Bretherton

by Morris, W. F. ;

  We applied various blood-stopping devices to Fanshawe’s nose till he yelled for mercy. “You beastly bicyclists!” he said reproachfully, as he tenderly fingered his damaged member. “Think you are mending a puncture?”

  III

  It was very cold that night. Our blankets were with the transport that would certainly not get past those exploding trucks, and with us we carried only our groundsheets. I found some straw in an old box, and wrapped it round my feet, but I awoke several times during the night stiff with cold, and lay awake for some time listening to the trucks which were still going up and thinking about G. B. and the dead Duchess.

  Another thing puzzled me now. How had he met his death? There was old G. B. flopping dead over a piano and nothing to show for it except a little prick in the chest. How had he come by that wound? None of our men had been in the château, that I would swear to, for I questioned Dodd afterwards. And it could not have been a self-inflicted wound, for there was no weapon lying about.

  And the girl on the sofa, the Duchess of Wittelsberg-Strelitz, how had she died? There was no wound nor mark upon her. Poison perhaps. But I was becoming melodramatic. Poison indeed! But this affair was melodramatic. I do not know much about poison, but I believe it makes a painful death—twisting of the limbs and all that. But that girl, however she may have died, lay calm and peaceful when I found her. It could not have been poison, then. It was a mystery; two people dead, one by the thrust of a mysterious bayonet, and the other—just dead. There must be some clue to it, some little thing perhaps that would make everything clear and logical; but I had not got it, and perhaps I never should have it. However, I was very cold but very tired, and there was not so much noise now. The dump had nearly blown itself out. I rearranged the straw around my legs and dozed off again.

  CHAPTER III

  I

  We turned out cramped and shivering in the dawn of the next morning. The dump had blown itself out, and with the exception of some machine-gunning from an aeroplane and a few shells sailing majestically over to detonate grumpily among the trees beyond the village, all was peaceful.

  To us seated at breakfast in the drab little cottage parlour entered Bellamy, the Adjutant, waving a pink message-form.

  “Guerre finie! War nah pool” he cried pithily.

  “In the forest I met a fool!” proclaimed Pagan wearily. “Pass the canned cow-juice, Guerney. Merci! Your jokes are in bad taste this time o’ day, Bellamy, and breakfast is a serious job, anyway.”

  “Read for yourselves, you guzzling Thomases,” retorted Bellamy with dignity. And he threw the pink form on the table.

  I picked it up and read that now famous message. We all read it, snatching it from one another to do so. Dodd absent-mindedly speared Wainright’s ration of salt pork on to his own plate. “Grand Ecossais! Only three hours more of the giddy old war! What does one do now?” he demanded.

  “Go up to the line and have a look-see,” suggested Wainwright, deftly recovering the remains of his salt pork.

  Pagan shook his head. “Not me,” he said firmly. He produced the inevitable tobacco-pouch and pipe. “I’m going to find the deepest cellar in this carmine village and stay there till eleven ack emma. I’m not taking any chances in the last lap.”

  I must confess that I rather agreed with him. During those four years of war that had passed over my head I had grown accustomed to being in some danger, and except when the danger was imminent I succeeded in not thinking about it. It was so inevitable and the possibility of its cessation so remote that one became fatalistic about it. But now that I was suddenly confronted with the knowledge that in less than three hours the danger would cease altogether, my life seemed very precious. For a moment I felt almost afraid to go outside the room lest any one of the hundred-odd chances that normally one never thought about should rob me of that peace that was so near. It was the feeling that I have known just before going on leave; but now it was stronger.

  The matter was settled by the Adjutant. “The General wants us to go up to-night to patrol the line,” he announced. “And the C.O. says that no one is to go wandering about sight-seeing.”

  “Then a drink is clearly indicated,” asserted Dodd.

  Pagan, who with his head on one side was drawing at his pipe and over the top of it examining himself in the cracked mirror above the fireplace, threw away the match and remarked: “Quite so—if you think tea good enough. There is nothing else.”

  “Ye gods!” Dodd threw out his arms appealingly towards the ceiling, from which most of the plaster had fallen the night before. “The ruddy old war over at last and not a spot to celebrate it in! ’Nough to make a fellow start a new war on his own. I ask you.”

  Wainwright temporarily stopped munching ration biscuit and plum-and-apple jam to remark, “The civilians must have some wine buried in their gardens; and you bet they will dig it up today. I’m going out to reconnoitre presently.”

  Dodd, however, saved him that trouble.

  II

  The village presented a lively appearance that morning. The men off duty wandered about the streets or stood in groups talking. From some of the billets came the sound of lusty voices singing “I want to go home” and “Blighty.” The C.O. paraded the battalion and read out the armistice message. It was received by the men in silence; they betrayed no signs either of joy or of sorrow. He explained to them that an armistice was merely a cessation of hostilities for the purpose of discussing terms of peace, that it did not necessarily mean the end of the war. If on the expiration of the armistice, peace terms had not been concluded, hostilities might recommence. But he thought it unlikely that this would happen.

  The civilians were jubilant at the news. They chattered excitedly to one another, shook hands with one another and with every soldier they met, and shouted “Vivent les Anglais” on the slightest provocation. Also Wainwright proved to be a true prophet in the matter of wine; earthy cases were produced mysteriously from back gardens in the manner of rabbits from a conjurer’s hat, broken open, and Tommies roped in from the highways and hedges to celebrate the occasion. Cries of “Voter santy, monsewer” came from every other house.

  Dodd, who had reconnoitred the railway, reported that both the station and the trucks had disappeared and that the farm in which the Lancers had been billeted was as full of holes as a sieve. He had found one of the heavy iron wheels of a truck embedded in the ground over three hundred yards from the railway.

  I think everyone looked at his watch rather often that morning. At half-past ten shells began sailing over again, though most of them fell in the fields beyond the railway. From the direction of the line the sounds of gunning increased. At a quarter to eleven a German plane came over and sprayed about with a machine gun, but my friend of the anti-aircraft battery had at last arrived, and the “archie” barrage he put up made the sky look like a blue wallpaper with a pattern of white powder-puffs. The Bosche plane retired.

  The strafe roused itself for a final effort a few minutes before eleven. Judging by the continuous rattle of small arms, I should say that machine gunners were firing belt after belt, and every rifleman must have been putting up a creditable show upon this his last practice of rapid fire.

  At eleven o’clock the racket diminished appreciably; by one minute past it had almost died away. A distant bugle sounded the “Cease Fire” and the “Stand Fast.” The battalion bugler took up the call and made the village street ring with the notes. As he finished, another far-off bugle was faintly heard sounding an unfamiliar call. That I took to be a German one.

  I had heard those few notes of the “Cease Fire” blown countless times at the end of schemes on Salisbury Plain and during field training in back areas, but I had never thought that I should hear them blown in earnest in the greatest war the world has yet seen. And I think it was this incident that brought home to me for the first time the real significance of that morning.

  All sounds of firing had now ceased, and the silence was uncanny. Subconscio
usly my ear was strained in expectation that it would break out afresh, and I had to remind myself that in all probability I should never hear that familiar sound again.

  For a few moments we stood and looked inquiringly at one another. What did one do now? The position was so strange and unreal. Also we felt a little flat; unconscious reaction, I suppose. And then the civilians and their womenfolk, whose supply of tears seemed to be inexhaustible, came among us, overwhelmed us with their congratulations, and carried us off to share in their joy.

  III

  The afternoon was an eventful one in many ways. First of all we had a funeral: two poor fellows who had been knocked out the night before. And though long usage had hardened me to these, I found this one strangely sad. It did seem hard luck to go through four years of more or less undiluted Hell, only to be knocked out when one’s head and shoulders were above the brink. The civilians turned up in force and shed more tears, and when the clear notes of the “Last Post” rang out in that still unfamiliar silence, I almost wept myself.

  As we entered the village on our return, we became aware of a noise. My repertoire of noises had become pretty extensive during the war, but this one was new to me. It resembled a large dogfight more than anything; but there was something human about it, despite the predominant animal note. We hurried round a corner to find what at first sight appeared to be a rugger scrum, but the pack was a very large one, composed entirely of women, and, judging by the cries they emitted, it was anything but a game.

  The cause of the disturbance, we were told, was a Frenchwoman who owned a large house in the village and had been both lavish and indiscreet in her favours to German officers during the enemy’s occupation. Her indignant fellow-townswomen were now venting four years of pent-up wrath upon her unfortunate body.

  It took half a platoon of men to get her away from them. With streaming hair they fought like furies, biting and tearing with tooth and nail, and it was difficult to believe that the gory mess we eventually rescued from them had been a beautiful woman. They had torn her clothing to shreds and most of her hair from her head, and her face and body was just a dirty crimson mess.

  We got her into an ambulance whilst the vengeful furies stood round with sullen faces and glowing eyes. I think Sergeant Pepper summed up the feelings of all of us when he said that if the next war was going to be anything like that, he would take care to be a conscientious objector. “I used to fancy I had a way with the ladies,” he added. But I might as well have made sheep’s eyes at Sergeant-Major Craggs as at that beauty chorus.”

  It was very soon after this unpleasant incident that the first refugees began to come through. They were those civilians who had been trapped by the German advance of 1914, had been within the enemy’s lines for four years, and recently been swept eastwards before the advancing tide of war. Now that the “Cease Fire” had sounded, the Germans were allowing them to pass through the lines, and they were returning to discover if any of their cottages had escaped the widespread destruction.

  They were pitiful objects, long strings of men and women past middle age for the most part, though a few were young in years, but with faces prematurely aged. Some of them trundled wheelbarrows piled with a few pathetic domestic treasures. Most of them were ragged, and many of the women were in men’s clothes. They trudged along slowly and stolidly, showing no signs of emotion; it would be time enough to rejoice when one found one’s cottage still standing and the sister or daughter safe who had been left behind.

  I was standing watching this dreary procession when I was suddenly startled to see among them a face I knew. Suddenly perhaps is not quite the right word, since although recognition was instantaneous, the certainty of it was a matter of several seconds; for the unshaven face, slovenly gait, and rough peasant clothes of the man before me caused a reasonable doubt to arise as to whether he could be the fairly spruce figure I had last seen decked out in red tabs and A.P.M. brassard.

  He must have seen my bewilderment, for after a moment’s hesitation he decided the question for me by saying with a nervous laugh, “Yes, it’s Hubbard all right.”

  “Good Lord, man! What on earth are you doing!” I exclaimed.

  He laughed again nervously, “It’s a long story,” he said. “But for God’s sake give me a drink, and then I will tell it you.”

  I took him to our mess in the little cottage parlour and supplied him with a cigarette and a whisky from a bottle Pagan had cadged from Headquarters. Then I lighted my pipe and waited for him to begin. My curiosity to hear his story was natural. He had been in the divisional company in the old pre-battalion days, and in ’16, when corps battalions were formed, had commanded B Company. At that time the Corps A.P.M. had employed some of our men on odd jobs—traffic control, prisoners’ cages, and what not—and Hubbard had shown a preference for this unheroic but necessary kind of work. The A.P.M. had been only too pleased to have somebody to help him with his many jobs, and Hubbard had been attached to him for some months. Eventually Hubbard himself became an A.P.M., and the next we heard of him was from Italy, where he was A.P.M. of some town or other. I had come across him once in Boulogne when I was passing through on leave; and that was the last I had seen or heard of him till my eyes had fallen upon his unshaven face among the dreary procession of refugees.

  And so I was curious to hear his story. But he seemed in no hurry to begin, and instead asked about the battalion. I gave him all the news and the history up to date, omitting of course the scene in the château. At last, after a second drink, he leaned back in his chair and told his story. I had never cared much for the man, but I felt sorry for him now; he must have had a trying time.

  He had come back from Italy at the end of ’17 to be A.P.M. of a division near Cambrai. On the morning of the great German drive of March ’18 he had been looking after some of his traffic control posts at Adecourt, a couple of miles behind the line. He had left one of his men on duty at the cross-roads and was strolling down a side-street when he met a couple of hurrying Tommies, who shouted to him that Jerry was behind them. They were out of sight in the mist in a few seconds, He attached no importance to what they had said, but thinking that they might be stragglers, he turned back with the intention of questioning them.

  He reached the cross-roads to find grey figures in coal-scuttle helmets moving through the mist around him. He got back into a side-street unseen and just avoided another party of the enemy by diving into a small house. In a few minutes the village was full of German troops, and it was not long before a battery of field guns came lumbering through the street. The fog had now lifted somewhat, and to have left the house would have meant capture. Also it was certain that with the passing of the enemy’s attacking waves the troops behind would occupy the village and search the houses.

  Hubbard stripped off his uniform and put on an old suit of working clothes that he borrowed from the civilian occupant of the house. His uniform was burnt in the stove. He had hoped to get back through the lines after nightfall, but with the arrival of a General and his staff in the village, the civilians were lined up and evacuated. They were marched eastwards across our old front line and no-man’s-land well back into the undevastated area behind the German lines.

  Hubbard spoke French well, as I knew, and was therefore able to sustain the rôle of a French civilian, and for greater safety he posed as a half-wit. And so for nearly eight months he had played his part, living a wretched existence behind the enemy’s lines, forced to work under German N.C.O.’s, and at the mercy of any civilian who liked to betray him.

  Such was his story, and after he had reported to Advance Guard Headquarters I got him a lift back to Corps with the G.S.O.2, who was in the village.

  IV

  At tea-time the C.O. came into our little parlour mess in high good-humour. He had just come from Advance Guard Headquarters. The Corps Commander had been there and had expressed himself as very satisfied with the work of the battalion. He had asked how the men were, and the C.O. had told h
im that they were rather done up but still full of buck. “You want a rest in a quiet spot,” the Corps Commander had replied. “Choose your place, and go there as soon as you like.”

  “And I have chosen Surcamps,” said the C.O. “It is only a few kilometres from here; it is a quiet little one-horse village in the woods and has first-class billets. Pagan passed through it yesterday. We move off in half an hour. The R.S.M. is parading Orderly Sergeants now.”

  Our departure from Andigny-Deux-Eglises was rather like a triumphal progress; for the Lancers and ourselves had been the first British troops to enter the village and the inhabitants were determined to make a fuss of us. They cheered us in the funny jerky French manner and loaded us with presents. They had not much left to give, poor souls, but every villager found something. One of the men was presented with a large and very hideous clock. Nor would his benefactor be denied, and he had to tuck the atrocity under his arm; and some minutes later, as we were riding along a country road the whole battalion roared with laughter when the gift solemnly chimed five o’clock. We had to march out of the village; the enthusiasm of the inhabitants made riding impossible. Only when we were a couple of hundred yards from the last house were we able to mount.

  Surcamps was an ideal place for a rest. The village, shut in on all sides by the woods, consisted of a number of quaint old cottages growing, as it seemed, round the four sides of a large green. The effect was rather that of the Great Court of Trinity dumped down in a forest and ruralized. Only one building encroached upon the green, and that was a large, comfortable-looking farmhouse with a wide expanse of weathered roof and numerous peaked gables. There we fixed the mess, and the C.O., the Adjutant, Pagan, and myself found billets there also. Fuel was plentiful in that wooded country, and we had a roaring fire halfway up the chimney of the large, low-ceilinged dining-room.