‘The next thing I knew was when I came to and found myself remembering a tremendous blow in the throat and right shoulder, and feeling speechless and paralysed. Men were moving to and fro above me. Then there was a wild yell – “They’re coming back!” and I was alone. I thought “I shall be bombed to bits lying here” and just managed to get along to where a Lewis gun was firing. I fell down and Johnson came along and cut my equipment off and tied up my throat. Someone put my pistol in my side pocket, but when Johnson got me on to my legs it was too heavy and pulled me over so he threw it away. I remember him saying, “Make way; let him come,” and men saying “Good luck, sir” – pretty decent of them under such conditions! Got along the trench and out at the back somehow – everything very hazy – drifting smoke and shell-holes – down the hill – thinking “I must get back to Mother” – kept falling down and getting up – Johnson always helping. Got to Battalion Headquarters; R.S.M. outside; he took me very gently by the left hand and led me along, looking terribly concerned. Out in the open again at the back of the hill I knew I was safe. Fell down and couldn’t get up any more. Johnson disappeared. I felt it was all over with me till I heard his voice saying, “Here he is,” and the stretcher-bearers picked me up…. When I was at the dressing-station they took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and read it to me. “I saved your life under heavy fire”; signed and dated. The stretcher-bearers do that sometimes, I’m told!’
He laughed huskily, his face lighting up with a gleam of his old humour….
I asked whether the attack had been considered successful. He thought not. The Manchesters had failed, and Ginchy wasn’t properly taken till about a week later. ‘When I was in hospital in London,’ he went on, ‘I talked to a son of a gun from the Brigade Staff; he’d been slightly gassed. He told me we’d done all that was expected of us; it was only a holding attack in our sector, so as to stop the Boches from firing down the hill into the backs of our men who were attacking Guillemont. They knew we hadn’t a hope of getting Ale Alley.’
He had told it in a simple unemphatic way, illustrating the story with unconscious gestures – taking aim with a rifle, and so on. But the nightmare of smoke and sunlight had been in his eyes, with a sense of confusion and calamity of which I could only guess at the reality. He was the shattered survivor of a broken battalion which had ‘done all that was expected of it’.
I asked about young Fernby. Durley had been in the same hospital with him at Rouen and had seen him once. ‘They were trying to rouse him up a bit, as he didn’t seem to recognize anybody. They knew we’d been in the same Battalion, so I was taken into his ward one night. His head was all over shrapnel wounds. I spoke to him and tried to get him to recognize me, but he didn’t know who I was; he died a few hours later.’
Silence was the only comment possible; but I saw the red screens round the bed and Durley whispering to Fernby’s bandaged head and irrevocable eyes, while the nurse stood by with folded hands.
3
At the beginning of January David got himself passed for General Service abroad. I was completely taken by surprise when he came back and told me. Apparently the doctor asked him whether he wanted some more home service, but a sudden angry pride made him ask to be given G.S. A couple of weeks later he’d had his final leave and I was seeing him off at Liverpool Station.
A glum twenty-one-year-old veteran (unofficially in charge of a batch of young officers going out for the first time) he butted his way along the crowded platform with shoulders hunched, collar turned up to his ears, and hands plunged in pockets. A certain philosophic finality was combined with the fidgety out-of-luck look which was not unusual with him. ‘I’ve reduced my kit to a minimum this time. No revolver. I’ve worked it out that the chances are about five to one against my ever using it,’ he remarked, as he stood shuffling his feet to try and keep them warm. He hadn’t explained how he’d worked the chances out, but he was always fond of a formula. Then the train began to move and he climbed awkwardly into his compartment. ‘Give my love to old Joe when you get to the First Battalion,’ was my final effort at heartiness. He nodded with a crooked smile. Going out for the third time was a rotten business and his face showed it.
‘I ought to be going with him,’ I thought, knowing that I could have got G.S. at my last Board if I’d had the guts to ask for it. But how could one ask for it when there was a hope of getting a few more days with the Cheshire and the weather was so perishing cold out in France? ‘What a queer mixture he is,’ I thought, as I wandered absent-mindedly away from the station. Nothing could have been more cheerless than the rumbling cobbled street by the Docks, with dingy warehouses shutting out the dregs of daylight and an ash-coloured sky which foretold some more snow.
I remember going back to the hut that night after Mess. There was snow on the ground, and the shuttered glare and muffled din of the explosive works seemed more than usually grim. Sitting by the stove I began to read a magazine which David had left behind. It was a propagandist weekly containing translations from the Foreign Press. A Copenhagen paper said: ‘The sons of Europe are being crucified on the barbed wire because the misguided masses are shouting for it. They do not know what they do, and the statesmen wash their hands. They dare not deliver them from their martyr’s death…. ’ Was this really the truth, I wondered; wild talk like that was new to me. I thought of Dick Tiltwood, and how he used to come into this hut with such shining evidences of youth in his face; and of dark-haired little Fernby who was just such another; and of Lance-Corporal Kendle, and all those others whose violent deaths had saddened my experience. David was now returning to be a candidate for this military martyrdom, and so (I remembered it with a sick assurance) was I.
Lying awake while the stove-light died redly in the corner of the room, I remembered the wine-faced Army Commander with his rows of medal-ribbons, and how young Allgood and I had marched past him at the Army School last May, with the sun shining and the band playing. He had taken the salute from four hundred officers and N.C.O.s of his Army. How many of them had been killed since then, and how deeply was he responsible for their deaths? Did he know what he was doing, or was he merely a successful old cavalryman whose peace-time popularity had pushed him up on to his present perch?
It was natural that I should remember Flixécourt. Those four weeks had kept their hold on my mind, and they now seemed like the First Act of a play – a light-hearted First Act which was unwilling to look ahead from its background of sunlight and the glorying beauty of beech forests. Life at the Army School, with its superb physical health, had been like a prelude to some really conclusive sacrifice of high-spirited youth. Act II had carried me along to the fateful First of July. Act III had sent me home to think things over. The autumn attacks had been a sprawling muddle of attrition and inconclusiveness. In the early summer the Fourth Army had been ready to advance with a new impetus. Now it was stuck in the frozen mud in front of Bapaume, like a derelict tank. And the story was the same all the way up to Ypres. Bellicose politicians and journalists were fond of using the word ‘crusade’. But the ‘chivalry’ (which I’d seen in epitome at the Army School) had been mown down and blown up in July, August, and September, and its remnant had finished the year’s ‘crusade’ in a morass of torment and frustration. Yet I was haunted by the memory of those Flixécourt weeks – almost as though I were remembering a time when I’d been in love. Was it with life that I’d been in love then? – for the days had seemed saturated with the fecundity of physical health and fine weather, and it had been almost as if my own germinant aliveness were interfused with some sacrificial rite which was to celebrate the harvest. ‘Germinating and German-hating,’ I thought, recovering my sense of reality with a feeble joke. After that I fell asleep.
I had an uncomfortable habit of remembering, when I woke up in the morning, that the War was still going on and waiting for me to go back to it; but apart from that and the times when my inmost thoughts got the upper hand of me, life at the Camp was comparative
ly cheerful, and I allowed myself to be carried along by its noisy current of good-humoured life. At the end of each day I found consolation in the fact that I had shortened the winter, for the new year had begun with a spell of perishing cold weather. Our First Battalion, which had been up to its neck in mud in front of Beaumont-Hamel, was now experiencing fifteen degrees of frost while carrying on minor operations connected with straightening the line. Dottrell wrote that they ‘weren’t thinking beyond the mail and the rum ration’, and advised me to stay away until the weather improved. It wasn’t difficult to feel like following his advice; but soon afterwards I went into Liverpool for what I knew to be my final Medical Board. It was a dark freezing day, and all the officers in the waiting-room looked as if they wanted to feel their worst for the occasion. A sallow youth confided in me that he’d been out on the razzle the night before and was hoping to get away with another four weeks’ home service.
There were two silver-haired Army doctors sitting at a table, poring over blue and white documents. One, with a waxed moustache, eyed me wearily when I came into the office. With a jerk of the head he indicated a chair by the table. ‘Feel fit to go out again?’ ‘Yes; quite well, thank you.’ His pen began to move across the blue paper. ‘Has been passed fit for General Ser…. ’ He looked up irritably. ‘Don’t shake the table!’ (I was tapping it with my fingers.) The other Colonel gazed mildly at me over his pince-nez. Waxed moustache grunted and went on writing. Shaking the table wouldn’t stop that pen of his!
PART SEVEN
ROUEN IN FEBRUARY
1
Sometime in the second week of February I crossed to Havre on a detestable boat named Archangel. As soon as the boat began to move I was aware of a sense of relief. It was no use worrying about the War now; I was in the Machine again, and all responsibility for my future was in the haphazard control of whatever powers manipulated the British Expeditionary Force. Most of us felt like that, I imagine, and the experience was known as ‘being for it again’. Apart from that, my only recollection of the crossing is that someone relieved me of my new trench-coat while I was asleep.
At nine o’clock in the evening of the next day I reported myself at the 5th Infantry Base Depot at Rouen. The journey from London had lasted thirty-three hours (a detail which I record for the benefit of those who like slow-motion war-time details). The Base Camp was a couple of miles from the town, on the edge of a pine forest. In the office where I reported I was informed that I’d been posted to our Second Battalion; this gave me something definite to grumble about, for I wanted to go where I was already known, and the prospect of joining a strange battalion made me feel more homeless than ever. The 5th I.B.D. Adjutant advised me to draw some blankets; the storeroom was just round the corner, he said. After groping about in the dark and tripping over tent ropes I was beginning to lose my temper when I opened a door and found myself in a Guard Room. A man, naked to the waist, was kneeling in the middle of the floor, clutching at his chest and weeping uncontrollably. The Guard were standing around with embarrassed looks, and the Sergeant was beside him, patient and unpitying. While he was leading me to the blanket store I asked him what was wrong. ‘Why, sir, the man’s been under detention for assaulting the military police, and now ’e’s just ’ad news of his brother being killed. Seems to take it to ’eart more than most would. ’Arf crazy, ’e’s been, tearing ’is clothes off and cursing the War and the Fritzes. Almost like a shell-shock case, ’e seems. It’s his third time out. A Blighty one don’t last a man long nowadays, sir.’ As I went off into the gloom I could still hear the uncouth howlings.
‘Well, well; this is a damned depressing spot to arrive at!’ I thought, while I lay awake trying to keep warm and munching a bit of chocolate, in a narrow segment of a canvas shed about four feet high. Beyond the army-blanket which served as a partition, two officers were chattering interminably in rapid Welsh voices. They were comparing their experiences at some squalid pleasure house in Rouen, and their disclosures didn’t make the War seem any jollier. It was, in fact, the most disgusting little conversation I’d ever listened to. But what right had I to blame the poor devils for trying to have a good time before they went up to the Line?… Nevertheless, the War seemed to be doing its best to make me feel un-heroic.
Next day I found the 5th I.B.D. Mess dispiriting. I knew nobody, and it wasn’t a place where people felt inclined to be interested in one another, since none of them were there for more than a few days. They agreed in grumbling about the alcoholic R.C. padre who managed the mess; the food was bad, and four and threepence a day was considered an exorbitant charge. When they weren’t on the training ground (known as ‘the Bull Ring’) officers sat about in the Mess Room playing cards, cursing the cold weather, and talking tediously about the War with an admixture of ineffective cynicism which hadn’t existed twelve months before. I watched them crowding round the notice board after a paper had been pinned to it. They were looking to see if their names were on the list of those going up to the Line next day. Those who were on the list laughed harshly and sat down, with simulated unconcern, to read a stale picture paper. On the same notice board were the names of three private soldiers who had been shot for cowardice since the end of January. ‘The sentence was duly carried out…. ’ In the meantime we could just hear the grumbling of the guns and there was the Spring Offensive to look forward to.
I was feeling as if I’d got a touch of fever, and next morning the doctor told me I’d got German measles. So I transferred myself ingloriously to No. 25 Stationary Hospital, which was a compound of tents with a barbed wire fence round it, about 300 yards from the Camp. There were six in the tent already and my arrival wasn’t popular. An extra bed had to be brought in, and the four card players huddled against a smoky stove were interrupted by a gust of Arctic wind. There was snow on the ground and the tent was none too warm at the best of times. ‘Now, Mr Parkins, I’m afraid you must shift round a bit to make room for the new patient,’ said the nurse. While my bed was being lugged into position by an orderly, Mr Parkins made it plain that six had been company in that tent and seven was an inconvenience. One of his opponents told him to stop chewing the rag and deal again. The cards had been blown off the table and Parkins had lost what, he said, was the first decent hand he’d held that morning. But the additional overcrowding soon ceased to be a grievance, and I didn’t spoil their well established circle by offering to butt in at bridge, for I was content to read a book and observe my fellow-invalids.
The quietest of them was Strangford, a specimen of adolescent simplicity, lanky and overgrown and credulous. He wore a kilt, but came of good North Irish stock. Though barely nineteen, he had done several months in the trenches. His father kept a pack of harriers in County Down, and his face would light up when I encouraged him to tell me about them. But unless he was talking or had some little job to keep him busy, his brain appeared to cease working altogether. He would sit on the edge of his bed, slowly rubbing his knee which had a bad sore on it; a mop of untidy brown hair hung over his forehead, and his huge clumsy hands and red wrists had outgrown his tunic. After rubbing his knee, he takes a letter from his breast pocket, bending his gawky, unformed face over it; once he smiles secretly, but when he has read it through he is solemn – wondering, perhaps, when he will see his home and the harriers again.
Parkins was an obvious contrast to this modest youth. Pent up in the accidental intimacy of army life, men were usually anxious to exhibit themselves to the best advantage, particularly as regards their civilian antecedents. ‘I’ll bet he was jolly well-dressed before the war,’ was a type of remark frequently made by young platoon commanders. Parkins was about thirty, and often reminded us that he had been to Cambridge; in private life he had been a school-master. Plausible at first, he soon revealed his defects, for the slovenly tedium of that tent brought greed and selfishness to the surface. With his muddy eyes and small dark moustache, he wasn’t a man one took to. But he was self-satisfied, and did his best to amuse us
with indecent rhymes and anecdotes. He was also fond of using certain stilted expressions, such as ‘for the nonce’ and ‘anent’. ‘I’ve no complaints to make anent this hand,’ he would say when playing cards. He posed as a gay dog, chaffing the nurses when they brought in the food, and quoting Omar Khayyám at them – ‘a jug of wine, a loaf of bread and thou beside me, singing in the Wilderness’ – and referring to the tent as ‘this battered Caravanserai whose portals are alternate Night and Day’. Parkins did not conceal his dislike of the Front Line, and was now in hopes of getting a job as Railway Transport Officer. But he was the sort of man who would get killed in some unutterably wretched attack after doing his best to dodge it.
The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston 2 - Memoirs of an Infantry Officer Page 14