Now It Can Be Told Part 44

"But," said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, "I don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!"

He was the normal man. The elderly officer was abnormal. The normal man, soldier without camouflage, had no use for death at all, unless it was in connection with the fellow on the opposite side of the way. He hated the notion of it applied to himself. He fought ferociously, desperately, heroically, to escape it. Yet there were times, many times, when he paid not the slightest attention to the near neighborhood of that grisly specter, because in immediate, temporary tranquillity he thrust the thought from his mind, and smoked a cigarette, and exchanged a joke with the fellow at his elbow. There were other times when, in a state of mental exaltation, or spiritual self-sacrifice, or physical excitement, he acted regardless of all risks and did mad, marvelous, almost miraculous things, hardly conscious of his own acts, but impelled to do as he did by the pa.s.sion within him-pa.s.sion of love, pa.s.sion of hate, pa.s.sion of fear, or pa.s.sion of pride. Those men, moved like that, were the leaders, the heroes, and groups followed them sometimes because of their intensity of purpose and the infection of their emotion, and the comfort that came from their real or apparent self-confidence in frightful situations. Those who got through were astonished at their own courage. Many of them became convinced consciously or subconsciously that they were immune from sh.e.l.ls and bullets. They walked through hara.s.sing fire with a queer sense of carelessness. They had escaped so often that some of them had a kind of disdain of sh.e.l.l-bursts, until, perhaps, one day something snapped in their nervous system, as often it did, and the bang of a door in a billet behind the lines, or a wreath of smoke from some domestic chimney, gave them a sudden shock of fear. Men differed wonderfully in their nerve-resistance, and it was no question of difference in courage.

In the ma.s.s all our soldiers seemed equally brave. In the ma.s.s they seemed astoundingly cheerful. In spite of all the abomination of that Somme fighting our troops before battle and after battle-a few days after-looked bright-eyed, free from haunting anxieties, and were easy in their way of laughter. It was optimism in the ma.s.s, heroism in the ma.s.s. It was only when one spoke to the individual, some friend who bared his soul a second, or some soldier-ant in the mult.i.tude, with whom one talked with truth, that one saw the hatred of a man for his job, the sense of doom upon him, the weakness that was in his strength, the bitterness of his grudge against a fate that forced him to go on in this way of life, the remembrance of a life more beautiful which he had abandoned-all mingled with those other qualities of pride and comradeship, and that illogical sense of humor which made up the strange complexity of his psychology.

XV

It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the astounding belief that he was "immune" from sh.e.l.l-fire, and I met other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut. I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite-not knowing the injustice of our military censorship under the orders of G.H.Q.

"Why the h.e.l.l don't we get a word?" he asked. "Haven't we done as well as anybody, died as much?"

I promised to do what I could-which was nothing-to put the matter right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in self-revelation.

"I have a mystical power," he said. "Nothing will ever hit me as long as I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive sh.e.l.ls and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch with the Universal Spirit, as I am."

He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that astonished me. I envied him his particular "kink." I wished I could cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man's eyes and knew, and he claimed that he never made a mistake... He was sorry to possess that second sight, and it worried him.

There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed, although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some cases I know they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being the reverse side of the argument.

I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette, on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos, and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters located under some sand-bags in a German dug-out. All the way up to Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by sh.e.l.l-fire. Legs and arms protruded from sh.e.l.l-craters where bodies lay half buried. Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with enormous noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate battlefield, with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil's hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John Wood, who lived in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, st.u.r.dy, gallant figure, in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sand-bags, walked on the top of communication trenches (not bothering to take cover) and skirting round hedges of barbed wire, apparently unconscious of the "crumps" that were bursting around. I found laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the earth where the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was courteous, but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that I should go up farther, to the ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one's head into trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been blowing in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was insistent that I should meet "old Thom," afterward in command of the battalion. He had just been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. So we left the cover of the dugout and took to the open again. Long lines of Jocks were digging a support trench-digging with a kind of rhythmic movement as they threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them was another line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though asleep, out in the open. They were the dead of the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up against the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with his steel hat on the back of his head-a handsome, laughing figure. He did not look like a man who had just been buried and dug out again.

"It was a narrow shave," he said. "A beastly sh.e.l.l covered me with a ton of earth... Have a cigarette, won't you?"

We gossiped as though in St. James's Street. Other young Scottish officers came up and shook hands, and said: "Jolly weather, isn't it? What do you think of our little show?" Not one of them gave a glance at the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn't beat them. "Well, good morning! Must get on with the job." There was no anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred of this life, so near to death. They seemed to like it... They did not really like it. They only made the best of it, without gloom. I saw they did not like this job of battle, one evening in their mess behind the line. The colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the Celts, was in a queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his manner, a little "fey." He was annoyed with three of his officers who had come back late from three days' Paris leave. They were giants, but stood like schoolboys before their master while he spoke ironical, bitter words. Later in the evening he mentioned casually that they must prepare to go into the line again under special orders. What about the store of bombs, small-arms ammunition, machine-guns?

The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as though to say: "What does the old man mean? Is this true?" One of them became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his eyes. Another said, "h.e.l.l!" in a whisper. The adjutant answered the colonel's questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the colonel's face anxiously.

"Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?"

The colonel laughed.

"Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for training."

The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been fairly taken in by the "old man's" leg-pulling... No, it was clear they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence.

XVI

In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and comic-among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire, Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded together in a battalion of the Middles.e.x Regiment. They gave a shock to our French friends when they arrived as a division at the port of Boulogne.

"Name of a dog!" said the quayside loungers. "England is truly in a bad way. She is sending out her last reserves!"

"But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!" exclaimed others.

"It is terrible that they should send these little ones," said kind-hearted fishwives.

Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became smart and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to see them strutting up and down as sentries outside divisional headquarters, with their bayonets high above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they did well-though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the top-and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly strong enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit-steel helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags-with which other troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly, behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval, and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in the cover they made under d.a.m.nable fire, until many of them were blown to bits. There was no "glory" in their job, only filth and blood, but they held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d, and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional, these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow-the jester of them all-whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed the name of "glory." He advocated a trade-unionism among soldiers to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to cut them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disembowel them. He looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered what his missus would say if she saw him scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his head in the earth with sh.e.l.ls bursting around him, or prodding Germans with a bayonet. "Oh," said that five-foot hero, "there will be a lot of murder after this b.l.o.o.d.y war. What's human life? What's the value of one man's throat? We're trained up as murderers-I don't dislike it, mind you-and after the war we sha'n't get out of the habit of it. It'll come nat'ral like!"

He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a group of comrades who roared with laughter and said: "Go it, Bill! That's the stuff!" Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen, or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their eyes. Some of them had big heads on small bodies, as though they suffered from water on the brain... Many of them were sent home afterward. General Haldane, as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked his stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously unfit, the degenerates, and said at each prod, "You can go... You. ..You...." The Bantam Division ceased to exist.

They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A Bantam died-of disease ("and he would," said General Haldane)-and a comrade came to see his corpse.

"Shut ze door ven you come out," said the old woman of his billet. "Fermez la porte, mon vieux."

The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much moved by grief.

"I've seed poor Bill," he said.

"As-tu ferme la porte?" said the old woman, anxiously.

The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it.

"C'est a cause du chat!" said the old woman. "Ze cat, Monsieur, 'e 'ave 'ad your friend in ze pa.s.sage tree time already to-day. Trois fois!"

Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to a man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their size.

They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval. It was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade. He came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded with a spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst, which made their tongues swell and set their throats on fire.

"Water!" they cried. "Water! For Christ's sake, water!"

There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there in a sh.e.l.l-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy, and he was a dead shot.

But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of that chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the upright, fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back the trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pa.s.s. He pa.s.sed many times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into bad places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made from the well water for men in agony.

XVII

During these battles I saw thousands of German prisoners, and studied their types and physiognomy, and, by permission of Intelligence officers, spoke with many of them in their barbed-wire cages or on the field of battle when they came along under escort. Some of them looked degraded, b.e.s.t.i.a.l men. One could imagine them guilty of the foulest atrocities. But in the ma.s.s they seemed to me decent, simple men, remarkably like our own lads from the Saxon counties of England, though not quite so bright and brisk, as was only natural in their position as prisoners, with all the misery of war in their souls. Afterward they worked with patient industry in the prison-camps and established their own discipline, and gave very little trouble if well handled. In each crowd of them there were fellows who spoke perfect English, having lived in England as waiters and hairdressers, or clerks or mechanics. It was with them I spoke most because it was easiest, but I know enough German to talk with the others, and I found among them all the same loathing of war, the same bewilderment as to its causes, the same sense of being driven by evil powers above them. The officers were different. They lost a good deal of their arrogance, but to the last had excuses ready for all that Germany had done, and almost to the last professed to believe that Germany would win. Their sense of caste was in their nature. They refused to travel in the same carriages with their men, to stay even for an hour in the same inclosures with them. They regarded them, for the most part, as inferior beings. And there were castes even among the officers. I remember that in the last phase, when we captured a number of cavalry officers, these elegant sky-blue fellows held aloof from the infantry officers and would not mix with them. One of them paced up and down all night alone, and all next day, stiff in the corsets below that sky-blue uniform, not speaking to a soul, though within a few yards of him were many officers of infantry regiments.

Our men treated their prisoners, nearly always, after the blood of battle was out of their eyes, with a good-natured kindness that astonished the Germans themselves. I have seen them filling German water-bottles at considerable trouble, and the escorts, two or three to a big batch of men, were utterly trustful of them. "Here, hold my rifle, Fritz," said one of our men, getting down from a truck-train to greet a friend.

An officer standing by took notice of this.

"Take your rifle back at once! Is that the way to guard your prisoners?"

Our man was astonished.

"Lor' bless you, sir, they don't want no guarding. They're glad to be took. They guard themselves."