Now It Can Be Told Part 8

The machine-gun was firing too high to do any serious damage. It was probably a ricochet from a broken tree which made one of the boys suddenly drop his spade and fall over it in a crumpled way.

"Get up, Charlie," said the comrade next to him; and then, in a scared voice, "Oh, Sergeant!"

"That's all right," said the sergeant-major. "We're getting off very lightly. New remember what I've been telling you... Stretcher this way."

They were very steady through the night, this first company of the New Army.

"Like old soldiers, sir," said the sergeant-major, when he stood chatting with the colonel after breakfast.

It was a bit of bad luck, though not very bad, after all-which made the Germans sh.e.l.l a hamlet into which I went just as some of the New Army were marching through to their quarters. These men had already seen what sh.e.l.lfire could do to knock the beauty out of old houses and quiet streets. They had gone tramping through one or two villages to which the enemy's guns had turned their attention, and had received that unforgetable sensation of one's first sight of roofless cottages, and great gaps in garden walls, and tall houses which have tumbled inside themselves. But now they saw this destruction in the process, and stood very still, listening to the infernal clatter as sh.e.l.ls burst at the other end of the street, tumbling down huge ma.s.ses of masonry and plugging holes into neat cottages, and tearing great gashes out of red-brick walls.

"Funny business!" said one of the boys.

"Regular Drury Lane melodrama," said another.

"Looks as if some of us wouldn't be home in time for lunch," was another comment, greeted by a guffaw along the line.

They tried to see the humor of it, though there was a false note in some of the jokes. But it was the heroic falsity of boys whose pride is stronger than their fear, that inevitable fear which chills one when this beastliness is being done.

"Not a single casualty," said one of the officers when the storm of sh.e.l.ls ended with a few last concussions and a rumble of falling bricks. "Anything wrong with our luck?"

Everything was all right with the luck of this battalion of the New Army in its first experience of war on the first night in the danger-zone. No damage was done even when two sh.e.l.ls came into one of their billets, where a number of men were sleeping after a hard day and a long march.

"I woke up pretty quick," said one of them, "and thought the house had fallen in. I was out of it before the second came. Then I laughed. I'm a heavy sleeper, you know. [He spoke as if I knew his weakness.] My mother bought me an alarm-clock last birthday. 'Perhaps you'll be down for breakfast now,' she said. But a sh.e.l.l is better-as a knocker-up. I didn't stop to dress."

Death had missed him by a foot or two, but he laughed at the fluke of his escape.

"K.'s men" had not forgotten how to laugh after those eleven months of hard training, and they found a joke in grisly things which do not appeal humorously to sensitive men.

"Any room for us there?" asked one of these bronzed fellows as he marched with his battalion past a cemetery where the fantastic devices of French graves rose above the churchyard wall.

"Oh, we'll do all right in the open air, all along of the German trenches," was the answer he had from the lad at his side. They grinned at their own wit.

IV

I did not find any self-conscious patriotism among the rank and file of the New Army. The word itself meant nothing to them. Unlike the French soldier, to whom patriotism is a religion and who has the name of France on his lips at the moment of peril, our men were silent about the reasons for their coming out and the cause for which they risked their lives. It was not for imperial power. Any illusion to "The Empire" left them stone-cold unless they confused it with the Empire Music Hall, when their hearts warmed to the name. It was not because they hated Germans, because after a few turns in the trenches many of them had a fellow-feeling for the poor devils over the way, and to the end of the war treated any prisoners they took (after the killing in hot blood) like pet monkeys or tame bears. But for stringent regulations they would have fraternized with the enemy at the slightest excuse, and did so in the winter of 1914, to the great scandal of G. H. Q. "What's patriotism?" asked a boy of me, in Ypres, and there was hard scorn in his voice. Yet the love of the old country was deep down in the roots of their hearts, and, as with a boy who came from the village where I lived for a time, the name of some such place held all the meaning of life to many of them. The simple minds of country boys clung fast to that, went back in waking dreams to dwell in a cottage parlor where their parents sat, and an old clock ticked, and a dog slept with its head on its paws. The smell of the fields and the barns, the friendship of familiar trees, the heritage that was in their blood from old yeoman ancestry, touched them with the spirit of England, and it was because of that they fought.

The London lad was more self-conscious, had a more glib way of expressing his convictions, but even he hid his purpose in the war under a covering of irony and cynical jests. It was the spirit of the old city and the pride of it which helped him to suffer, and in his daydreams was the clanging of 'buses from Charing Cross to the Bank, the lights of the embankment reflected in the dark river, the back yard where he had kept his bicycle, or the suburban garden where he had watered his mother's plants... London! Good old London!... His heart ached for it sometimes when, as sentry, he stared across the parapet to the barbed wire in No Man's Land.

One night, strolling outside my own billet and wandering down the lane a way, I heard the sound of singing coming from a big brick barn on the roadside. I stood close under the blank wall at the back of the building, and listened. The men were singing "Auld Lang Syne" to the accompaniment of a concertina and a mouth-organ. They were taking parts, and the old tune-so strange to hear out in a village of France, in the war zone-sounded very well, with deep-throated harmonies. Presently the concertina changed its tune, and the men of the New Army sang "G.o.d Save the King." I heard it sung a thousand times or more on royal festivals and tours, but listening to it then from that dark old barn in Flanders, where a number of "K.'s men" lay on the straw a night or two away from the ordeal of advanced trenches, in which they had to take their turn, I heard it with more emotion than ever before. In that anthem, chanted by these boys in the darkness, was the spirit of England. If I had been king, like that Harry who wandered round the camp of Agincourt, where his men lay sleeping, I should have been glad to stand and listen outside that barn and hear those words:

Send him victorious, Happy and glorious.

As the chief of the British tribes, the fifth George received his tribute from those warrior boys who had come out to fight for the flag that meant to them some old village on the Suss.e.x Downs, where a mother and a sweetheart waited, or some town in the Midlands where the walls were placarded with posters which made the Germans gibe, or old London, where the 'buses went clanging down the Strand.

As I went back up the lane a dark figure loomed out, and I heard the click of a rifle-bolt. It was one of K.'s men, standing sentry outside the camp.

"Who goes there?"

It was a c.o.c.kney voice.

"Friends."

"Pa.s.s, friends. All's well."

Yes, all was well then, as far as human courage and the spirit of a splendid youthfulness counted in that war of high explosives and destructive chemistry. The fighting in front of these lads of the New Army decided the fate of the world, and it was the valor of those young soldiers who, in a little while, were flung into h.e.l.l-fires and killed in great numbers, which made all things different in the philosophy of modern life. That concertina in the barn was playing the music of an epic which will make those who sang it seem like heroes of mythology to the future race which will read of this death-struggle in Europe. Yet it was a c.o.c.kney, perhaps from Clapham junction or Peckham Rye, who said, like a voice of Fate, "All's well."

V

When the New Army first came out to learn their lessons in the trenches in the long days before open warfare, the enemy had the best of it in every way. In gunpowder and in supplies of ammunition he was our master all along the line, and made use of his mastery by flinging over large numbers of sh.e.l.ls, of all sizes and types, which caused a heavy toll in casualties to us; while our gunners were strictly limited to a few rounds a day, and cursed bitterly because they could not "answer back." In March of 1915 I saw the first fifteen-inch howitzer open fire. We called this monster "grandma," and there was a little group of generals on the Scherpenberg, near Kemmel, to see the effect of the first sh.e.l.l. Its target was on the lower slope of the Wytschaete Ridge, where some trenches were to be attacked for reasons only known by our generals and by G.o.d. Preliminary to the attack our field-guns opened fire with shrapnel, which scattered over the German trenches-their formidable earthworks with deep, sh.e.l.l-proof dugouts-like the glitter of confetti, and had no more effect than that before the infantry made a rush for the enemy's line and were mown down by machine-gun fire-the Germans were very strong in machine-guns, and we were very weak-in the usual way of those early days. The first sh.e.l.l fired by our monster howitzer was heralded by a low reverberation, as of thunder, from the field below us. Then, several seconds later, there rose from the Wytschaete Ridge a tall, black column of smoke which stood steady until the breeze clawed at it and tore it to tatters.

"Some sh.e.l.l!" said an officer. "Now we ought to win the war-I don't think!"

Later there arrived the first 9.2 (nine-point-two)-"aunty," as we called it.

Well, that was something in the way of heavy artillery, and gradually our gun-power grew and grew, until we could "answer back," and give more than came to us; but meanwhile the New Army had to stand the racket, as the Old Army had done, being strafed by hara.s.sing fire, having their trenches blown in, and their billets smashed, and their bodies broken, at all times and in all places within range of German guns.

Everywhere the enemy was on high ground and had observation of our position. From the Westhook Ridge and the Pilkem Ridge his observers watched every movement of our men round Ypres, and along the main road to Hooge, signaling back to their guns if anybody of them were visible. From the Wytschaete Ridge (White-sheet, as we called it) and Messines they could see for miles across our territory, not only the trenches, but the ways up to the trenches, and the villages behind them and the roads through the villages. They looked straight into Kemmel village and turned their guns on to it when our men crouched among its ruins and opened the graves in the cemetery and lay old bones bare. Clear and vivid to them were the red roofs of d.i.c.kebusch village and the gaunt ribs of its broken houses. (I knew a boy from Fleet Street who was cobbler there in a room between the ruins.) Those Germans gazed down the roads to Vierstraat and Vormizeele, and watched for the rising of white dust which would tell them when men were marching by-more cannon fodder. Southward they saw Neuve Eglise, with its rag of a tower, and Plug Street wood. In cheerful mood, on sunny days, German gunners with sh.e.l.ls to spare ranged upon separate farm-houses and isolated barns until they became bits of oddly standing brick about great holes. They sh.e.l.led the roads down which our transport wagons went at night, and the communication trenches to which our men moved up to the front lines, and gun-positions revealed by every flash, and dugouts foolishly frail against their 5.9's, which in those early days we could only answer by a few pip-squeaks. They made fixed targets of crossroads and points our men were bound to pa.s.s, so that to our men those places became sinister with remembered horror and present fear: Dead Horse Corner and Dead Cow Farm, and the farm beyond Plug Street; Dead Dog Farm and the Moated Grange on the way to St.-Eloi; Stinking Farm and Suicide Corner and Sh.e.l.l-trap Barn, out by Ypres.

All the fighting youth of our race took their turn in those places, searched along those roads, lived in ditches and dugouts there, under constant fire. In wet holes along the Yser Ca.n.a.l by Ypres, young officers who had known the decencies of home life tried to camouflage their beastliness by giving a touch of decoration to the clammy walls. They bought Kirchner prints of little ladies too lightly clad for the climate of Flanders, and pinned them up as a reminder of the dainty feminine side of life which here was banished. They brought broken chairs and mirrors from the ruins of Ypres, and said, "It's quite cozy, after all!"

And they sat there chatting, as in St. James's Street clubs, in the same tone of voice, with the same courtesy and sense of humor-while they listened to noises without, and wondered whether it would be to-day or to-morrow, or in the middle of the sentence they were speaking, that bits of steel would smash through that mud above their heads and tear them to bits and make a mess of things.

There was an officer of the Coldstream Guards who sat in one of these holes, like many others. A nice, gentle fellow, fond of music, a fine judge of wine, a connoisseur of old furniture and good food. It was cruelty to put such a man into a hole in the earth, like the ape-houses of Hagenbeck's Zoo. He had been used to comfort, the little luxuries of court life. There, on the ca.n.a.l-bank, he refused to sink into the squalor. He put on pajamas at night before sleeping in his bunk-silk pajamas-and while waiting for his breakfast smoked his own brand of gold-tipped cigarettes, until one morning a big sh.e.l.l blew out the back of his dugout and hurled him under a heap of earth and timber. He crawled out, cursing loudly with a nice choice of language, and then lit another gold-tipped cigarette, and called to his servant for breakfast. His batman was a fine lad, brought up in the old traditions of service to an officer of the Guards, and he provided excellent little meals, done to a turn, until something else happened, and he was buried alive within a few yards of his master... Whenever I went to the ca.n.a.l-bank, and I went there many times (when still and always hungry high velocities came searching for a chance meal), I thought of my friend in the Guards, and of other men I knew who had lived there in the worst days, and some of whom had died there. They hated that ca.n.a.l-bank and dreaded it, but they jested in their dugouts, and there was the laughter of men who hid the fear in their hearts and were "game" until some bit of steel plugged them with a gaping wound or tore their flesh to tatters.

VI

Because the enemy was on the high ground and our men were in the low ground, many of our trenches were wet and waterlogged, even in summer, after heavy rain. In winter they were in bogs and swamps, up by St.-Eloi and southward this side of Gommecourt, and in many other evil places. The enemy drained his water into our ditches when he could, with the cunning and the science of his way of war, and that made our men savage.

I remember going to the line this side of Fricourt on an August day in '15. It was the seventeenth of August, as I have it in my diary, and the episode is vivid in my mind because I saw then the New Army lads learning one of the lessons of war in one of the foulest places. I also learned the sense of humor of a British general, and afterward, not enjoying the joke, the fatalistic valor of officers and men (in civil life a year before) who lived with the knowledge that the ground beneath them was mined and charged with high explosives, and might hurl them to eternity between the whiffs of a cigarette.

We were sitting in the garden of the general's headquarters, having a picnic meal before going into the trenches. In spite of the wasps, which attacked the sandwiches, it was a nice, quiet place in time of war. No sh.e.l.l same crashing in our neighborhood (though we were well within range of the enemy's guns), and the loudest noise was the drop of an over-ripe apple in the orchard. Later on a shrill whistle signaled a hostile airplane overhead, but it pa.s.sed without throwing a bomb.

"You will have a moist time in some of the trenches," said the general (whose boots were finely polished). "The rain has made them rather damp... But you must get down as far as the mine craters. We're expecting the Germans to fire one at any moment, and some of our trenches are only six yards away from the enemy. It's an interesting place."

The interest of it seemed to me too much of a good thing, and I uttered a pious prayer that the enemy would not explode his beastly mine under me. It makes such a mess of a man.