Now It Can Be Told Part 14

In further fields out of view of the German trenches, but well within sh.e.l.l-range, the harvesting was being done by French soldiers. One of them was driving the reaping-machine and looked like a gunner on his limber, with his kepi thrust to the back of his head. The trousers of his comrades were as red as the poppies that grew on the edge of the wheat, and three of these poilus had ceased their work to drink out of a leather wine-bottle which had been replenished from a hand-cart. It was a pretty scene if one could forget the grim purpose which had put those harvesters in uniform.

The same thought was in the mind of a British officer.

"A beautiful country, this," he said. "It's a pity to cut it up with trenches and barbed wire."

Battalions of New Army men were being reviewed but a furlong or two away from that Invisible Man who was wielding a scythe which had no mercy for unripe wheat. Out of those lines of eyes stared the courage of men's souls, not shirking the next ordeal.

It was through red ears of corn, in that summer of '15, that one found one's way to many of the trenches that marked the boundary-lines of the year's harvesting, and in Belgium (by Kemmel Hill) the sh.e.l.ls of our batteries, answered by German guns, came with their long-drawn howls of murder across the heads of peasant women who were gleaning, with bent backs.

In Plug Street Wood the trees had worn thin under showers of shrapnel, but the long avenues between the trenches were cool and pleasant in the heat of the day. It was one of the elementary schools where many of our soldiers learned the A B C of actual warfare after their training in camps behind the lines. Here one might sport with Amaryllis in the shade, but for the fact that country wenches were not allowed in the dugouts and trenches, where I found our soldiers killing flies in the intervals between pot-shots at German periscopes.

The enemy was engaged, presumably, in the same pursuit of killing time and life (with luck), and sniping was hot on both sides, so that the wood resounded with sharp reports as though hard filbert nuts were being cracked by giant teeth. Each time I went there one of our men was. .h.i.t by a sniper, and his body was carried off for burial as I went toward the first line of trenches, hoping that my shadow would not fall across a German periscope. The sight of that dead body pa.s.sing chilled one a little. There were many graves in the bosky arbors-eighteen under one mound-but some of those who had fallen six months before still lay where the gleaners could not reach them.

I used to peer through the leaves of Plug Street Wood at No Man's Land between the lines, where every creature had been killed by the sweeping flail of machine-guns and shrapnel. Along the harvest-fields there were many barren territories like that, and up by Hooge, along the edge of the fatal crater, and behind the stripped trees of Zouave Wood there was no other gleaning to be had but that of broken sh.e.l.ls and shrapnel bullets and a litter of limbs.

XV

For some time the War Office would not allow military bands at the front, not understanding that music was like water to parched souls. By degrees divisional generals realized the utter need of entertainment among men dulled and dazed by the routine of war, and encouraged "variety" shows, organized by young officers who had been amateur actors before the war, who searched around for likely talent. There was plenty of it in the New Army, including professional "funny men," trick cyclists, conjurers, and singers of all kinds. So by the summer of '15 most of the divisions had their dramatic entertainments: "The Follies," "The Bow Bells," "The Jocks," "The Pip-Squeaks," "The Whizz-Bangs," "The Diamonds," "The Bra.s.s Hats," "The Verey Lights," and many others with fancy names.

I remember going to one of the first of them in the village of Acheux, a few miles from the German lines. It was held in an old sugar-factory, and I shall long remember the impressions of the place, with seven or eight hundred men sitting in the gloom of that big, broken, barn-like building, where strange bits of machinery looked through the darkness, and where through gashes in the walls stars twinkled.

There was a smell of clay and moist sugar and tarpaulins and damp khaki, and chloride of lime, very pungent in one's nostrils, and when the curtain went up on a well-fitted stage and "The Follies" began their performance, the squalor of the place did not matter. What mattered was the enormous whimsicality of the Bombardier at the piano, and the outrageous comicality of a tousle-haired soldier with a red nose, who described how he had run away from Mons "with the rest of you," and the light-heartedness of a performance which could have gone straight to a London music-hall and brought down the house with jokes and songs made up in dugouts and front-line trenches.

At first the audience sat silent, with glazed eyes. It was difficult to get a laugh out of them. The mud of the trenches was still on them. They stank of the trenches, and the stench was in their souls. Presently they began to brighten up. Life came back into their eyes. They laughed!... Later, from this audience of soldiers there were yells of laughter, though the effect of sh.e.l.ls arriving at unexpected moments, in untoward circ.u.mstances, was a favorite theme of the jesters. Many of the men were going into the trenches that night again, and there would be no fun in the noise of the sh.e.l.ls, but they went more gaily and with stronger hearts, I am sure, because of the laughter which had roared through the old sugar-factory.

A night or two later I went to another concert and heard the same gaiety of men who had been through a year of war. It was in an open field, under a velvety sky studded with innumerable stars. Nearly a thousand soldiers trooped through the gates and ma.s.sed before the little canvas theater. In front a small crowd of Flemish children squatted on the gra.s.s, not understanding a word of the jokes, but laughing in shrill delight at the antics of soldier-Pierrots. The corner-man was a funny fellow, and his by-play with a stout Flemish woman round the flap of the canvas screen, to whom he made amorous advances while his comrades were singing sentimental ballads, was truly comic. The hit of the evening was when an Australian behind the stage gave an unexpected imitation of a laughing-jacka.s.s.

There was something indescribably weird and wild and grotesque in that prolonged cry of cackling, unnatural mirth. An Australian by my side said: "Well done! Exactly right!" and the Flemish children shrieked with joy, without understanding the meaning of the noise. Old, old songs belonging to the early Victorian age were given by the soldiers, who had great emotion and broke down sometimes in the middle of a verse. There were funny men dressed in the Widow Tw.a.n.key style, or in burlesque uniforms, who were greeted with yells of laughter by their comrades. An Australian giant played some clever card tricks, and another Australian recited Kipling's "Gunga Din" with splendid fire. And between every "turn" the soldiers in the field roared out a chorus:

"Jolly good song, Jolly well sung. If you can think of a better you're welcome to try. But don't forget the singer is dry; Give the poor beggar some beer!"

A touring company of mouth-organ musicians was having a great success in the war zone. But, apart from all those organized methods of mirth, there was a funny man in every billet who played the part of court jester, and clowned it whatever the state of the weather or the risks of war. The British soldier would have his game of "house" or "crown and anchor" even on the edge of the sh.e.l.l-storm, and his little bit of sport wherever there was room to stretch his legs. It was a jesting army (though some of its jokes were very grim), and those who saw, as I did, the daily tragedy of war, never ceasing, always adding to the sum of human suffering, were not likely to discourage that sense of humor.

A successful concert with mouth-organs, combs, and tissue-paper and penny whistles was given by the Guards in the front-line trenches near Loos. They played old English melodies, harmonized with great emotion and technical skill. It attracted an unexpected audience. The Germans crowded into their front line-not far away-and applauded each number. Presently, in good English, a German voice shouted across:

"Play 'Annie Laurie' and I will sing it."

The Guards played "Annie Laurie," and a German officer stood up on the parapet-the evening sun was red behind him-and sang the old song admirably, with great tenderness. There was applause on both sides.

"Let's have another concert to-morrow!" shouted the Germans.

But there was a different kind of concert next day, and the music was played by trench-mortars, Mills bombs, rifle-grenades, and other instruments of death in possession of the Guards. There were cries of agony and terror from the German trenches, and young officers of the Guards told the story as an amusing anecdote, with loud laughter.

XVI

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the "hat trick" with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-l.u.s.t, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise.

Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.

So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon-a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore's club in the pictures of a fairy-tale.

So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford "Union") whose pleasure it was to creep out o' nights into No Man's Land and lie doggo in a sh.e.l.l-hole close to the enemy's barbed wire, until presently, after an hour's waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle-three notches one night-to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appet.i.te.

In one section of trenches the men made a habit of betting upon those who would be wounded first. It had all the uncertainty of the roulette-table... One day, when the German gunners were putting over a special dose of hate, a sergeant kept coming to one dugout to inquire about a "new chum," who had come up with the drafts.

"Is Private Smith all right?" he asked.

"Yes, Sergeant, he's all right," answered the men crouching in the dark hole.

"Private Smith isn't wounded yet?" asked the, sergeant again, five minutes later.

"No, Sergeant."

Private Smith was touched by this interest in his well-being.

"That sergeant seems a very kind man," said the boy. "Seems to love me like a father!"

A yell of laughter answered him.

"You poor, bleeding fool!" said one of his comrades. "He's drawn you in a lottery! Stood to win if you'd been hit."

In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches.

"Bit of Bill," said the leading man, putting in a leg.

"Another bit of Bill," he said, unearthing a hand.

"Bill's ugly mug," he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found.

As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.

How we used to guffaw at the answer of the c.o.c.kney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: "Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!"

"Not so much of your 'Mercy, Kamerad,'" said the c.o.c.kney. "'And us over your b.l.o.o.d.y ticker!"

It was the man's watch he wanted, without sentiment.

One tale was most popular, most mirth-arousing in the early days of the war.