PART III THE WESTERN FRONT (continued 3)

It was from this point that the second phase of the retreat began. It was like nothing so much as being in that half dead condition on the operating table when the fumes of ether fill one’s brain with phantasies and flapping birds and wild flights of imagination just before one loses consciousness, knowing at the time that one hasn’t quite “gone.” Overfatigue, strain, lack of food and above all was a craving to stop everything, lie down, and sleep and sleep and sleep. One’s eyes were glued open and burnt in the back of one’s head, the skin of one’s face and hands tightened and stretched, one’s feet were long since past shape and feeling; wherever the clothes touched one’s body they irritated—not that one could realize each individual ache then. The effect was one ceaseless dolour from which the brain flung out and away into the no man’s land of semi-consciousness, full of thunder and vast fires, only to swing back at intervals to find the body marching, marching, endlessly, staggering almost drunkenly, along the interminable roads of France in the rain and cold. Hour after hour one rode side by side with the Scot, silent, swaying in the saddle, staring hollow-eyed into the dark ahead, or sliding with a stiff crash to the ground and blundering blindly from rut to rut, every muscle bruised and torn. Unconsciously every hour one gave a ten-minute halt. The horses stood drooping, the men lay down on the side of the road, motionless bundles like the dead, or sprawled over the vehicles, limp and exhausted, not smoking, not talking, content to remain inert until the next word of command should set them in motion again; wonderful in their recognition of authority, their instant unquestioning obedience, their power of summoning back all their faculties for just one more effort, and then another after that.

The country was unknown. Torches had given out their last flicker. Road junctions were unmarked. We struck matches and wrestled with maps that refused to fold in the right place, and every time Guivry seemed a million miles away. The noise of shelling dropped gradually behind until it became a mere soothing lullaby like the breaking of waves upon a pebble beach while we rolled with crunching wheels down the long incline into Buchoire, a village of the dead, without lights, doors creaking open at the touch of the wind.

We halted there to water the horses and give them what forage could be scraped together. The Scot and I rode on alone to Guivry, another seven kilometres. As we neared it so the sound of guns increased again as though a military band had died away round one corner and came presently marching back round another, playing the same air, getting louder as it came.

In a small room lit by oil lamps, Generals and Staffs were bending over huge maps scored heavily with red and blue pencils. Telephones buzzed and half conversations with tiny voices coming from back there kept all the others silent. Orderlies came in motor overalls with all the dust of France over them.

They gave us food,—whisky, bully and bread, apples with which we filled our pockets. Of our Corps they knew nothing, but after much telephoning they “thought” we should find them at Château Beines.

The Scot and I looked at one another. Château Beines was ten minutes from the burning hangars. We had passed it on our way down empty, silent, hours ago, in another life. Would the horses get us back up that interminable climb? Who should we find when we got there—our people or Germans? We rode back to Buchoire and distributed apples to the Babe, the Stand-by and the others and broke it to them that we had to go back on the chance of finding our brigade. The horses had been watered but not fed.

We turned about and caught up French transport which had blocked the road in both directions. We straightened them out, a wagon at a time, after endless wagging of hands and tongues and finally got to Château Beines to find a French Headquarters installed there who knew nothing about our brigade. There were English artillery in the farm a mile farther.

We went there. The farm was a ruin wreathed in fog, but from beneath the now smoking hangars a battery of ours was spitting shells into the night. Headquarters was somewhere in the farm cellar. We followed up a chink of light to its source and found a row of officers lying on wooden beds of rabbit netting, a signaller squatting on a reel of wire in the corner over a guttering candle, the concrete roof dripping moisture upon them. It was 3 a.m.

Orders were to come into action at once and open fire on a certain main-road junction.

The Scot and I went out and scoured ploughed fields waist-deep in drifting mist, looking for a position, found a belt of turf on the edge of a road and fetched the guns up. Locating the position on the map, working out the angle of the line of fire and the range with protractors took us back to the cellar where those lucky devils who were not commanding batteries were lying stertorous. Horses and men sweated their heart’s blood in getting the guns into position on the spongy ground and within an hour the first ear-splitting cracks joined in the chorus of screaming resistance put up by the other two batteries, with gunners who lost their balance at the weight of a shell and fell upon their faces, picking themselves up without even an oath and loading up again in a stupor by a process of sub-conscious reflex energy.

What are the limits of human endurance? Are there any? We had three more days and nights of it and still those men went on.

25

Sometime or other the Babe, the Stand-by and the other lad got some tea down in the cellar and fell asleep over their cups. Sometime or other I too got some tea, closed my eyes and fell off the box on which I was sitting. Sometime or other we got the order to cease fire and seek covered positions for the day’s work. Time, as one ordinarily recognizes it, had ceased. There was no night, marked by rest, nor day divided off into duties and meals. Time was all one, a blurry mixture of dark and cold; light, which hurt one’s eyes, and sweat. Sleep and rest were not. What was happening we did not know. It might have been the end of the world and we shouldn’t have known till we were in the next. There were just guns to be fired at given points for ever and ever, always and always, world with or without end, amen. Guns, guns and nothing but guns, in front, behind, right and left, narrowing down to those of mine which grew hot and were sponged out and went on again and still on, unhurriedly, remorselessly into the German advance, and would go on long and long after I was dead.

One’s mind refused to focus anything but angles and ranges and ammunition supply. There was nothing of importance in the world but those three things, whether we moved on or stayed where we were, whether we walked or whether we rode, whether we ate or whether we starved. In a sort of detached fog one asked questions and gave orders about food and forage and in the same fog food eventually appeared while one stared at the map and whispered another range which the Stand-by shouted down the line of guns.

With spades we cut a gap in a hedge which shut off an orchard from the road. The ditch was filled with stones and bricks from the farm. The horses took the guns in one by one, and other gaps were cut in the front hedge for the gun muzzles. Platforms were dug and trail beds, and ammunition began to pile up beside each gun as the sun came out and thinned the fog.

A telephone line ran away across the fields and a new voice came through the receiver, tickling one’s ear,—that of an uncaptured Colonel of a captured brigade who honoured us by taking command of our brigade. With a shaven face and washed hands he had looked upon our bearded chins and foul appearance and talked of the condition of our horses.

In front of the guns a long line of French machine gunners had dug themselves in and we were on the top of a high ridge. Below us the ground sloped immediately away to a beautiful green valley which rose up again to a feathery wood about to burst into green and ran past it in undulations like the green rollers of the Atlantic. Away in the distance were the great bulbous ever-watching eyes of the enemy,—balloons, which as the sun came up, advanced steadily, hypnotically, many of them strung out in a long line. Presently from the wood below came trickling streams of men, like brown insects coming from a dead horse. The sun glinted on their rifles. Steadily they came, unhurriedly, plodding up to the ridge, hundreds of them, heedless of the enemy barrage which began climbing too in great hundred-yard jumps.

“What news?” said I, as one trickle reached me. It was led by a Colonel.

He shook his head. “We’ve been relieved by the French,” said he, not stopping.

“Relieved? But God’s truth, isn’t there a war on?”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” He flung it over his shoulder and his men followed him away.

Somehow it didn’t seem credible. And yet there all along the ridge and the valley was the entire British infantry, or what looked like it, leisurely going back, while the French machine gunners looked at them and chattered. I got on the ’phone to Brigade about it. The Colonel said, “Yes, I know.”

We went on firing at long range. The teams were just behind the guns, each one under an apple tree, the drivers lying beside their horses. The planes which came over didn’t see us. The other batteries were in the open behind the crest tucked into folds of the ground, all the wagon lines clinging to a farmhouse about a mile back where the headquarters was. The Hun barrage was quickly coming nearer.

A troop of cavalry trotted down into it and took cover under one end of the wood. They had only one casualty. A shell struck a tree and brought it crashing down on top of a horse and rider. The last of our infantry had passed behind us and the wood was empty again. The opposite ridge was unoccupied; glasses showed no one in the country that stretched away on the left. Only the balloons seemed almost on top of us. The cavalry left the wood and trotted over the ridge in a long snake of half sections, and then the fringe of the barrage reached us. It splashed into the orchard. Drivers leaped to the horses’ heads. No man or animal was touched. Again one heard it coming, instinctively crouching at its shriek. Again it left us untouched as with an inattentive eye I saw the cavalry come trotting quietly back. It was followed by a chattering of the French. The reason was obvious. Out of the wood other streams came trickling, blue this time, in little parties of four and five, momentarily increasing in number and pace.

The first lot reached the battery and said they were the second line. The Boche was a “sale race, b’en zut alors!” and hitching their packs they passed on.

The machine gunners began to get ready. The battery began to look at me. The Stand-by gave them another salvo for luck and then ordered ten rounds per gun to be set at fuse 6—the edge of the wood was about fifteen hundred.

The next stream of poilus was hotter. They sweated much all among the orchard and told me with a laugh that the Boche would be here in five minutes. But when I suggested that they should stay and see what we could do together they shrugged their shoulders, spat, said, “En route!” and en routed.

The gunners had finished setting the fuses and were talking earnestly together. The machine gunners weren’t showing much above ground. The barrage had passed over to our rear.

I called up the Colonel again and told him. He told me I could drop the range to three thousand.

The Stand-by passed the order. It got about as far as the first gun and there died of inanition. The battery was so busy talking about the expected arrival of the Boche that orders faded into insignificance. The Stand-by repeated the order. Again it was not passed. I tried a string of curses but nothing more than a whisper would leave my throat. The impotence of it was the last straw. I whispered to the Stand-by to repeat word for word what I said. He megaphoned his hands and you could have heard him across the Channel,—a lovely voice, a bull of Bashan, that rose above the crash of shells and reached the last man at the other end of the line of guns. What he repeated was totally unprintable. If voice failed me, vocabulary hadn’t. I rose to heights undreamed of by even the Tidworth sergeant-major.

At the end of two minutes we began a series which for smartness, jump, drive, passing and execution of orders would have put a Salisbury depot battery into the waste-paper basket. Never in my life have I seen such gunnery as those fellows put up. Salvos went over like one pistol shot. Six rounds battery fire one second were like the ticking of a stop watch. Gun fire was like the stoking of the fires of hell by demons on hot cinders.

One forgot to be tired, one forgot to look out for the Hun in the joy of that masterly performance, a fortissima cantata on a six pipe organ of death and hate. Five minutes, ten minutes? I don’t know, but the pile of empty shell cases became a mountain behind each gun.

A signaller tugged at my arm and I went to the ’phone.

“Retire immediately! Rendezvous at Buchoire!”

I was still caught up with the glory of that shooting.

“What the hell for?” said I. “I can hang on here for ages yet.”

“Retire immediately!” repeated the Colonel.

I came to earth with a bang and began to apologize. Somehow it doesn’t do to talk like that to one’s Colonel even in moments of spiritual exaltation.

We ceased fire and packed up and got mounted and hooked in like six bits of black ginger, but the trouble was that we had to leave the comparative safety of our orchard and go out into the barrage which was churning up the fields the other side of the hedge. I collected the Stand-by and gave him the plan of campaign. They were to follow me in column of route at a trot, with twenty yards between guns,—that is, at right angles to the barrage, so as to form a smaller target. No man can have failed to hear his voice but for some unknown reason they failed to carry out the order. The leading gun followed me over the ditch on to the field, shells bursting on every side. About sixty yards across the field I looked over my shoulder and saw that they were all out of the orchard but wheeling to form line, broadside on to the barrage.

The leading gun, which the Stand-by took on, was the only one that got safely away. The five others all stuck with horses dead and men wounded, and still that barrage dropped like hail.

We cut out the dead horses and shot the badly wounded ones and somehow managed a four-horse team for each gun. The wounded who couldn’t walk were lifted on to limbers and held there by the others, and the four-horse teams nearly broke their hearts before we got the guns off that devilish bit of ploughed land on to a road, and after another twenty minutes had got out of the shell fire. Three sergeants were wounded, a couple of drivers and a gunner. The road was one solid mass of moving troops, French and English, infantry, gunners and transport. There was no means of going cross-country with four-horse teams. One had to follow the stream. Fortunately there were some R.A.M.C. people with stretchers and there was a motor ambulance. Between the two we got all our casualties bandaged and away. The other batteries had been gone already three quarters of an hour. There was no sign of them anywhere.

My own battery was scattered along a mile of traffic; one gun here, another there, divided by field kitchens and French mitrailleuse carts, marching infantry and limbered G.S. wagons. Where the sergeant-major was with the wagon line was beyond the bounds of conjecture. One hoped to find him at the rendezvous at Buchoire. There was nothing with us in the way of rations or forage and we only had the limbers full of ammunition. Fortunately the men had had a midday ration issued in the orchard, and the horses had been watered and fed during the morning. In the way of personnel I had the Quartermaster-sergeant, and two sergeants. The rest were bombardiers, gunners, and drivers,—about three men per gun all told. The outlook was not very optimistic.

The view itself did not tend to lighten one’s depression. We climbed a fairly steep slope which gave a view of the country for miles on either side. The main roads and every little crossroad as far as the eye could carry were all massed with moving troops going back. It looked like the Allied armies in full retreat, quite orderly but none the less routed. Where would it end? From rumours which ran about we were almost surrounded. The only way out was south. We were inside a bottle which we could not break, all aiming for the neck.

And yet everywhere on that slope French infantry had dug themselves in, each man in a little hole about knee-deep with a tiny bank of mud in front of him, separated from the next man by a few yards. They sat and smoked in their holes, so like half-dug graves, waiting for the enemy, watching us go back with a look in their eyes that seemed to be of scorn. Now and again they laughed. It was difficult to meet those quiet eyes without a surge of rage and shame. How much longer were we going to retreat? Where were our reinforcements? Why had our infantry been “relieved” that morning? Why weren’t we standing shoulder to shoulder with those blue-clad poilus? What was the brain at the back of it all? Who was giving the orders? Was this the end of the war? Were we really beaten? Could it be possible that somewhere there was not a line of defence which we could take up and hold, hold for ever? Surely with magnificent men like ours who fought till they dropped and then picked themselves up and fought again, surely something could be done to stop this appalling débâcle!

26

The tide of traffic took us into Guiscard where we were able to pull out of the stream one by one and collect as a battery,—or at least the gun part of it. While studying the map a mounted orderly came up and saluted.

“Are you the —— Brigade, sir?” he said.

I said yes.

“The orders are to rendezvous at Muiraucourt instead of Buchoire.”

To this day that man remains a mystery. The rest of the brigade did rendezvous at Buchoire and fought twice again that day. The Colonel never gave any order about Muiraucourt and had never heard of the place. Where the orderly came from, who he was, or how he knew the number of the brigade are unsolved problems. I never saw him again. Having given the message he disappeared into the stream of traffic, and I, finding the new rendezvous to be only about three kilometres away in a different direction to Buchoire and out of the traffic road led on again at once.

We passed French gunners of all calibres firing at extreme range and came to Muiraucourt to find it absolutely empty and silent. While the horses were being watered and the wounded ones bandaged I scouted on ahead and had the luck to find an A.S.C. officer with forage for us and a possibility of rations if we waited an hour. It was manna in the wilderness.

We drew the forage and fed the starving horses. At the end of the hour an A.S.C. sergeant rode in to say that the ration wagons had been blown up.—We took up an extra hole in our Sam Brownes. It appeared that he had seen our headquarters and the other batteries marching along the main road in the direction of Noyon, to which place they were undoubtedly going.

The Quartermaster whispered something about bread and tea. So we withdrew from the village and halted on a field just off the road and started a fire. The bread ration was a snare and a delusion. It worked out at about one slice per every other man. He confided this to me sadly while the men were spread-eagled on the bank at the roadside, enjoying all the anticipation of a full stomach. We decided that it wasn’t a large enough quantity to split up so I went over and put the position to them, telling them that on arrival at Noyon we hoped to find the brigade looking out for us with a meal for everybody ready. Meanwhile there wasn’t enough to go round. What about tossing for it?... The ayes had it. They tossed as if they were going to a football match, the winners sending up a cheer, and even the losers sitting down again with a grin.

I decided to ride on into Noyon and locate the brigade and find out where to get rations. So I handed the battery to the Stand-by to bring on when ready, left him the Babe and the other lad, and took the Quartermaster on with me.

It was a nightmare of a ride through miles and miles of empty villages and deserted country, blown-up bridges like stricken giants blocking every way, not a vehicle on the roads, no one in sight, the spirit of desertion overhanging it all, with the light failing rapidly and Noyon apparently as far off as ever. The horses were so done that it was difficult to spur them out of a walk, we ourselves so done that we could hardly raise the energy to spur them. At last after hours of riding we came to the main Roye-Noyon road but didn’t recognize it in the dark and turned the wrong way, going at least half an hour before we discovered our mistake! It was the last straw.

A thing that added to our anxiety was the sight of big guns on caterpillars all coming away from the place we were going to and as we got nearer the town the roar of bursting shells seemed to be very near. One didn’t quite know that streams of the enemy would not pour over the crest at any minute. Deep in one’s brain a vague anxiety formed. The whole country was so empty, the bridges so well destroyed. Were we the last—had we been cut off? Was the Hun between us and Noyon? Suppose the battery were captured? I began to wish that I hadn’t ridden on but had sent the Stand-by in my place. For the first time since the show began, a sense of utter loneliness overwhelmed me, a bitter despair at the uselessness of individual effort in this gigantic tragedy of apocalyptic destruction. Was it a shadow of such loneliness as Christ knew upon the Cross when He looked out upon a storm-riven world and cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” All the evil in the world was gathered here in shrieking orgy, crushing one to such mental and physical tiredness that death would only have been a welcome rest.

Unaided I should not have regretted that way out, God knows. But two voices came to me through the night,—one from a little cottage among the pine trees in England, the other calling across the Atlantic with the mute notes of a violin.

“Your men look to you,” they whispered. “We look to you....”

27

We came to Noyon!

It was as though the town were a magnet which had attracted all the small traffic from that empty countryside, letting only the big guns on caterpillars escape. The centre of the town, like a great octopus, has seven roads which reach out in every direction. Each of these was banked and double-banked with an interlocked mass of guns and wagons. Here and there frantic officers tried to extricate the tangle but for the most part men sat silent and inert upon their horses and vehicles beyond effort and beyond care.

Army Headquarters told me that Noyon would begin to be shelled in an hour’s time and gave me maps and a chit to draw food from the station, but they had never heard of the brigade and thought the Corps had been wiped out. As I left, the new lad came up and reported that the battery had halted on the outskirts of the town. We went back to it and collected the limbers and tried to take them with us to the station, with hearts beating high at the thought of food. It was impossible, so we left them on the pavement and dodged single file between wagon wheels and horses’ legs. After an hour’s fighting every yard of the way we got to the station to find a screaming mob of civilians carrying bundles, treading on each other in their efforts to enter a train, weeping, praying, cursing, out of all control.

The R.S.O. had gone. There was no food.

We fought our way back to Army Headquarters where we learned that a bombardier with two wagons of rations destined to feed stray units like us had gone to Porquericourt, five kilometres out. If we found him we could help ourselves. If we didn’t find him—a charming smile, and a shrug of the shoulders.

I decided to try the hotel where I had spent a night with my brother only three weeks ago. Three weeks, was it possible? I felt years older. The place was bolted and barred and no amount of hammering or shouting drew an answer. The thought of going back empty-handed to my hungry battery was an agony. The chances of finding that bombardier were about one in a million, so small that he didn’t even represent a last hope. In utter despair one called aloud upon Christ and started to walk back. In a narrow unlit street we passed a black doorway in which stood a soldier.

“Can you give me a drink of water?” said I.

“Yes,” said he. “Come in, sir. This is the officers’ club.”

Was it luck? Or did Christ hear? You may think what you like but I am convinced that it was Christ.

We went in. In one room were sleeping officers all over the floor. The next was full of dinner tables uncleared, one electric light burning. It was long after midnight. We helped ourselves to bits of bread from each table and drank the leavings of milk which had been served with the coffee. Then a waiter came. He said he would cook us some tea and try and find a cold tongue or some ham. I told him that I had a starving battery down the road and wanted more than tea and ham. I wanted food in a sack, two sacks, everything he could rake up, anything.

He blinked at me through his glasses. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” he said and went away.

We had our tea and tongue and he brought a huge sack with loaves and tins of jam and bits of cheese and biscuits and packets of cigarettes and tins of bully. Furthermore he refused all payment except two francs for what we had eaten.

“That’s all right, sir,” he said. “I spent three days in a shell hole outside Wipers on one tin o’ bully.—That’s the best I can do for you.”

I wrung him by the hand and told him he was a brother and a pal, and between us the lad and I shouldered the sack and went out again, thanking God that at least we had got something for the men to eat.

On returning to the battery I found that they had been joined by six wagons which had got cut off from the sergeant-major’s lot and the entire wagon line of the Scots Captain’s battery with two of his subalterns in charge. They, too, were starving.

The sack didn’t go very far. It only took a minute or so before the lot was eaten. Then we started out, now a column about a mile long, to find Porquericourt, a tiny village some two kilometres off the main road, the gunners sleeping as they walked, the drivers rocking in the saddle, the horses stumbling along at a snail’s pace. None of us had shaved or washed since the 21st. We were a hollow-eyed, draggled mob, but we got there at last to be challenged by sentries who guarded sleeping bits of units who had dropped where they stood all over the place. While my two units fixed up a wagon line I took the Quartermaster with me and woke up every man under a wagon or near one asking him if he were Bombardier So and So,—the man with the food. How they cursed me. It took me an hour to go the rounds and there was no bombardier with food. The men received the news without comment and dropped down beside the wagons. The Babe had collected a wagon cover for us to sleep under and spread it under a tree. The four of us lay on it side by side and folded the end over ourselves. There was a heavy dew. But my job wasn’t over. There was to-morrow to be considered. I had given orders to be ready to move off at six o’clock unless the Hun arrived before that. It was then 3 a.m.

The Army had told me that if our Corps was not completely wiped out, their line of retreat was Buchoire, Crissolles and so back in the direction of Lassigny. They advised me to go to Crissolles. But one look at the map convinced me that Crissolles would be German by six o’clock in the morning. So I decided on Lagny by the secondary road which went straight to it from Porquericourt. If the brigade was not there, surely there would be some fighting unit who would have heard of them, or who might at least be able to spare us rations, or tell us where we could get some. Fighting on scraps of bread was all right but could not be prolonged indefinitely.

At six o’clock we set out as a squadron of cavalry with slung lances trotted like ghosts across the turf. We had only been on the march five minutes when a yell from the rear of the battery was passed quickly up to me as I walked in the lead.

“Halt! Action rear!”

My heart stood still. Were the Germans streaming up in the mist? Were we caught at last like rats in a trap? It couldn’t be. It was some fool mistake. The Babe was riding just behind me. I called him up. “Canter back and find out who gave that order and bring him here.—You, lead driver! Keep on walking till I give you the order to do anything else.”

We went on steadily. From moment to moment nothing seemed to happen, no rifle or machine-gun fire.—The Babe came back with a grin. “The order was ‘All correct in rear,’ sir.”

Can you get the feeling of relief? We were not prisoners or fighting to the last man with clubbed rifles in that cold grey dawn on empty stomachs.

I obeyed the natural instinct of all mothers who see their child snatched from destruction,—to slap the infant. “Find out the man who passed it up wrongly and damn his soul to hell?”

“Right, sir,” said the Babe cheerily, and went back. Good Babe, he couldn’t damn even a mosquito properly!

The road was the most ungodly track imaginable, blocked here and there by 60-pounders coming into action. But somehow the horses encompassed the impossible and we halted in the lane outside the village at about seven o’clock. The Stand-by remained in charge of the battery while the Babe and I went across gardens to get to the village square. There was an old man standing at a door. He gazed at us motionless. I gave him bon jour and asked him for news of British troops, gunners. Yes, the village was full. Would we care for some cider? Wouldn’t we! He produced jugfuls of the most perfect cider I’ve ever drunk and told us the story of his life. He was a veteran of 1870 and wept all down himself in the telling. We thanked him profusely, shook his trembling hand and went out of his front door into the main street.

There were wagons with the brigade mark! I could have wept with joy.

In a couple of minutes we had found Headquarters. The man I’d dosed with champagne on the road corner two days before fell on my neck with strong oaths. It appeared that I’d been given up as wiped out with the whole battery, or at least captured. He looked upon me as back from the dead.

The Colonel had a different point of view. He was no longer shaved and washed, and threatened to put me under arrest for not having rendezvoused at Buchoire! Relations between us were strained, but everybody was in the act of getting mounted to reconnoitre positions so there was no time for explanations or recriminations. Within three-quarters of an hour the battery was in action, but the Quartermaster had found the sergeant-major, who, splendid fellow, had our rations. He functioned mightily with cooks. Tea and bacon, bread and butter,—what could the “Carlton” have done better than that?

And later, when the sun came out, there was no firing to be done, and we slept beside the gun wheels under an apple tree, slept like the dead for nearly a whole hour.

28

The Hun was indeed at Crissolles, for the brigade had fought there the previous evening. So much for Army advice.

The day was marked by two outstanding events; one, the return of the Major of the Scots Captain’s battery, his wound healed, full of bloodthirst and cheeriness; the other, that I got a shave and wash. We advanced during the morning to cover a village called Bussy. We covered it,—with gun fire and salvos, the signal for each salvo being a wave from my shaving brush. There was a hell of a battle in Bussy, street fighting with bayonets and bombs. The brigade dropped a curtain of fire on the outer fringe of the village and caught the enemy in full tide. Four batteries sending over between them a hundred rounds a minute of high explosive and shrapnel can make a nasty mess of a pin-point. The infantry gloated,—our infantry.

On our right Noyon was the centre of a whirlwind of Hun shells. We were not out any too soon. The thought added zest to our gun fire. Considering the amount of work those guns had done in the last five days and nights it was amazing how they remained in action without even breaking down. The fitter worked like a nigger and nursed them like infants. Later the Army took him from me to go and drive rivets in ships!

We pulled out of action again as dusk was falling, and the word was passed that we had been relieved and were going out of the line. The brigade rendezvoused at Cuy in a field off the road while the traffic crept forward a yard and halted, waited an hour and advanced another yard, every sort of gun, wagon, lorry, ambulance and car, crawling back, blocked at every crossroads, stuck in ditches, sometimes abandoned.

All round the sky glared redly. Hour after hour we sat in that cup of ground waiting for orders, shivering with cold, sleeping in uneasy snatches, smoking tobacco that ceased to taste, nibbling ration biscuits until the night became filled with an eerie strained silence. Jerky sentences stopped. Faint in the distance came the crunch of wheels, a vague undercurrent of sound. The guns had stopped. Now and again the chink of a horse mumbling his bit. The tail end of the traffic on the road below us was silent, waiting, the men huddled, asleep. And through it all one’s ear listened for a new sound, the sound of marching feet, or trotting horses which might mean an Uhlan patrol. Bussy was not far.

Suddenly one voice, far away, distinct, pierced the darkness like a thin but blinding ray. “Les Boches!—Les Boches!”

A sort of shivering rustle ran over the whole brigade. Men stirred, sat up, muttered. Horses raised their heads with a rattle of harness. Hands crept to revolvers. Every breath was held and every head stared in the direction of the voice.

For a moment the silence was spellbound.

Then the voice came again, “A gauche! A gauche! Nom de Dieu!” and the crunch of wheels came again.

The brigade relaxed. There came a laugh or two, a mumbled remark, a settling down, a muttered curse and then silence once more.

Eventually came a stir, an order. Voices were raised. Sleeping figures rolled over stiffly, staggered up. Officers came forward. The order “Get mounted!” galvanized everybody.

Wagon by wagon we pulled out of the field. My battery was the last. No sooner on the road, with our noses against the tailboard of the last vehicle of the battery in front, than we had to halt again and wait endlessly, the drivers sleeping in their saddles until pulled out by the N.C.O.’s, the gunners flinging themselves into the ditch. At last on again, kicking the sleepers awake,—the only method of rousing them. It was very cold. To halt was as great an agony as to march, whether mounted or on foot. For five days and nights one had had one’s boots on. The condition of feet was indescribable. In places the road was blocked by abandoned motor lorries. We had to extemporize bridges over the ditch with rocks and tins and whatever was in the lorries with a tailboard placed on top, to unhook lead horses from a four-horse gun team and hook them into a loaded wagon to make a six-horse team, to rouse the drivers sufficiently to make them drive properly and get the full team to work together, and at last, having reached a good metalled road, to follow the battery in front, limping and blind, hour after hour. From time to time the gunners and drivers changed places. For the most part no word was spoken. We halted when the teams bumped their noses on the wagon in front, went on again when those in front did. At one halt I sat on a gun seat, the unforgivable sin for a gunner on the line of march,—and I was the Battery Commander. Sprawled over the breech of the gun in a stupor I knew no more for an indefinite period when I woke again to find us still marching. The sergeant-major confided to me afterwards that he was so far my accomplice in that lack of discipline that he posted a gunner on either side to see that I didn’t fall off. We had started the march about five o’clock in the afternoon.

We didn’t reach our destination till nine o’clock next morning. The destination consisted of halting in the road outside a village already full of troops, Chevrincourt. The horses were unhooked and taken off the road, watered, and tied to lines run up between the trees. Breakfast was cooked, and having ascertained that we were not going to move for the rest of the day we spread our valises, and got into pyjamas, not caring if it snowed ink.

29

We stayed there two days, doing nothing but water and feed the horses and sleep. I succeeded in getting letters home the first morning, having the luck to meet a junior Brass Hat who had done the retreat in a motor-car. It was good to be able to put an end to their anxiety. Considering all things we had been extraordinarily lucky. The number of our dead, wounded and missing was comparatively slight and the missing rolled up later, most of them. On the second night at about two in the morning, Battery Commanders were summoned urgently to Brigade Headquarters. The Colonel had gone, leaving the bloodthirsty Major in command. It transpired that a Divisional brigade plus one battery of ours was to go back into the line. They would take our best guns, some of our best teams and our best sergeants. The exchanges were to be carried out at once. They were.

We marched away that day, leaving one battery behind. As it happened, it didn’t go into the line again but rejoined us a week later.

The third phase of the retreat, marching back to the British area—we were far south into the French area at Chevrincourt, which is near Compiègne, and all its signboards showed Paris so many kilometres away—gave us an impression of the backwash of war. The roads were full, not of troops, but of refugees, women, old men, girls and children, with what possessions they could load into a farm wagon piled sky high. They pulled their cattle along by chains or ropes tied round their horns. Some of them pushed perambulators full of packages and carried their babies. Others staggered under bundles. Grief marked their faces. The hope of return kept them going. The French have deeper roots in the soil than we. To them their “patelin” is the world and all the beauty thereof. It was a terrible sight to see those poor women trudging the endless roads, void of a goal as long as they kept away from the pursuing death, half starved, sleeping unwashed in leaky barns, regardless of sex, begging milk from the inhabited villages they passed through to satisfy their unhappy babies, managing somehow to help the aged and infirm who mumbled bitter curses at the “sale Boche” and “soixante-dix.” I heard one woman say “Nous savons c’qu c’est que la guerre! Nous avons tout fait excepté les tranchées.” “We know what war is. We have done everything except the trenches.” Bombarded with gas and long-range guns, bombed by aeroplanes, homeless, half starved, the graves of their dead pillaged by ghoul-like Huns, their sons, husbands, and lovers killed, indeed they knew the meaning of war.

England has been left in merciful ignorance of this side of war, but woe unto her if she ever forgets that these women of France are her blood-sisters, these peasant women who later gave food to the emaciated Tommies who staggered back starving after the armistice, food of which they denied themselves and their children.

On the third day we reached Poix where only three months previously we had spent a merry Christmas and drunk the New Year in, the third day of ceaseless marching and finding billets in the middle of the night in villages crowded with refugees. The whole area was full, British and French elbowing each other, the unfortunate refugees being compelled to move on.

Here we exchanged old guns for new, received reinforcements of men and horses, drew new equipment in place of that which was destroyed and lost, found time to ride over to Bergicourt to pay our respects to the little Abbé, still unshaved, who was now billeting Moroccan troops, and who kissed us on both cheeks before all the world, and in three more days were on our way to their firing line again.

It was here that the runaway servants were dealt with; here, too, that my brother came rolling up in his car to satisfy himself that I was still this side of eternity or capture. And very good it was to see him. He gave us the number of divisions engaged against us, and we marvelled again that any of us were still alive.

We went north this time for the defence of Amiens, having been joined by our fourth battery, and relieved a brigade in action behind the village of Gentelles. The Anzacs were in the line from Villers Brettoneux to Hangard where their flank touched the French. The spire of Amiens cathedral peeped up behind us and all day long-range shells whizzed over our heads into the stricken city.

Some one was dissatisfied with our positions behind the village. The range was considered too long. Accordingly we were ordered to go forward and relieve some other batteries down the slope in front of Gentelles. The weather had broken. It rained ceaselessly. The whole area was a mud patch broken by shell holes. The Major, who had remained behind at Chevrincourt, and I went forward together to locate the forward batteries. Dead horses everywhere, and fresh graves of men marked our path. Never have I seen such joy on any faces as on those of the officers whom we were coming to relieve.

On our return we reported unfavourably, urging strongly that we should remain where we were. The order was inexorable. That night we went in.

We stayed there three days, at the end of which time we were withdrawn behind the village again. Our dead were three officers—one of whom was the Babe—half the gunners, and several drivers. Our wounded were one officer and half the remaining gunners. Of the guns themselves about six in the brigade were knocked out by direct hits.

Who was that dissatisfied “some one” who, having looked at a map from the safety of a back area, would not listen to the report of two Majors, one a regular, who had visited the ground and spoke from their bitterly-earned experience? Do the ghosts of those officers and men, unnecessarily dead, disturb his rest o’ nights, or is he proudly wearing another ribbon for distinguished service? Even from the map he ought to have known better. It was the only place where a fool would have put guns. The German artillery judged him well.

Poor Babe, to be thrown away at the beginning of his manhood at the dictate of some ignorant and cowardly Brass Hat!

“Young, unmarried men, your King and country need you!”

30

So we crawled out of the valley of death. With what remained of us in men and guns we formed three batteries, two of which went back to their original positions behind the village and in disproof of their uselessness fired four thousand rounds a day per battery, fifty-six wagon-loads of ammunition. The third battery tucked itself into a corner of the village and remained there till its last gun had been knocked out. One S.O.S. lasted thirty-six hours. One lived with a telephone and a map. Sleep was unknown. Food was just food, eaten when the servants chose to bring it. The brain reeled under the stupendousness of the strain and the firing. For cover we lived in a hole in the ground, some four feet deep with a tarpaulin to keep the rain out. It was just big enough to hold us all. The wings of the angel of death brushed our faces continuously. Letters from home were read without being understood. One watched men burned to death in the battery in front, as the result of a direct hit, without any emotion. If there be a hell such as the Church talks about, then indeed we had reached it.

We got a new Colonel here, and the bloodthirsty Major returned to his battery, the Scots Captain having been one of the wounded. My own Captain rolled up again too, having been doing all sorts of weird fighting up and down the line. It was only now that we learned the full extent of the retreat and received an order of the day from the Commander in Chief to the effect that England had its back up against the wall. In other words the Hun was only to pass over our dead bodies. He attempted it at every hour of the day and night. The Anzacs lost and retook Villers Brettoneux. The enemy got to Cachy, five hundred yards in front of the guns, and was driven back again. The French Colonials filled Hangard Wood with their own and German dead, the wounded leaving a trail of blood day and night past our hole in the ground. The Anzacs revelled in it. They had never killed so many men in their lives. Their General, a great tall man of mighty few words, was round the outpost line every day. He was much loved. Every officer and man would gladly have stopped a shell for him.

At last we were pulled out of the line, at half an hour’s notice. Just before hooking in—the teams were on the position—there was a small S.O.S. lasting five minutes. My battery fired four hundred rounds in that time,—pretty good going for men who had come through such an inferno practically without sleep for fifteen days.

We sat under a haystack in the rain for forty-eight hours and the Colonel gave us lectures on calibration. Most interesting!

I confess to having been done in completely. The Babe’s death had been a frightful shock. His shoulder was touching mine as he got it and I had carried him spouting blood to the shelter of a bank. I wanted to get away and hide. I was afraid, not of death, but of going on in that living hell. I was unable to concentrate sufficiently to dictate the battery orders. I was unable to face the nine o’clock parade and left it to the Orderly Officer. The day’s routine made me so jumpy that I couldn’t go near the lines or the horses. The sight of a gun filled me with physical sickness. The effort of giving a definite order left me trembling all over.

The greatest comfort I knew was to lie on my valise in the wet straw with closed eyes and listen to “Caprice Viennois” on the gramophone. It lifted one’s soul with gentle hands and bore it away into infinite space where all was quiet and full of eternal rest and beauty. It summed up the youth of the world, the springtime of love in all its fresh cleanness, like the sun after an April shower transforms the universe into magic colours.

I think the subalterns guessed something of my trouble for they went out of their way to help me in little things.

We marched north and went into the line again behind Albert, a murdered city whose skeleton melted before one’s eyes under the ceaseless rain of shells from our heavy artillery.

During and since the retreat the cry on all sides was “Where the devil are the Americans?”—those mysterious Americans who were reported to be landing at the rate of seven a minute. What became of them after landing? They seemed to disappear. Some had seen them buying up Marseilles, and then painting Paris all colours of the rainbow, but no one had yet heard of them doing any fighting. The attitude was not very bright, until Pershing’s offer to Foch. Then everybody said, “Ah! Now we shall see something.” Our own recruits seemed to be the dregs of England, untrained, weedy specimens who had never seen a gun and were incapable of learning. Yet we held the Hun all right. One looked for the huskies from U.S.A., however, with some anxiety.

At Albert we found them, specimens of them, wedged in the line with our infantry, learning the game. Their one desire was to go out into No Man’s Land and get to close quarters. They brought Brother Boche or bits of him every time. One overheard talk on one’s way along the trenches to the O.P. “Danger?” queried one sarcastically, “Say, I ain’t bin shot at yet.” And another time when two officers and I had been shelled out of the O.P. by a pip-squeak battery to our extreme discomfort and danger, we came upon a great beefy American standing on the fire step watching the shells burst on the place we had just succeeded in leaving. “If that guy don’t quit foolin’ around with that gun,” he said thoughtfully, “some one’ll likely get hurt in a minute.”

Which was all to the good. They shaped well. The trouble apparently was that they had no guns and no rifles.

Our own positions were another instance of the criminal folly of ignorance,—great obvious white gashes in a green field, badly camouflaged, photographed and registered by the Hun, so placed that the lowest range to clear the crest was 3,500 and the S.O.S. was 3,550. It meant that if the Germans advanced only fifty yards we could not bring fire to bear on them.

The dawn of our getting in was enlivened by an hour’s bombardment with gas and four-twos. Every succeeding dawn was the same.

Fortunately it proved to be a peace sector, comparatively speaking, and I moved out of that unsavoury spot with no more delay than was required in getting the Colonel’s consent. It only took the death of one man to prove my point. He was a mere gunner, not even on proficiency pay, so presumably it was cheap knowledge. We buried him at midnight in pouring rain, the padre reading the service by the light of my electric torch. But the Colonel wasn’t there.

From the new position so reluctantly agreed to, we fired many hundreds of rounds, as did our successors, and not a single man became a casualty.

What is the psychology of this system of insisting on going into childishly unsuitable positions? Do they think the Battery Commander a coward who balks at a strafed emplacement? Isn’t the idea of field gunners to put their guns in such a place as will permit them to remain in action effectively for the longest possible time in a show? Why, therefore, occupy a position already accurately registered by the enemy, which he can silence at any given moment? Do they think that a Major of two years’ experience in command of a battery in the line has not learned at least the rudiments of choosing positions for his guns? Do they think it is an attempt to resent authority, or to assert their own importance? Do they think that the difference of one pip and a foot of braid is the boundary between omniscience and crass stupidity?

In civil life if the senior partner insists on doing the junior’s job and bungles it, the junior can resign,—and say things.

While we were outside Albert we got our first leave allotment and the ranks were permitted to return to their wives and families for fourteen days, provided always that they had been duly vaccinated, inoculated, and declared free from vermin and venereal disease by the medical officer.

A delightful game, the inoculation business. Army orders are careful not to make it compulsory, but if any man refuses to be done his commanding officer is expected to argue with him politely, and, if that fails, to hound him to the needle. If he shies at the needle’s point then his leave is stopped,—although he has sweated blood for King and country for eighteen months or so, on a weekly pay with which a munitioneer daily tips the waiter at the “Carlton.” If he has been unlucky enough to get venereal disease then his leave is stopped for a year.

In the next war every Tommy will be a munition maker.

31

The desire to get out of it, to hide, refused to leave me.

I wrote to my brother and asked him if he could help me to become an R.T.O. or an M.L.O.; failing that, a cushy liaison job miles away from shambles and responsibility and spit and polish. He knew of the very thing, and I was duly nominated for liaison. The weeks went by and the nomination papers became a mass of illegible recommendations and signatures up to the highest Generals of the English Army and a Maréchal of France. But the ultimate reply was that I was a Battery Commander and therefore far too important to be allowed to go. Considering that I was half dead and not even allowed an opinion in the choosing of a position for my own battery, Gilbert and Sullivan could have conceived no more priceless paradox.

Somewhere about the end of May we were relieved and went to a rest camp outside Abbeville which was being bombed every night. A special week’s leave to England was granted to “war-weary officers.” I sent a subaltern and, prepared to pawn my own soul to see England again, asked if I might go too.

The reply is worthy of quotation. “You don’t seem to understand that this is a rest camp, the time when you are supposed to train your battery. You’ll get your leave in the line.”

The camp was on turf at the edge of a deep lake. All day the horses roamed free grazing, and the men splashed about in the water whenever they felt inclined. The sun shone and footballs appeared from nowhere and there were shops in the village where they could spend money, and Abbeville was only about a mile and a half away. In the morning we did a little gun drill and cleaned vehicles and harness. Concerts took place in the evenings. Leslie Henson came with a theatrical company and gave an excellent show. The battery enjoyed its time of training.

Most of those officers who weren’t sufficiently war-weary for the week in England, went for a couple of days to Tréport or Paris-Plage. For myself I got forty-eight hours in Etaples with my best pal, who was giving shows to troops about to go up the line, feeding train-loads of refugees and helping to bandage wounded; and somehow or other keeping out of the way of the bombs which wrecked the hospital and drove the reinforcement camps to sleep in the woods on the other side of the river. We drove out to Paris-Plage and lunched and dined and watched the golden sea sparkling and walked back in a moonlight filled with the droning of Gothas, the crashing of bombs and the impotent rage of an Archie barrage.

Not only were there no horses to look after nor men to handle but there was a kindred spirit to talk with when one felt like it, or with whom to remain silent when one didn’t. Blessed be pals, for they are few and far between, and their value is above rubies.

Our rest camp came to an end with an inspection from Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and once more we took the trail. The battery’s adventures from then until the first day of the attack which was to end the war can be briefly summed up, as we saw hardly any fighting. We went back to Albert and checked calibrations, then entrained and went off to Flanders where we remained in reserve near St. Omer for a fortnight or so. Then we entrained once more and returned to Albert, but this time south of it, behind Morlancourt.

There was an unusual excitement in the air and a touch of optimism. Foch was said to have something up his sleeve. The Hun was reported to be evacuating Albert. The Americans had been blooded and had come up to expectations. There was a different atmosphere about the whole thing. On our own sector the Hun was offensive. The night we came in he made a raid, took two thousand yards of front line on our right, and plastered us with gas and four-twos for several hours. No one was hurt or gassed except myself. I got a dose of gas. The doctor advised me to go down to the wagon line for a couple of days, but the barrage was already in for our attack and the Captain was in England on the Overseas Course. The show started about 4 p.m. right along the front.

It was like the 21st of March with the positions reversed. South of us the whole line broke through and moved forward. At Morlancourt the Hun fought to the death. It was a sort of pivot, and for a couple of days we pounded him. By that time the line had ceased to bulge and was practically north and south. Then our infantry took Morlancourt and pushed the Hun back on to the Fricourt ridge and in wild excitement we got the order to advance. It was about seven o’clock at night. All Battery Commanders and the Colonel dashed up in a car to the old front line to reconnoitre positions. The car was missed by about twelve yards with high explosive and we advanced in the dark, falling over barbed wire, tumbling into shell holes, jumping trenches and treading on corpses through a most unpleasant barrage. The Hun had a distinct sting in his tail.

We came into position about three hundred yards north-west of Morlancourt. The village and all the country round stank of festering corpses, mostly German, though now and again one came upon a British pair of boots and puttees with legs in them,—or a whole soldier with a pack on his back, who looked as if he were sleeping until one saw that half his face was blown away. It made one sick, sick with horror, whether it was our own Tommies or a long trench chaotic with rifles, equipment, machine guns and yellow, staring and swollen Germans.

The excitement of advancing died away. The “glory of victory” was just one long butchery, one awful smell, an orgy of appalling destruction unequalled by the barbarians of pre-civilization.

Here was all the brain, energy and science of nineteen hundred years of “progress,” concentrated on lust and slaughter, and we called it glorious bravery and rang church bells! Soldier poets sang their swan songs in praise of dying for their country, their country which gave them a period of hell, and agonizing death, then wept crocodile tears over the Roll of Honour, and finally returned with an easy conscience to its money-grubbing. The gladiators did it better. At least they were permitted a final sarcasm, “Morituri, te salutant!”

Even gentle women at home, who are properly frightened of mice and spank small boys caught ill-treating an animal, even they read the flaming headlines of the papers with a light in their eyes, and said, “How glorious! We are winning!” Would they have said the same if they could have been set down on that reeking battlefield where riddled tanks splashed with blood heaved drunkenly, ambulances continuously drove away with the smashed wrecks of what once were men, leaving a trail of screams in the dust of the road, and always the guns crashed out their pæan of hate by day and night, ceaselessly, remorselessly, with a terrible trained hunger to kill, and maim and wipe out?

There was no stopping. I was an insignificant cog in that vast machine, but no man could stop the wheels in their mighty revolutions. Fate stepped in, however.

We advanced again to Mametz, and there, mercifully, I got another dose of gas. The effects of the first one, seven days previously, had not worked off. This was the last straw. Three days later it toppled me over. The doctors labelled me and sent me home.