Notes of a Camp-Follower on the Western Front Part 9

That dramatic month would have been memorable for the weather if for nothing else. Day after day 'the March sun felt like May,' if ever it did; and though it dried no hawthorn-spray in the broken heart of our little old town, and there was neither blade nor petal to watch a-blowing and a-growing, yet Spring was in our nostrils and we savoured it the more eagerly for all we knew it must bring forth. Then the overshadowing ruins took on glorious hues in the keen sunlight, especially towards evening; the outer grey so warm and soft, like a mouse's fur; the inner lining, of aged brick, an even softer tone of its own, neither red nor pink. Day after day a clean sky threw the jagged peaks into violent relief, and high lights snowed their Matterhorn, until a sidelong sunset picked the whole chain out with shadows like falls of ink. It was a sin to spend those afternoons indoors, even in the Rest Hut, where the two stoves stood idle for days on end, and all the windows open.

Then there were the still and starry nights. Then there were the moonlight nights, not so still, but nothing very dreadful happening our way. Our big local gun might have gone on tour; at least I seem to remember many a night when it did not shake us in our beds, when indeed there was little but the want of sheets and pillow-cases to remind us that we were not in England, where after all one can hear more guns than are noticed any longer, and an aeroplane at any hour of the twenty-four.

Many a night there was no more than that to remind us that we were only just behind the Line.

Sometimes, as the two of us sat last thing over a nice open fireplace that had found its way into my room from one of the skeleton houses on the opposite side of the square, one or other would fall to moralising upon the past life of the place we had made so much our own. It was a dutiful effort to remember that the Hotel de Ville had not always been a mangled pile, its palisaded courtyard once something other than the site of a Y.M.C.A. hut. But the reflection failed to haunt us as it might have done; the present and the living were too absorbing, to say nothing of the imminent future; and as for the dead past, we had our own. And yet we knew from guide-book and alb.u.m what shining pools of parquet, what ceilings heavily ornate, what monumental intricacies in wood and stone, what crystal grandiosities, formed the huge rubbish-heaps between the mouse-grey walls with the reddish lining: we knew, but it was no use trying to care. The Hotel de Ville had finished its course; the Rest Hut was just getting into its stride. Another chunk off the stump of the once delicate and dizzy belfry, what did it signify unless the chunk came through our roof? That was our only anxiety in the matter, and we debated whether such a chunk would fly so far, or fall straight down as apparently the rest of the campanile had done before it. My chief mate, however, wound up every debate with the reiterated conviction that there would be no German push at all; they were 'not such fools' as to make one. But for my part I never went to bed without wondering whether that would be the last of our quiet nights, or a quiet night at all. And deadly quiet they had grown; even the rats no longer disturbed us; every one of them had departed, and for no adequate reason within our knowledge. Even the sceptic of a mate had something trite but sinister to say about 'a sinking ship.' ...

One afternoon, two days before the date on which most people seemed to expect things to happen, a harbinger arrived as I sat perched behind the counter. We were not long open; most of the men present were cl.u.s.tered round the newspaper table; you really could have heard some pins drop. That was why, for a second or two, I did hear something I had never heard before, and have no wish to hear again. It sounded exactly like a miniature aeroplane approaching at phenomenal speed. I was just beginning to wonder what it was when there followed the most extraordinary crash. Not an explosion; not a breakage; but the loud flat smack a dining-table might make if you hauled it up to a ceiling by its castors and let it fall perfectly evenly upon a bare floor. It was the roof, however, that had been hit.

We went out to look, and one of the men picked up a fragment of sh.e.l.l, only about three inches long and less than an inch wide. That was my table-top. The jagged edge of it glittered as though incrusted with tiny brilliants; but the fragment was quite cold, showing that it had travelled far since the burst. 'One of our Archies,' said most of the men; but the Rest Hut orderly, who wore a Gunner badge said laconically: 'Fritz--range-finding!' He was borne out by a High Commander who honoured me with a visit some days later. I believe it was the first bit of German stuff that had found its way into the middle of the town since the previous November; and a very interesting and effective little entry it made, in the quietest hour of one of those uncannily quiet days, and in the precincts of what we flattered ourselves was the quietest hut on any front. But the funny (and rather disappointing) thing was that it had failed to leave so much as its mark upon our roof.

It must have skimmed the apex and glanced off the downward slope--convex side down--as a stone glances off a pond. 'The little less,' and it would have drilled the reverse slope like a piece of paper. I have often thought of that cl.u.s.ter of forage caps, under the silky skylights, round the central table; but what I shall always hear, plainer than the terrific smack that left no mark, is that first little singing whirr as of a dwarf propeller of gigantic power. I think that must be the most sickening sound of all under heavy sh.e.l.l-fire in the open.

Next day was the eve of the expected attack, which did not in point of fact take place for another week and more; but how widespread was the expectation we learnt for ourselves by our own small signs and portents.

A dozen francs were refunded on a dozen books whose borrowers were afraid they would have no more time just then to read another; but when it all blew over for that week, back they came with their deposits, and out went more books than ever. The mate was jubilant. Of course there had been no German attack; and never would be; they were not such fools!

Nor was he by any means alone in his opinion; many officers--but enough!

We were not, to be sure, by way of meeting many officers. And yet Wednesday, March 20th, brought two to my room whose respective deliverances are worth remembering in the light of subsequent events.

One was the Gunner who had given me steak and onions on our All Uppingham day in the dark depths of the earth. He was as cheery as if he had been making another century in the Old Boys' Match, instead of having just gone on with his heavies on a new pitch altogether. It was going to suit him. He felt like getting wickets. And the Pavilion was not a dug-out this time; it was an elephant, in which the Major and he could put me up any night I liked. Why not that night? He had come in a car; he could take me back with him.

Why not, I sometimes wonder to this day! There were good, there were even creditable, reasons; but, beyond the fact that I was now much attached to my counter, I honestly forget what they were. I only know that my hospitable friend's new wicket was one of the first to be overrun by a field-grey mob; and though the Major and he are still enjoying rude health on the right side of the Line, and it goes without saying that they left the ground with becoming dignity, I am afraid I should have been out of place in the procession. Exciting moments I must have had, but I should have been sorry to play Anchises to my friend's aeneas. And I was to have my little moments as it was.

My other visitor was, curiously, another cricketer, whom I had first seen bowling in the University match at Lord's. It is not his department of the greater game; nor do I intend to compromise this officer by means of any further clue; for he it was who informed me that the push was really coming before morning. 'So they say,' he smiled, and we pa.s.sed on to matters of more immediate interest. Time enough to be interested in the push when it did come; from all reports I was likely to find myself in the stalls, and he of course would be on the stage. So that was that.

In the meantime I had a great fixture arranged and billed for the Sat.u.r.day evening. An old friend was coming over from the Press Chateau to lecture in the Rest Hut, for the first time on any platform; there were to be seats for all our other friends, officers and men, and some supper in my room for half-a-dozen of us and the lecturer. It was of this we talked, and probably of pre-war cricket, and my beloved men, over the last quiet tea I was to have there. Books went out very freely till we closed. _With Our Faces to the Light_, _Heroes and Hero-Worship_, _The Supreme Test_, and _Our Life after Death_, were among the last half-dozen t.i.tles!

ANOTHER OPENING DAY

... It did not wake me up till four or five in the morning. Then I knew it had begun. The row was incessant rather than tremendous; not nearer than it had often been, when that big local gun was at home, but indubitably different. Some supplementary sound followed most of the reports, as the receding swish of a shattered breaker follows the first crash. I guessed what it was, but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to ask the mate, on the other side of the part.i.tion behind my head; but I didn't want to wake him up on purpose. The only unnerved man I met in France, one of our workers whose railway-carriage had been blown in by a bomb on the last stage of his journey from the coast, had awakened the man in the next bed for company's sake the night after. He was brave enough to own it. _I_ wanted company, but I had not the hardihood to sing out for it until I heard a movement through the part.i.tion.

The mate, of course, did not believe it was the push; but he confessed it sounded the sort of thing one would expect to hear if the Germans were fools enough to make a push. It sounded like rather distant thunder, with sporadic claps in the middle distance. I smoked a pipe with my _Spectator_ before trying for some more sleep, and was just dropping off when our orderly arrived with jaunty tread.

'It's Fritz,' said he, with sardonic unconcern. 'You can hear the houses coming down.'

And there followed the tale of damage done so far.

I am afraid we were both up with the wind, if not with the sun. But we shaved without bloodshed; for it is remarkable how a sh.e.l.l-burst can fail to jog your elbow, or to spill your tea, when you have been educated up to that type of disturbance. We had grown so used to guns in the night that the quiet nights were the uncanny ones; and even they were generally punctuated first or last by a comfortable bang from the local heavy; the 'All's Well!' of that night-watchman, which, if it woke us up, only encouraged us to go to sleep again with an increased sense of security. A sh.e.l.l-burst at a decent distance sounded much the same for the first--and only startling--second. And all that morning, and generally throughout the day, they kept their distance with quite unexpected decency.

But they did sing over our heads; they did keep the blue above us vocal with their shrill, whining cries; it was astounding to look up into the unruffled heavens and see no trace of their course. As one gazed, the crash came in the streets a few hundred yards away; and often after the crash, by an interval of seconds, a noise as of some huge cart shooting its rubbish. Somebody said it was like a great lash whistling over us and cracking amid the herd of living houses just beyond. It really was; and what followed was the groan as yet another piece was taken out of the palpitating town.

Two things came home to us while the day was young. It was biggish stuff that was coming in, at a longish range; and it was coming in on business, not on pleasure. Its business was to feel for barracks, batteries, and other sound investments for valuable munitions; not to have a sporting flutter here, there, and everywhere; much less to indulge in the sheer luxury of pestling a ruined area to powder. If or when they made some ground, and brought up their field-guns, it would be a different matter; then it might pay them to keep us skipping in all parts of the town at once; but, for the present, we in our part were in quite ign.o.ble security--unless Fritz lost his strength! We had, however, to remember that we were in a straight line between wicket and wicket; nor did his singing deliveries give us much chance of forgetting the fact.

News was not long in reaching us from less fortunate localities. The station was catching it; and we had a busy hut all but adjoining the station. We looked upon our comrades at the Station Hut with mingled envy and commiseration, when one or two of them dropped in to recount their adventures and escapes. A short-pitched one had killed four officers in the street in their direction. And it so happened that business took me to the spot during the course of the morning.

It would be idle to pretend it was an enjoyable expedition. A friend went with me; we wore our shrapnel helmets, and everybody we met was wearing his. That alone gave the streets an altered appearance; otherwise everything wore its normal aspect; the March sun was more like May than ever, the sky more innocently blue, the cool light hand of spring softer and more caressing. On the way we met two chaplains of the Guards, who gave us details of the tragedy; on its scene we saw clean wounds on the stone facing of a house, the chipped places standing out in the strong sunlight, but did not investigate too closely. Two of the officers had been standing in the doorway, two crossing the open s.p.a.ce we skirted; two had been killed outright, and two were dying or dead of their wounds. Sh.e.l.ls whistled continuously as we walked, but not one burst before our eyes.

On my return the mate and I had a look at a dungeon under the Town Hall, as a possible sleeping-place. It was part of an underground system for which the town was famous. One could walk for miles, from chamber to chamber, as one can crawl from cell to cell in the foundations of most big houses. We had long talked of going to ground there, with all our books, in the day of battle; and now we viewed provisional sites, though only one of us allowed that the day had dawned.

'This is not the push,' I was stoutly a.s.sured. 'This is only a feint, man. They are not such fools ...'

After lunch we opened to the bang and whistle of our own guns, for a change. The sacred mid-day meal was never followed up by enemy gun-fire in my hearing; the time-table obviously included a methodical siesta, which it was our daily delight to spoil. Not that my Rest Hut crowd betrayed much pleasure in the proceedings; for once, indeed, I could not help thinking them rather a stolid lot. There they sat as usual under the sunny skylights, dredging the day's news as though it were the one uninteresting thing in the hut, or playing dominoes and draughts, like a nurseryful of unnaturally good children. It is difficult to describe their demeanour. To say that they looked as though nothing was happening is to imply a studied unconcern; and there was certainly nothing studied on their side of the counter; on ours, it seemed as if the Rest Hut had only needed this external din to make it really restful.

'Our friend Jerry's a bit saucy this morning,' said the emissary of a sick Sergeant who sent for a fresh Maurice Hewlett every day that week.

It was the first comment of the afternoon on the day's events. 'Our friend Jerry' had risen from his siesta and was giving us whistle and bang for our bang and whistle; and still every shot sounded plumb over the hut. It was like the middle of a tennis-court during a hard rally; but I never heard anybody suggest that either side might hit into the net.

Then, I remember, came a new-comer, a husky lad with a poisoned wrist.

'Gimme one o' them books.'

I had my formula in such cases.

'Who is your favourite author?'

'Don't know as I have one; gimme any good yarn.'

'What's the best yarn you ever read?'

'I don't often read one.'

'The last you did read?'

Lost in the mists. I set _The Hound of the Baskervilles_ on him, and saw him well bitten by the book before the afternoon was out or the bombardment by way of abating. There was no tea-interval on the other side, that I remember; but we had ours as usual in my room, and it was either that afternoon or the next that an eminent Oxford professor, out on a lecturing tour, gave us his company. He was delightfully interested in the library, and spent most of the afternoon behind the counter, making out a list of books he talked of sending us, chatting with the men, and endearing himself to us all. I daresay he was the oldest man who had ever entered the hut; but I still see him perched on top of our little home-made step-ladder, in overcoat and m.u.f.fler and soft felt hat, while the sh.e.l.ls burst nearer, or at any rate made more noise, as the day drew in. Book in hand, and a kindly, interested, quizzical smile upon his face, the professor looked either as though he never heard one of them, or as though he had heard little else all his life. He cheered one more than the cheeriest soldier, for his was not the insensibility of usage, but the selfless preoccupation of a lofty soul.

Earlier in the week I had accepted an invitation to dine that evening with a mess at the other end of the town. It was quite the wrong end for dinner at such a time; it was the end where the German sh.e.l.ls were feeling about for things worth smashing. They kept skimming across the streets as I found my way through the dusk, and ours came skimming back; it was the tennis-court again, but this time one seemed to be crossing it on gigantic stilts, head and shoulders above the chimney-pots. But nothing happened. It was a seasoned mess, all padres and doctors, to the best of my recollection; and they gave one a confidence more welcome than all their conscious hospitality. I enjoy my evening immensely--as I look back.

There was a window at each end of the dinner-table. No sooner were we seated than there occurred outside one of these windows about the loudest explosion I ever heard. No chair was pushed back, and I am bound to say that was the end of it; they said it was further off than I can yet believe. They also seemed to think it was a bomb. There I trusted they were right. Bombs cannot go on falling on or even about the same place. But in fifteen minutes to the tick we had the same thing outside the other window. This time the gla.s.s came tinkling down, and it was thought worth while to inquire whether there were any casualties in the kitchen. There were none: no doubt some chair _would_ have been pushed back if the answer had been in the affirmative.

And that was all, except a great deal of sh.e.l.l-talk, and comparison of hair-breadth escapes, between my two hosts (both of whom had borne charmed lives--but who has not, out there?) when the rest were gone, and a shower of stuff in the soft soil of the garden as I was going myself.

Perhaps 'shower' is too strong a word; but one of the many things I can still hear is the whizz and burial of at least one lethal fragment close beside us in the dark. The kind pair insisted on walking back with me, and were strong in their advice to me to seek a cellar for the night.

This being their own intention, and the idea that I found in the mind of my mate on regaining the Rest Hut, he and I spent the next hour in transferring our beds and bedding to the dungeon aforesaid, where I for one slept all the better for the soothing croon of sh.e.l.ls high overhead in waking intervals.

It was officially computed that over eight hundred large sh.e.l.ls arrived in our little town that day, the historic 21st March, 1918.

THE END OF A BEGINNING

Two capital nights we pa.s.sed in our ideal dungeon. It was deep yet dry, miraculously free from rats, and so very heavily vaulted, so tucked away under tons of debris, and yet so protected by the standing ruins, that it was really difficult to imagine the projectile that could join the party. There was, to be sure, a precipitous spiral staircase to the upper air, but even it did not descend straight into our lair. Still, a direct hit on the stairs would have been unpleasant; but one ran as much risk of a direct hit by lightning in peace-time. It seems indecent to gloat over a safety verging on the ign.o.ble at such a time; but those two nights it was hard to help it; and the dim morning light upon the warm brick arches, bent like old shoulders under centuries of romance, added an appeal not altogether to the shrinking flesh.

The day between had been very like the first day. I thought the bombardment a shade less violent; but worse news was always coming in.

Far fewer books were taken out, far fewer men had their afternoon to themselves, but only too many were their tales of bloodshed, especially on the outskirts of the town. They told them simply, stoically, even with the smile that became men whose turn it might be next; but the smile stopped short at the lips. Still worse hearing was the fall of village after village in sectors all too near our own; and yet more sinister rumours came from the far south. Our greatest anxieties were naturally nearest home, and our chief comfort the unruffled faces of such officers as pa.s.sed our way. 'He seems to be meeting with some success, too!' as one vouchsafed from his saddle, after an opening in the style of the gentleman who was still demanding Hewletts for his Sergeant.

The second night we had a third cellarman, leader of one of the outlying huts now being abandoned every day. Almost hourly our headquarters were filling up with refugee workers flushed with their sad adventures; but this young fellow had been through more than most; a man had been killed in his hut, and he himself was in the last stages of exhaustion. He had been fast asleep when we descended from the turmoil for our night of peace; and fast asleep I left him in the morning, little thinking that most of us had spent our last night in the neighbourhood.

It was another of those brilliant days we shall remember every March that we may live to see. The devil's choristers were still singing through the blue above, still thundering their own applause in the doomed quarter of the town. Yet to stand blinking in the keen sunlight, snuffing the pure invigorating air, was to vote the whole thing weak and unconvincing. The picturesque ruins were not real ruins. The noises were not the noises of a real bombardment; they were too simple and too innocuous, one had heard them better done upon the stage. It seemed particularly impossible that anything could happen to me, for instance, at the head of my cellar stairs, or to the very immaculate Jocks' Padre picking his way towards me, over a mound of last year's ruins, to us as old as any other hill.

But it was that Padre who struck the sinister note at once. What were we going to do? Do! His meaning was not clear to me; he made it clear without delay. His Jocks--_our_ Jocks--the rocks of my military faith!--had gone away back. Divisional Headquarters, at all events, had shifted out of that; it was the same with the other Divisions in the Corps, the Padre thought; and he took it we should all be ordered back if we didn't go! A place with a ridge had been taken by the enemy, who had only to get his field-guns up--and that was only a question of hours--to make the town a great deal unhealthier than it was already.

I was horrified. It was the one thing I had never contemplated, being turned out of the little old town! After all, it had been an unhealthier spot a year ago than it yet threatened to become again. A year ago the very Line had curled through its narrow rim of suburbs; and yet the troops had stuck to the town; there had been cellarage for all, barricades in streets swept by machine-guns, and a Y.M.C.A. hut run by a valiant veteran through thick and thin. One or two of us, at least, had been prepared for the same thing over again, _plus_ our Rest Cave and all our books at a safe depth underground. That prospect had thrilled and fascinated; the one now foreshadowed seemed too black to come true.

But at breakfast we had it officially from the mere boy (from a Public School, however) in local charge of the lot of us. We had better get packed; it would be safer; but he hoped, perhaps more heartily than any of us, that the extremity in view would not arise. So we pulled out kit-bags and suit-cases of which we had forgotten the sight--and my jolly little room never looked itself again. No room does, once you start packing the belongings that made it what it was; but I never hated that hateful job so much in all my life. Nor did I ever do it worse--which is saying even more. Two days and nights under continuous sh.e.l.l-fire, even when it is only the music of those spheres that he hears incessantly, does find a man out in one way or another. My way was forgetfulness and, I fear, a certain irritability. There are some of my most cherished little possessions that I shall never see again, and a good friend or so with whom I fear I was a trifle gruff. I hope they have forgiven me. But a sh.e.l.l-burst may be easier to bear than a pointless question, especially when you are asking one or two yourself.