Now It Can Be Told Part 12

It seemed impossible that any German should be left alive in this quagmire, but there was still a rattle of machine-guns from holes and hillocks. Not for long. The bombing-parties searched and found them, and silenced them. From the heaps of earth which had once been trenches German soldiers rose and staggered in a dazed, drunken way, stupefied by the bombardment beneath which they had crouched.

Our men spitted them on their bayonets or hurled hand-grenades, and swept the ground before them. Some Germans screeched like pigs in a slaughter-house.

The men went on in short rushes. They were across the Menin road now, and were first to the crater, though other troops were advancing quickly from the left. They went down into the crater, shouting hoa.r.s.ely, and hurling bombs at Germans, who were caught like rats in a trap, and scurried up the steep sides beyond, firing before rolling down again, until at least two hundred bodies lay dead at the bottom of this pit of h.e.l.l.

While some of the men dug themselves into the crater or held the dugouts already made by the enemy, others climbed up to the ridge beyond and with a final rush, almost winded and spent, reached the extreme limit of their line of a.s.sault and achieved the task which had been set them. They were mad now, not human in their senses. They saw red through bloodshot eyes. They were beasts of prey-these decent Yorkshire lads.

Round the stables themselves three hundred Germans were bayoneted, until not a single enemy lived on this ground, and the light of day on that 9th of August revealed a b.l.o.o.d.y and terrible scene, not decent for words to tell. Not decent, but a shambles of human flesh which had been a panic-stricken crowd of living men crying for mercy, with that dreadful screech of terror from German boys who saw the white gleam of steel at their stomachs before they were spitted. Not many of those Durham and Yorkshire lads remain alive now with that memory. The few who do must have thrust it out of their vision, unless at night it haunts them.

The a.s.saulting battalion had lost many men during the a.s.sault, but their main ordeal came after the first advance, when the German guns belched out a large quant.i.ty of heavy sh.e.l.ls from the direction of Hill 60. They raked the ground, and tried to make our men yield the position they had gained. But they would not go back or crawl away from their dead.

All through the day the bombardment continued, answered from our side by fourteen hours of concentrated fire, which I watched from our battery positions. In spite of the difficulties of getting up supplies through the "crumped" trenches, the men held on and consolidated their positions. One of the most astounding feats was done by the sappers, who put up barbed wire beyond the line under a devilish cannonade.

A telephone operator had had his apparatus smashed by a sh.e.l.l early in the action, and worked his way back to get another. He succeeded in reaching the advanced line again, but another sh.e.l.l knocked out his second instrument. It was then only possible to keep in touch with the battalion headquarters by means of messengers, and again and again officers and men made their way across the zone of fire or died in the attempt. Messages reached the colonel of the regiment that part of his front trenches had been blown away.

From other parts of the line reports came in that the enemy was preparing a counter-attack. For several hours now the colonel of the Durhams could not get into touch with his companies, isolated and hidden beneath the smoke of the sh.e.l.l-bursts. Flag-wagging and heliographing were out of the question. He could not tell even if a single man remained alive out there beneath all those sh.e.l.ls. No word came from them now to let him know if the enemy were counter-attacking.

Early in the afternoon he decided to go out and make his own reconnaissance. The bombardment was still relentless, and it was only possible to go part of the way in an old communication trench. The ground about was littered with the dead, still being blown about by high explosives.

The soul of the colonel was heavy then with doubt and with the knowledge that most of the dead here were his own. When he told me this adventure his only comment was the soldier's phrase, "It was not what might be called a 'healthy' place." He could see no sign of a counter-attack, but, straining through the smoke-clouds, his eyes could detect no sign of life where his men had been holding the captured lines. Were they all dead out there?

On Monday night the colonel was told that his battalion would be relieved, and managed to send this order to a part of it. It was sent through by various routes, but some men who carried it came back with the news that it was still impossible to get into touch with the companies holding the advanced positions above the Menin road.

In trying to do so they had had astounding escapes. Several of them had been blown as far as ten yards by the air-pressure of exploding sh.e.l.ls and had been buried in the scatter of earth.

"When at last my men came back-those of them who had received the order," said the colonel, "I knew the price of their achievement-its cost in officers and men." He spoke as a man resentful of that b.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice.

There were other men still alive and still holding on. With some of them were four young officers, who clung to their ground all through the next night, before being relieved. They were without a drop of water and suffered the extreme miseries of the battlefield.

There was no distinction in courage between those four men, but the greater share of suffering was borne by one. Early in the day he had had his jaw broken by a piece of sh.e.l.l, but still led his men. Later in the day he was wounded in the shoulder and leg, but kept his command, and he was still leading the survivors of his company when he came back on the morning of Tuesday, August 10th.

Another party of men had even a longer time of trial. They were under the command of a lance-corporal, who had gained possession of the stables above the Menin road and now defended their ruins. During the previous twenty-four hours he had managed to send through several messages, but they were not to report his exposed position nor to ask for supports nor to request relief. What he said each time was, "Send us more bombs." It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after thirty hours under sh.e.l.l-fire, that the survivors came away from their rubbish heap in the lines of death.

So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men, touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still fouled them. Even now, in remembrance, I wonder how men could go through such hours without having on their faces more traces of their h.e.l.l, though some of them were still shaking with a kind of ague.

X

Here and there on the roadsides behind the lines queer sacks hung from wooden poles. They had round, red disks painted on them, and looked like the trunks of human bodies after Red Indians had been doing decorative work with their enemy's slain. At Flixecourt, near Amiens, I pa.s.sed one on a Sunday when bells were ringing for high ma.s.s and a crowd of young soldiers were trooping into the field with fixed bayonets.

A friend of mine-an ironical fellow-nudged me, and said, "Sunday-school for young Christians!" and made a hideous face, very comical.

It was a bayonet-school of instruction, and "O. C. Bayonets"-Col. Ronald Campbell-was giving a little demonstration. It was a curiously interesting form of exercise. It was as though the primitive nature in man, which had been sleeping through the centuries, was suddenly awakened in the souls of these c.o.c.kney soldier-boys. They made sudden jabs at one another fiercely and with savage grimaces, leaped at men standing with their backs turned, who wheeled round sharply, and crossed bayonets, and taunted the attackers. Then they lunged at the hanging sacks, stabbing them where the red circles were painted. These inanimate things became revoltingly lifelike as they jerked to and fro, and the bayonet men seemed enraged with them. One fell from the rope, and a boy sprang at it, dug his bayonet in, put his foot on the prostrate thing to get a purchase for the bayonet, which he lugged out again, and then kicked the sack.

"That's what I like to see," said an officer. "There's a fine fighting-spirit in that lad. He'll kill plenty of Germans before he's done."

Col. Ronald Campbell was a great lecturer on bayonet exercise. He curdled the blood of boys with his eloquence on the method of attack to pierce liver and lights and kidneys of the enemy. He made their eyes bulge out of their heads, fired them with blood-l.u.s.t, stoked up hatred of Germans-all in a quiet, earnest, persuasive voice, and a sense of latent power and pa.s.sion in him. He told funny stories-one, famous in the army, called "Where's 'Arry?"

It was the story of an attack on German trenches in which a crowd of Germans were captured in a dugout. The sergeant had been told to blood his men, and during the killing he turned round and asked, "Where's 'Arry?... 'Arry 'asn't 'ad a go yet."

'Arry was a timid boy, who shrank from butcher's work, but he was called up and given his man to kill. And after that 'Arry was like a man-eating tiger in his desire for German blood.

He used another ill.u.s.tration in his bayonet lectures. "You may meet a German who says, 'Mercy! I have ten children.'... Kill him! He might have ten more."

At those training-schools of British youth (when nature was averse to human slaughter until very scientifically trained) one might see every form of instruction in every kind of weapon and instrument of death-machine-guns, trench-mortars, bombs, torpedoes, gas, and, later on, tanks; and as the months pa.s.sed, and the years, the youth of the British Empire graduated in these schools of war, and those who lived longest were experts in divers branches of technical education.

Col. Ronald Campbell retired from bayonet instruction and devoted his genius and his heart (which was bigger than the point of a bayonet) to the physical instruction of the army and the recuperation of battle-worn men. I liked him better in that job, and saw the real imagination of the man at work, and his amazing, self-taught knowledge of psychology. When men came down from the trenches, dazed, sullen, stupid, dismal, broken, he set to work to build up their vitality again, to get them interested in life again, and to make them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets-the game-c.o.c.ks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each one, and to rear chicks, and tend flowers, and grow vegetables. Love, and not hate, was now his gospel. All his training was done by games, simple games arousing intelligence, leading up to elaborate games demanding skill of hand and eye. He challenged the whole army system of discipline imposed by authority by a new system of self-discipline based upon interest and instinct. His results were startling, and men who had been dumb, blear-eyed, dejected, sh.e.l.l-shocked wrecks of life were changed quite quickly into bright, cheery fellows, with laughter in their eyes.

"It's a pity," he said, "they have to go off again and be shot to pieces. I cure them only to be killed-but that's not my fault. It's the fault of war."

It was Colonel Campbell who discovered "Willie Woodbine," the fighting parson and soldier's poet, who was the leading member of a traveling troupe of thick-eared thugs. They gave pugilistic entertainments to tired men. Each of them had one thick ear. Willie Woodbine had two. They fought one another with science (as old professionals) and challenged any man in the crowd. Then one of them played the violin and drew the soul out of soldiers who seemed mere animals, and after another fight Willie Woodbine stepped up and talked of G.o.d, and war, and the weakness of men, and the meaning of courage. He held all those fellows in his hand, put a spell on them, kept them excited by a new revelation, gave them, poor devils, an extra touch of courage to face the menace that was ahead of them when they went to the trenches again.

XI

Our men were not always in the trenches. As the New Army grew in numbers reliefs were more frequent than in the old days, when battalions held the line for long spells, until their souls as well as their bodies were sunk in squalor. Now in the summer of 1915 it was not usual for men to stay in the line for more than three weeks at a stretch, and they came back to camps and billets, where there was more sense of life, though still the chance of death from long-range guns. Farther back still, as far back as the coast, and all the way between the sea and the edge of war, there were new battalions quartered in French and Flemish villages, so that every cottage and farmstead, villa, and chateau was inhabited by men in khaki, who made themselves at home and established friendly relations with civilians there unless they were too flagrant in their robbery, or too sour in their temper, or too filthy in their habits. Generally the British troops were popular in Picardy and Artois, and when they left women kissed and cried, in spite of laughter, and joked in a queer jargon of English-French. In the estaminets of France and Flanders they danced with frowzy peasant girls to the tune of a penny-in-the-slot piano, or, failing the girls, danced with one another.

For many years to come, perhaps for centuries, those cottages and barns into which our men crowded will retain signs and memories of that British occupation in the great war. Boys who afterward went forward to the fighting-fields and stepped across the line to the world of ghosts carved their names on wooden beams, and on the whitewashed walls scribbled legends proclaiming that Private John Johnson was a b.a.s.t.a.r.d; or that a certain battalion was a rabble of ruffians; or that Kaiser Bill would die on the gallows, ill.u.s.trating those remarks with portraits and allegorical devices, sketchily drawn, but vivid and significant.

The soldier in the house learned quite a lot of French, with which he made his needs understood by the elderly woman who cooked for his officers' mess. He could say, with a fine fluency, "Ou est le blooming couteau?" or "Donnez-moi le bally fourchette, s'il vous plait, madame." It was not beyond his vocabulary to explain that "Les pommes de terre frites are absolument all right if only madame will tenir ses cheveux on." In the courtyards of ancient farmhouses, so old in their timbers and gables that the Scottish bodyguard of Louis XI may have pa.s.sed them on their way to Paris, modern Scots with khaki-covered kilts pumped up the water from old wells, and whistled "I Know a La.s.sie" to the girl who brought the cattle home, and munched their evening rations while Sandy played a "wee bit" on the pipes to the peasant-folk who gathered at the gate. Such good relations existed between the cottagers and their temporary guests that one day, for instance, when a young friend of mine came back from a long spell in the trenches (his conversation was of dead men, flies, bombs, lice, and h.e.l.l), the old lady who had given him her best bedroom at the beginning of the war flung her arms about him and greeted him like a long-lost son. To a young Guardsman, with his undeveloped mustache on his upper lip, her demonstrations were embarra.s.sing.

It was one of the paradoxes of the war that beauty lived but a mile or two away from hideous squalor. While men in the lines lived in dugouts and marched down communicating trenches thigh-high, after rainy weather, in mud and water, and suffered the beastliness of the primitive earth-men, those who were out of the trenches, turn and turn about, came back to leafy villages and drilled in fields all golden with b.u.t.tercups, and were not too uncomfortable in spite of overcrowding in dirty barns.

There was more than comfort in some of the headquarters where our officers were billeted in French chateaux. There was a splendor of surroundings which gave a graciousness and elegance to the daily life of that extraordinary war in which men fought as brutally as in prehistoric times. I knew scores of such places, and went through gilded gates emblazoned with n.o.ble coats of arms belonging to the days of the Sun King, or farther back to the Valois, and on my visits to generals and their staffs stood on long flights of steps which led up to old mansions, with many towers and turrets, surrounded by n.o.ble parks and ornamental waters and deep barns in which five centuries of harvests had been stored. From one of the archways here one might see in the mind's eye Mme. de Pompadour come out with a hawk on her wrist, or even Henri de Navarre with his gentlemen-at-arms, all their plumes alight in the sun as they mounted their horses for a morning's boar-hunt.

It was surprising at first when a young British officer came out and said, "Toppin' morning," or, "Any news from the Dardanelles?" There was something incongruous about this habitation of French chiteaux by British officers with their war-kit. The strangeness of it made me laugh in early days of first impressions, when I went through the rooms of one of those old historic houses, well within range of the German guns with a brigade major. It was the Chateau de Henencourt, near Albert.

"This is the general's bedroom," said the brigade major, opening a door which led off a gallery, in which many beautiful women of France and many great n.o.bles of the old regime looked down from their gilt frames.

The general had a nice bed to sleep in. In such a bed Mme. du Barry might have stretched her arms and yawned, or the beautiful d.u.c.h.esse de Mazarin might have held her morning levee. A British general, with his bronzed face and bristly mustache, would look a little strange under that blue-silk canopy, with rosy cherubs dancing overhead on the flowered ceiling. His top-boots and spurs stood next to a Louis Quinze toilet-table. His leather belts and field-gla.s.ses lay on the polished boards beneath the tapestry on which Venus wooed Adonis and Diana went a-hunting. In other rooms no less elegantly rose-tinted or darkly paneled other officers had made a litter of their bags, haversacks, rubber baths, trench-boots, and puttees. At night the staff sat down to dinner in a salon where the portraits of a great family of France, in silks and satins and Pompadour wigs, looked down upon their khaki. The owner of the chateau, in whose veins flowed the blood of those old aristocrats, was away with his regiment, in which he held the rank of corporal. His wife, the Comtesse de Henencourt, managed the estate, from which all the men-servants except the veterans had been mobilized. In her own chateau she kept one room for herself, and every morning came in from the dairies, where she had been working with her maids, to say, with her very gracious smile, to the invaders of her house: "Bon jour, messieurs! Ca va bien?"

She hid any fear she had under the courage of her smile. Poor chateaux of France! German sh.e.l.ls came to knock down their painted turrets, to smash through the ceilings where the rosy Cupids played, and in one hour or two to ruin the beauty that had lived through centuries of pride.

Scores of them along the line of battle were but heaps of brick-dust and twisted iron.

I saw the ruins of the Chateau de Henencourt two years after my first visit there. The enemy's line had come closer to it and it was a target for their guns. Our guns-heavy and light-were firing from the back yard and neighboring fields, with deafening tumult. Sh.e.l.ls had already broken the roofs and turrets of the chateau and torn away great chunks of wall. A colonel of artillery had his headquarters in the pet.i.t salon. His hand trembled as he greeted me.

"I'm not fond of this place," he said. "The whole d.a.m.n thing will come down on my head at any time. I think I shall take to the cellars."

We walked out to the courtyard and he showed me the way down to the vault. A sh.e.l.l came over the chateau and burst in the outhouses.

"They knocked out a 9.2 a little while ago," said the colonel. "Made a mess of some heavy gunners."