XXI THE PETER PANS OF WAR

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July 31

For two days now the sun has been blazing hot, and our fighting men have been baked brown. It is not good fighting weather either for guns or men. A queer haze is about the fields, as thick at times as a November mist and yet thrilling with heat, so that artillery observation is not good for anything like long-range shooting.

Mametz Wood, which is now well behind the lines, looms up vaguely, and, beyond, Delville Wood is hardly visible except as a low-lying smudge on the sky-line. Yet the sun is not shaded by the haze, and strikes down glaringly upon the white roads and the trampled fields, upon transport crawling forward in clouds of dust that rise like the smoke of fires about them, and upon soldiers trudging along with their rifles slung and their packs slipping, their iron helmets thrust forward over the eyes and their faces powdered white as millers’.

It is hot and thirsty work and painful to the spirit and flesh of men, even along roads that are not pebbled with shrapnel bullets. Men on the march to-day were glad of frequent halts, and flung themselves down on the waysides panting and sweating, moistening their dusty lips with parched tongues and fumbling for their water-bottles. They were lucky to have water, and knew their luck. It was worse for the men who were fighting yesterday in the same heat wave up by Waterlot Farm and further south by Maltzhorn Farm, not far from Guillemont.

Some of them drank their water too soon, and there was not a dog’s chance of getting any more until nightfall. Thirst, as sharp as redhot needles through the tongue, tortured some of these men of ours. And yet they were lucky, too, and knew their luck. There were other men suffering worse than they, the wounded lying in places beyond the quick reach of stretcher-bearers. “It was fair awfu’ to hear them crying,” said one of their comrades. “It was ‘Water! water! For Christ’s sake—water!’ till their voices died away.”

As usual the stretcher-bearers were magnificent and came out under heavy fire to get these men in until some of them fell wounded themselves. And other men crawled down to where their comrades lay and, in spite of their own thirst, gave the last dregs of their water to these stricken men. There were many Sir Philip Sidneys there, not knighted by any accolade except that of charity, and very rough fellows in their way of speech, but pitiful.

There was one of them who lay wounded with some water still in the bottle by his side. Next to him was a wounded German, groaning feebly and saying “Wasser! Wasser!” The Yorkshire lad knew enough to understand that word of German. He stretched out his flask and said, “Hi, matey, tak’ a swig o’ that.” They were two men who had tried to kill each other.

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On one part of the battlefields recently were some of the Bantam battalions, those little game-cocks for whom most of us out here have a warm corner in our hearts, because they are the smallest fighting men in the British army, and the sturdiest, pluckiest little men one can meet on a long day’s march. They have been under fire in several parts of the line, where it is not good for any men to be except for duty’s sake.

It has generally been their fate to act in support of other troops—troops whom it is an honour to support when they go into action, because their regiments have won fame on all the battlefields of Europe since the Napoleonic wars.

But it is always a dangerous honour to be in support. The attacking troops have often an easier time than those who lie behind them with scanty cover. It is here that the enemy’s barrage is likely to fall, and there is not much fun in lying under shell-fire hour after hour, perhaps for two days, without seeing the enemy or getting at him. The ground becomes strewn with dead and wounded. It is then that to “hold on” means the highest heroism.

The Bantams held on in hours like this, held on gamely and with wonderful grit. They became great diggers, and because they are not very high, a shallow trench was good enough for cover, and they burrowed like ants. “They would as soon forget their rifles as their shovels,” said one of their officers to-day. “There is no need to tell them to dig. They get to work mighty quick, being old soldiers now who have learnt by experience.”

They are old soldiers in cunning and knowledge, but there are young lads among them. Old or young (and there are many middle-aged Bantams who stand no higher than five feet in their socks), they are all the Peter Pans of the British Army—the Boys-who-wouldn’t-grow-up, and, like the heroic Peter Pan himself, who was surely the first of the Bantams, they are eager for single combat with the greatest enemy of England, Home and Beauty who may come along. They had their chance yesterday, and brought back a number of enormous Bavarians as prisoners fairly captured.

A certain Bantam, ex-boilermaker of Leeds (“the grandest city in the world,” he says), and the King’s Jester of his battalion was enormously amused by the incident. He said that each Bantam looked no higher than the matchstick to the candle with each Bavarian. To all these little men the German soldiers looked like giants, but like so many Hop-o’-my-Thumbs they took charge of these Bavarian Blunderbores and brought them back in triumph. They went searching for them in the ruins of Longueval some days ago, and found some of them sniping from the trees. They brought them down with a crash, and collected souvenirs.

This village was a dreadful place when some of the Bantams went into it. Only a few ruins remained, and about these many soldiers of many different regiments went prowling in search of Germans who were still concealed in dug-outs and shell-craters, and who still defended the outskirts of the village with machine-guns, which swept the streets.

There were Highlanders there, so “fey” after their fierce fighting that they went about with their bayonets, prodding imaginary Germans, and searching empty dug-outs as though the enemy were crowded there. The ground was strewn with dead, and from ruined trenches and piles of broken bricks there came the awful cries of wounded men.

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There were many wounded—Germans as well as British—and one man tended them with a heroic self-sacrifice which is described with reverence and enthusiasm by many officers and men. It was a chaplain attached to the South Africans who fought so desperately and so splendidly in “Devil’s Wood.” This “padre” came up to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter and applied himself to the wounded with a spiritual devotion that was utterly fearless.

In order to get water for them, and the means of making tea, he went many times to a well which was a danger spot marked down by German snipers, who shot our men, agonising with thirst, as though they were tigers going down to drink. They are justified according to the laws of war, but it was a cruel business. There was one German officer there, in a shell-hole, not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy to pick off any men who ventured to the well, and he was a dead shot.

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the fine figure of that chaplain, his disregard of all the bullets snapping about him, the tireless, fearless way in which he crossed a street of death in order to help the wounded, held back the trigger-finger of the German officer, and he let him pass. He passed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into its worst places, which were pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he had made from the well-water for men in agony because of their wounds and thirst.

They were officers of the Bantams who told me the story, though the padre was not theirs, and their generous praise was fine to hear. It was good also to hear the talk of these men who had just come out of battle with the grime and dirt of war upon them, about the men they love to command.

These young officers are keen, bright-eyed fellows, and in spite of all they had been through—things not yet to be described—they bore but little trace of their endurance. I sat with them under a tent propped up by stretcher-poles, with one flap tied to an old cart, while the men who had just marched down were lying in groups on the field, mostly without shirts and socks, because of the heat and the long time since they had changed their clothes.

Afterwards I went among the men—all these Peter Pans—who came from all parts of Scotland and the North of England, so that their speech is not easy to a man from the South. They were talking of German snipers and German shells, of all that they had suffered and done, and the boilermaker, their comic turn, was egged on to say outrageous things which caused roars of laughter from the Bantam crowd. The language of the boilermaker on the subject of Germans and the pleasures of war would be quite unprintable, but the gist of it was full of virtue and suited the philosophy of these five-foot Cœurs-de-Lion, who were grinning round him.

It is the philosophy of our modern knights, who take more risks in one day than their forebears in a lifetime, and find a grim and sinister humour in the worst things of war.