Now It Can Be Told Part 30

The still air was rent again... In a waterlogged trench, which we could not see, a German pumping-party had been blown to bits.

The artillery officers took turns in the observation posts, sleeping for the night in one of the dugouts behind the front trench instead of in the billet below.

The way to the observation post was sometimes a little vague, especially in frost-and-thaw weather, when parts of the communication trenches slithered down under the weight of sand-bags.

The young officer who walked with luminous eyes and eager step found it necessary to crawl on his stomach before he reached his lookout station from which he looked straight across the enemy's trenches. But, once there, it was pretty comfortable and safe, barring a direct hit from above or a little mining operation underneath.

He made a seat of a well-filled sand-bag (it was rather a shock when he turned it over one day to get dry side up and found a dead Frenchman there), and smoked Belgian cigars for the sake of their aroma, and sat there very solitary and watchful.

The rats worried him a little-they were bold enough to bare their teeth when they met him down a trench, and there was one big fellow called Cuthbert, who romped round his dugout and actually bit his ear one night. But these inconveniences did not seem to give any real distress to the soul of youth, out there alone and searching for human targets to kill... until one day, as I have said, everything snapped in him and the boy was broken.

It was on the way back from Kemmel village one day that I met a queer apparition through a heavy snowstorm. It was a French civilian in evening dress-boiled shirt, white tie, and all-with a bowler hat bent to the storm.

Tomlinson, the great Tomlinson, was with me, and shook his head.

"It isn't true," he said. "I don't believe it... We're mad, that's all!... The whole world is mad, so why should we be sane?"

We stared after the man who went into the ruin of Kemmel, to the noise of gun-fire, in evening dress, without an overcoat, through a blizzard of snow.

A little farther down the road we pa.s.sed a signboard on the edge of a cratered field. New words had been painted on it in good Roman letters.

Cimetiere reserve

Tomlinson, the only Tomlinson, regarded it gravely and turned to me with a world of meaning in his eyes. Then he tapped his forehead and laughed.

"Mad!" he said. "We're all mad!"

XVIII

In that winter of discontent there was one great body of splendid men whose spirits had sunk to zero, seeing no hope ahead of them in that warfare of trenches and barbed wire. The cavalry believed they were "bunkered" forever, and that all their training and tradition were made futile by the digging in of armies. Now and again, when the infantry was hard pressed, as in the second battle of Ypres and the battle of Loos, they were called on to leave their horses behind and take a turn in the trenches, and then they came back again, less some of their comrades, into dirty billets remote from the fighting-lines, to exercise their horses and curse the war.

Before they went into the line in February of '16 I went to see some of those cavalry officers to wish them good luck, and saw them in the trenches and afterward when they came out. In the headquarters of a squadron of "Royals"-the way in was by a ladder through the window-billeted in a village, which on a day of frost looked as quaint and pretty as a Christmas card, was a party of officers typical of the British cavalry as a whole.

A few pictures cut out of La Vie Parisienne were tacked on to the walls to remind them of the arts and graces of an older mode of life, and to keep them human by the sight of a pretty face (oh, to see a pretty girl again!).

Now they were going to change this cottage for the trenches, this quiet village with a church-bell chiming every hour, for the tumult in the battle-front-this absolute safety for the immediate menace of death. They knew already the beastliness of life in trenches. They had no illusions about "glory." But they were glad to go, because activity was better than inactivity, and because the risk would give them back their pride, and because the cavalry should fight anyhow and somehow, even if a charge or a pursuit were denied them.

They had a hot time in the trenches. The enemy's artillery was active, and the list of casualties began to tot up. A good officer and a fine fellow was killed almost at the outset, and men were horribly wounded. But all those troopers showed a cool courage.

Things looked bad for a few minutes when a section of trenches was blown in, isolating one platoon from another. A sergeant-major made his way back from the damaged section, and a young officer who was going forward to find out the extent of damage met him on the way.

"Can I get through?" asked the officer.

"I've got through," was the answer, "but it's chancing one's luck."

The officer "chanced his luck," but did not expect to come back alive. Afterward he tried to a.n.a.lyze his feelings for my benefit.

"I had no sense of fear," he said, "but a sort of subconscious knowledge that the odds were against me if I went on, and yet a conscious determination to go on at all costs and find out what had happened."

He came back, covered with blood, but unwounded. In spite of all the unpleasant sights in a crumpled trench, he had the heart to smile when in the middle of the night one of the sergeants approached him with an amiable suggestion.

"Don't you think it would be a good time, sir, to make a slight attack upon the enemy?"

There was something in those words, "a slight attack," which is irresistibly comic to any of us who know the conditions of modern trench war. But they were not spoken in jest.

So the cavalry did its "bit" again, though not as cavalry, and I saw some of them when they came back, and they were glad to have gone through that b.l.o.o.d.y business so that no man might fling a scornful word as they pa.s.sed with their horses.

"It is queer," said my friend, "how we go from this place of peace to the battlefield, and then come back for a spell before going up again. It is like pa.s.sing from one life to another."

In that cavalry mess I heard queer conversations. Those officers belonged to the old families of England, the old caste of aristocracy, but the foul outrage of the war-the outrage against all ideals of civilization-had made them think, some of them for the first time, about the structure of social life and of the human family.

They hated Germany as the direct cause of war, but they looked deeper than that and saw how the leaders of all great nations in Europe had maintained the philosophy of forms and had built up hatreds and fears and alliances over the heads of the peoples whom they inflamed with pa.s.sion or duped with lies.

"The politicians are the guilty ones," said one cavalry officer. "I am all for revolution after this b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sacre. I would hang all politicians, diplomats, and so-called statesmen with strict impartiality."

"I'm for the people," said another. "The poor, b.l.o.o.d.y people, who are kept in ignorance and then driven into the shambles when their rulers desire to grab some new part of the earth's surface or to get their armies going because they are bored with peace."

"What price Christianity?" asked another, inevitably. "What have the churches done to stop war or preach the gospel of Christ? The Bishop of London, the Archbishop of Canterbury, all those conventional, patriotic, cannon-blessing, banner-baptizing humbugs. G.o.d! They make me tired!"

Strange words to hear in a cavalry mess! Strange turmoil in the souls of men! They were the same words I had heard from London boys in Ypres, spoken just as crudely. But many young gentlemen who spoke those words have already forgotten them or would deny them.

XIX

The winter of 1915-16 pa.s.sed with its misery, and spring came again to France and Flanders with its promise of life, fulfilled in the beauty of wild flowers and the green of leaves where the earth was not made barren by the fire of war and all trees killed.

For men there was no promise of life, but only new preparations for death, and continued killing.

The battle of Verdun was still going on, and France had saved herself from a mortal blow at the heart by a desperate, heroic resistance which cost her five hundred and fifty thousand in dead and wounded. On the British front there were still no great battles, but those trench raids, artillery duels, mine fighting, and small ma.s.sacres which filled the casualty clearing stations with the average amount of human wreckage. The British armies were being held in leash for a great offensive in the summer. New divisions were learning the lessons of the old divisions, and here and there generals were doing a little fancy work to keep things merry and bright.

So it was when some mines were exploded under the German earthworks on the lower slopes of the Vimy Ridge, where the enemy had already blown several mines and taken possession of their craters. It was to gain those craters, and new ones to be made by our mine charges, that the 74th Brigade of the 25th Division, a body of Lancashire men, the 9th Loyal North Lancashires and the 11th Royal Fusiliers, with a company of Royal Engineers and some Welsh pioneers, were detailed for the perilous adventure of driving in the mine shafts, putting tremendous charges of high explosives in the sapheads, and rushing the German positions.

It was on the evening of May 15th, after two days of wet and cloudy weather preventing the enemy's observation, that our heavy artillery fired a short number of rounds to send the Germans into their dugouts. A few minutes later the right group of mines exploded with a terrific roar and blew in two of the five old German craters. After the long rumble of heaving earth had been stilled there was just time enough to hear the staccato of a German machine-gun. Then there was a second roar and a wild upheaval of soil when the left group of mines destroyed two more of the German craters and knocked out the machine-gun.

The moment for the infantry attack had come, and the men were ready. The first to get away were two lieutenants of the 9th Loyal North Lancashires, who rushed forward with their a.s.saulting-parties to the remaining crater on the extreme left, which had not been blown up.

With little opposition from dazed and terror-stricken Germans, bayoneted as they scrambled out of the chaotic earth, our men flung themselves into those smoking pits and were followed immediately by working-parties, who built up bombing posts with earth and sand-bags on the crater lip and began to dig out communication trenches leading to them. The a.s.saulting-parties of the Lancashire Fusiliers were away at the first signal, and were attacking the other groups of craters under heavy fire.

The Germans were shaken with terror because the explosion of the mines had killed and wounded a large number of them, and through the darkness there rang out the cheers of ma.s.ses of men who were out for blood. Through the darkness there now glowed a scarlet light, flooding all that turmoil of earth and men with a vivid, red illumination, as flare after flare rose high into the sky from several points of the German line. Later the red lights died down, and then other rockets were fired, giving a green light to this scene of war.

The German gunners were now at work in answer to those beacons of distress, and with every caliber of gun from howitzers to minenwerfers they sh.e.l.led our front-lines for two hours and killed for vengeance. They were too late to stop the advance of the a.s.saulting troops, who were fighting in the craters against groups of German bombers who tried to force their way up to the rescue of a position already lost. One of our officers leading the a.s.sault on one of the craters on the right was killed very quickly, but his men were not checked, and with individual resolution and initiative, and the grit of the Lancashire man in a tight place, fought on grimly, and won their purpose.