley between the chalk hills, like a ship wallowing in a great trough of the sea and waiting for the hill above to roll down upon it. It is hot and shadeless and dusty. All the trees have been felled, and even the fruit bushes in the garden at the back of the derelict brewery we occupy have been pulled up by the roots. The German is a thorough person even in his devastation. He has not left a single roof in the village, nor a fruit tree that has not been mutilated.
One has too much time here to think. We know that what we have suffered is a mere phlebotomy compared with the major operation that is before us. I am a man; I have a reputation for sang-froid, and I cultivate an air of casual humour, but this mask is a thing of gossamer. I have to struggle in secret with moods of profound depression.
Hallard feels as I do.
“I wish they would shove us in and have done with it.”
I can see him sitting in the mess and writing those long letters daily to his wife and kids. You would not think that his calm, sardonic face concealed so much of the little secret tortures of suspense. With a bright facetiousness we ask each other domestic questions.
“How’s Irene to-day?”
“And how’s Joan Phyllis?”
Mary’s letters are both a source of comfort and of provocation. I am beginning to think of leave. Dare one think too much of such human things? Ten days of escape, and then the coming back. There are times when I feel that I do not want to go home until the war is over.
We have lost Bamborough Brown. He has been posted to a battalion as its M.O.
We have another officer in place of Brown, a dry, quiet, responsible lad named Harker, a junior partner in a Hampshire practice. Harker is something of an archæologist, and he spends some of his time hunting hint tools. How much more pleasant this war might be if we were armed with coups de poing.
The great offensive at Ypres is in full blast. The weather has broken; it has begun to rain and it continues to rain. We hear rumours of our people being badly bogged up there. But why go on fighting in a bog? Our strategy seems so bovine and inflexible. We hear tales told of the German pillboxes. They are spoken of as though the Boche had sprung a surprise upon us. Did our directing brain know of their existence? If not, how lamentable! This sort of thing does not reinforce one’s confidence in authority. Fritz was more wise with his reinforced concrete.
August, and we are still here in this land of silvery hills and of devastation. The Division is supposed to be in high fettle, and straining at the leash. Are there any men who are passionately eager for the bloody business, and who lust to go out and kill? I suppose such men exist, to whom the killing of Germans is a sacred duty. “The only good Hun is a dead Hun.” Do the German women say the same of us?
All of us attend the Divisional Boxing Competition. Our General gives away the prizes, and makes an abrupt and a characteristic speech.
“I have seen some hard hitting, and punishment given and taken in right sporting spirit. I have no doubt that when we go in to play that other game the men of the 81st will show the same spirit.”
I often wonder whether there is any background to the minds of those who control our fate. Are they just simple and kindly gentlemen, the products of our public schools, naïvely conventional, and convinced that the uttering of a few platitudes can meet all crises? Do they blunder blandly and complacently into a cataclysm that is beyond their comprehension? Or are they more subtle than they seem, and planning above our poor heads some profound and splendid finale?
I do so yearn to believe in the brains of our supermen. If there is vision in their planning, then all these poor dead will not feel bitter in their graves. Also, I might feel more resigned to the making of my own sacrifice, should it so happen.
Our own Zeus is very active on this quiet sector. We see quite a lot of Colonel Cleek. He comes to dine with us, but I always feel that he has a third and sinister eye in the back of his head, and that his cold friendliness is not to be trusted. Also, I suspect that he has not forgotten that muddy incident near “Jock’s Grave,” and that he will not be merciful to me should the occasion serve him.
Men in authority should not be capable of spite.
But then, human nature is a morass in which all philosophies are doomed to stick and flounder. Our prejudices are stronger than our principles. Often they are our principles.
* * *
Fairfax has had another row with Cleek. We do not know what has caused it, and he does not tell us, so I can only infer that it has been a kind of Lion and Unicorn affair. I can think of nothing that Cleek can condemn in our unit, but when a man of authority of Cleek’s calibre desires to find fault he has only to assert that what is round should be square.
But Fairfax does confide in Hallard and me to the extent of telling us that he suspects Cleek of plotting to break him.
“I think I can prophesy that when our big show is staged this ambulance will have the post of honour. To put it vulgarly, Cleek means to rub our noses in it, and if there should be any breakdown in the evacuation of wounded, I shall be the man to be tarred and feathered.”
What a pleasant prospect! To have the Huns shelling us in front, and an old goat like Cleek waiting to butt us in the back! But we can assure Fairfax that we shall do all that is humanly possible to prevent any such breakdown.
We rather suspect Cleek of having a pup of his own whom he wishes to put in Fairfax’s place.
* * *
September, serene, still weather, cold in the early morning almost to the point of frost.
We are for it at last.
A Division that has been badly knocked about up at Ypres is relieving us here.
We are going north by train. We pass through Hazebrouck, and are pushed out at what appears to be an improvised station in the midst of nowhere. We can hear the rumble and bumping of guns. Our destination is “Heliotrope Camp.” What a name, and who was the fanciful soul who christened it? We find Heliotrope Camp in what had once been a grass field, but
is now a mangy expanse of boot-worn turf and caked mud. We are quartered in a collection of huts that have been tarred, and have a black and funereal look.
Fairfax tells me that he is taking a Ford ambulance to report at Divisional Headquarters at Ypres. Would I care to go with him? I am glad to go. This Flemish country is inexpressibly dreary, in spite of the September sunlight. Even beyond the shelled zone it has a shabby, soiled look, and it fills one with strange sadness. Ahead of us we see avenues of dead and mutilated trees, and the remnants of buildings. The place stinks of the war, and crawls with khaki. We pass horse-lines, transport parks, dumps, hutments. The jagged outline of Ypres rises against a faint blue sky. It makes one think, somehow, of a mouthful of decayed and broken teeth.
We pass through the ruined town. One sees nothing but grotesque fragments of wall, banks of rubble, and the black hollows of slimy cellars. The place fills me with a horrid feeling of foreboding. Ambulances and transports pass us. We cross the Grand Place with its now historic ruins, but they do not interest me. We arrive at the ramparts by the Menin Gate, and beyond it stretches a vista of unimaginable ruin. Just dirty road and devastation, and anonymous men in brown.
Divisional Headquarters is tucked away in the ramparts. Fairfax gets out, and I follow him, but not to headquarters. I am moved to wander along the road, and here I am confronted by one of those strange coincidences that clash like cymbals. I see a man coming towards me, an R.A.M.C. sergeant. I look at him and he looks at me. His swarthy, fierce face is somehow familiar, and suddenly I remember him. He was one of Frost’s sergeants at Gallipoli.
“Sergeant Fosdyke?”
He remembers me.
“Fancy meeting you, sir.”
“Is the old crowd near here?”
“Up the road, sir.”
“Colonel Frost?”
“Yes, sir. Our div. is just coming out. The 81st is relieving us.”
“Well, I’m damned, that’s my crowd! How’s the war going? Judging by the noise our guns are making we must be winning it.”
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