Letters from France Part 9

Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the mist--you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour in the dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory--not ours.

For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.

It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German lines. It came very slowly--the steady, even pace of a funeral. The leader was a man--a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman--who marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a flag. Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.

They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the wreckage of the night before. We went along the trench farther, and at a later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front of the line. A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking regularly--sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to show yourself too freely--the mist was lifting, and you never knew whether the Germans were this side of it or not. But though those bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the night's attack hopping back from advanced sh.e.l.l-holes, the little procession with the flag pa.s.sed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.

We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed of all its covering. The barrage of the night before, and of other days, had fallen there, and the slope was simply a ploughed field. I could not get rid of that impression at the time, and it is the only one that I have of it still--that we were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along a little, irregular, newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road and crossed it at one point. After a second or two's thought one recognised that it _was_ a road, because the banks of it ran straight.

It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin--it took you some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all.

There was a shrapnel sh.e.l.l regularly spitting across that country. We knew we should have to pa.s.s it, and one was naturally anxious to be under cover at the moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business which needed care when the expected sh.e.l.l whizzed over the hill and burst. I ducked.

The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.

We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen sh.e.l.ls in the minute, but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of all sorts mixed--ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the crash of a big sh.e.l.l; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into the brown earth; 5.9 sh.e.l.ls flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on until the shelter petered out and the shorter sh.e.l.ls were already bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip into when you heard them singing towards you--and then we decided to give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive into the sea.

A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench, perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to them.

They were stretcher-bearers--Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.

I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I had known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was not permitted to have a camera there, to prove to Australians that these things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke of a barrage on the skyline. And coming straight from it were two little parties each headed by a flag.

We hurried to the place--and there it is on record, in the photograph for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming down the open with the angry sh.e.l.ls behind them.

I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the sh.e.l.l-bursts how the Germans treated them.

"They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag," one of them said.

"You see, we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to their wounded. Of course, we can't help the artillery," he added, looking over his shoulder at the place from which he had come, where a line of black sh.e.l.l-bursts was fringing the hill. "That's not meant for us."

That understanding, if you can maintain it honourably and trust the enemy to do the same, means everything--everything--to the wounded of both sides. The commander who, sitting safely at his table, condemns his wounded and the enemy's in No Man's Land to death by slow torture without grounds for suspecting trickery, would incur a responsibility such as few men would face the thought of.

Load after load, day and night, mile upon mile in and out of craters across the open and back again--a.s.suredly the Australian stretcher-bearer has not degenerated since he made his name glorious amongst his fellow soldiers at Gallipoli. Hear them speak of him.

CHAPTER XXII

OUR NEIGHBOUR

_France, October 10th._

There are next to us at present some Scotsmen.

Australians and New Zealanders have fought alongside of many good mates in this war. I suppose the 29th Division and the Navy and the Indian Mountain Batteries and Infantry were their outstanding friends in Gallipoli. In France--the artillery of a certain famous regular division. And the Scotsmen.

It is quite remarkable how the Australian seems to forgather with the Scotsman wherever in France he meets him. You will see them sharing each other's canteens at the base, yarning round each other's camp fires at the front. Wherever the pipers are, there will the Australians be gathered together.

I asked an Australian the other day how it was that he and his mates had struck up such a remarkable friendship with some of these Highland regiments now camped near them. "Well, I think it's their sense of humour," he said.

We looked at him rather hard.

"You see, they can understand our jokes," he said. "They don't seem to take us too serious like."

And I think he had just hit it. The Australian has a habit of pulling his mate's leg, and being on his guard against a leg-pull in return. He has sharpened his conversation against the conversation of his friends from the time he could speak--his uncles are generally to blame for it; they started him on the path of repartee by pulling his legs before those same legs had learnt to walk. As a result he is always sparring in conversation--does not mean to be taken seriously. And the Scotsman, cautious and always on the look-out for a feint, is seldom caught by it.

If he is, the chances are he gives it back--with interest.

It is a grim, old, dry variety of humour, and it goes with a wonderful, grim, st.u.r.dy nature. Few people here see a Scottish regiment pa.s.sing without waiting, if they have the time, to watch the last square figure disappear down the road. Many look at the perfect swing of the kilts, and the strong bare knees. For myself I can never take my eyes off their faces. There is a stalwart independence in their strong mouths and foreheads and chins which rivets one's interest. Every face is different from the next. Each man seems to be thinking for himself, and ready to stand up for his own decision against the world. There is a sort of reasoned determination uniting them into a single whole, which, one thinks, must be a very terrible sort of whole to meet in anger.

And it is. The Scotsman is, I think, the most unrelenting fighter that I have come across. The Australian is a most fierce fighter in battle, but he is quite ready to make friends afterwards with his enemy. Once he has taken a German prisoner, he is apt to treat him more liberally than most troops--more so even, I think, than the English soldier--and that is saying a good deal. To the Scotsman, when he escorts his prisoners home, those prisoners are Germans still. He has never forgotten the tremendous losses which Scottish regiments suffered at the beginning of the war. He does not feel kindly towards the men who inflicted them. With the Australian, once the fight is over, the bitterness is left behind. The Scotsman makes prisoners, but he does not make friends.

I shall not forget a talk that I had, some time since, with a Scottish driver who had been very badly wounded during the first winter. He had not been in the Army Service Corps in those days. He was in a certain famous regiment of infantry--joined up in the first weeks of the war as a recruit, and was sent to the front with a draft almost at once--by some process which I do not now understand--to replace heavy casualties.

He was with them through that first winter in their miserable, overflowing apology for a trench. It was a shallow ditch with a wretched parapet, and all they could do for weeks on end was to send the men into the trench over the top of the ground at night--they had actually to approach this trench from the front, at times, because the rear was a marsh--get into it over the parapet, and sit there on the back of the trench until nightfall, sheltered only by the parapet, since the trench was too wet to live in.

At last there came a dawn when the regiment charged, to cover operations elsewhere. They left their ditch, and half-way across No Man's Land John Henderson--it is not his name, but it will do as well as another--John Henderson was. .h.i.t. He lay out there for a day and a night. A brave officer bandaged him and pa.s.sed on to others. John Henderson was brought in at last, delirious, with two bullets in him and a heavy rheumatism. He was invalided out of the service, and as soon as he thought himself well enough he came back and enlisted at another place, under another name, in another corps; he could not face his native village if he remained out of it, and at the same time he could not get into the fight again if the authorities knew he had once been invalided.

His dread still was that they might find out. He would not ask for his leave, when it became due, for fear of causing inquiries; he preferred to stick it out at the front.

He was as stern against the German after two years as he was on the day when he enlisted. "It's a funny thing," he said to me, "but Ah was no worrying about anything at all that night, when Ah was lying out there wounded, excepting that they might tak me a prisoner. Ah was kind of deleerious, ye know, but there was always just that thought running through ma head. I just prayed to G.o.d that He wad tak ma life."

And, oddly, I found that he was of the same mind still.

That spirit makes great fighting men; and the friendship between the Scot and the Australian persisted into the fighting. A Scottish unit has been alongside of the Australians for a considerable time. I was told that an Australian working party, while digging a forward trench, was sniped continually by a German machine-gunner out in front of his own line in a sh.e.l.l-hole. One or two men were hit. The line on the flank of the working party happened to be held by Scottish troops. An officer from the Australians had to visit the Scottish line in order to make some preparations for a forthcoming attack.

He found the Scotsmen there thirsting for that sniper's blood, impatiently waiting for dark in order to go over the parapet and get him--they could scarcely be held back even then, straining like hounds in the leash.

The sniper was bagged later, and his machine-gun. It was a mixed affair, Scottish and Australian; and I believe there was an argument as to which owned the machine-gun.

CHAPTER XXIII

MOUQUET FARM

_France, September 7th._

On the same day on which the British took Guillemont and reached Ginchy and Leuze Wood; on the same day on which the French pushed their line almost to Combles; at the same time as the British attacked Thiepval from the front, the Australians, for the fifth time, delivered a blow at the wedge which they have all the while been driving into Thiepval from the back, along the ridge whose crest runs northwards from Pozieres past Mouquet Farm.

It was a heavy punch this time. I cannot tell of all these fierce struggles here--they shall be told in full some day. In the earliest steps towards Mouquet British troops attacked on the Australian flank, and at least once the fighting which they met with was appallingly heavy. Victorians, South Australians, New South Welshmen have each dealt their blow at it. The Australians have been in heavy fighting, almost daily, for six solid weeks; they started with three of the most terrible battles that have ever been fought--few people, even here, realise how heavy that fighting was. Then the tension eased as they struck those first blows northwards. As they neared Mouquet the resistance increased.

Each of the last five blows has been stiffer to drive. On each occasion the wedge has been driven a little farther forward. This time the blow was heavier and the wedge went farther.

The attack was made just as a summer night was reddening into dawn. Away to the rear over Guillemont--for the Australians were pushing almost in an opposite direction from the great British attack--the first light of day glowed angrily on the lower edges of the leaden clouds. You could faintly distinguish objects a hundred yards away. Our field guns, from behind the hills, broke suddenly into a tempest of fire, which tore a curtain of dust from the red sh.e.l.l craters carpeting the ridge. A few minutes later the bombardment lengthened, and the line of Queenslanders, Tasmanians and Western Australians rushed for the trenches ahead of them.

On the left, well down the shoulder of the hill towards Thiepval, was the dust-heap of craters and ashes, with odd ends of some shattered timber sticking out of it, which goes by the name of Mouquet Farm. It was a big, important homestead some months ago. To-day it is the wreckage of a log roof, waterlogged in a boundless tawny sea of craters.

There is no sign of a trench left in it--the entrances of the dug-outs may be found here and there like rat-holes, about half a dozen of them, behind dishevelled heaps of rubbish. They open into craters now--no doubt each opening has been scratched clear of debris a dozen times. You have to get into some of them by crawling on hands and knees.

The first charge took the Western Australians far beyond the farm. They reached a position two hundred yards farther and started to dig in there. Within an hour or two they had a fairly good trench out amongst the craters well in front of the farm. The farm behind them ought to be solidly ours with such a line in front of it. A separate body of men, some of them Tasmanians, came like a whirlwind on their heels into the farm. The part of the garrison which was lying out in front in a rough line of sh.e.l.l craters found them on top of the craters before they knew that there were British troops anywhere about. They were captured and sent back. The Australians tumbled over the debris into the farm itself.