DEFENCE
It was now midday, and the Officers of the two companies that had been
deployed gathered round the mess-cart. The remaining companies, who had
been kept in local reserve during the fight, were sent out to bury the
dead. The rain began to fall in torrents, and somehow the memory of
crouching under the mess-cart to get shelter has left a far more
definite and indelible impression upon the Subaltern's mind than the
actual moments of danger and excitement.
A large band of prisoners had been captured by our troops that day.
Small detachments had from time to time been captured ever since the
turn at Chaumes, but this was different. There were long lines of them,
standing bolt upright, and weaponless. The Subaltern looked at them
curiously. They struck him as on the whole taller than the English, and
their faces were not brown, but grey. He admired their coats, there was
a martial air in the long sweep of them. And he confessed that one
looked far more of a soldier in a helmet. There is a ferocity about the
things, a grimness well suited to a soldier.... Not that clothes make
the man.
He sternly refused himself the pleasure of going to get a closer sight
of them. He wanted very badly to see them, perhaps to talk French with
them, but a feeling that it was perhaps _infra dignitatem_ debarred him.
The men, however, had no such scruples. They crowded round their
captives, and slowly and silently surveyed them. They looked at them
with the same sort of interest that one displays towards an animal in
the Zoo, and the Germans paid just as much attention to their regard as
Zoo animals do. Considering that only a short hour ago they had been
trying to take each other's lives, there seemed to be an appalling lack
of emotion in either party. Fully half an hour the Tommies inspected
them thus. Then, with infinite deliberation, one man produced a packet
of "Caporal" cigarettes and offered one, with an impassive countenance,
to a German. As far as the Subaltern could see, not a single word was
exchanged nor a gesture made. They did not move away until it was time
to fall in.
The advance was continued until it was dark, and intermittent firing was
heard throughout the afternoon on either flank. The German retreat,
which had in its first stages been conducted with such masterly skill,
was rapidly developing into a hurried and ill-conducted movement, that
bade fair to lead to disaster. Reports of large quantities of prisoners
were coming in more frequently than ever.
It was at this time that the Subaltern first heard the now notorious
story of the German who had been at the Savoy, and who gave himself up
to the Officer whom he recognised as an old habitué. One of the Officers
in the Regiment said that this had happened to him, and was
believed--for the moment. Later on, Officers out of every corps solemnly
related similar experiences, with occasional variations in the name of
the hotel. Usually it was the Savoy or the Ritz; less often the Carlton,
or even the Cecil, but the "Pic" or the "Troc" were absolutely barred.
The story multiplied so exceedingly that one began to suspect that the
entire German corps in front was exclusively composed of ex-waiters of
smart London hotels.
Another sign that the Germans were beginning to be thrust back more
quickly than they liked was the frequent abandonment of transport. Whole
trains of motor lorries that had been hastily burned and left by the
roadside, and all sorts of vehicles with broken wheels, were constantly
being passed. The Subaltern remembers seeing a governess cart, and
wondering what use the Germans had found for it. Perhaps a German
colonel had been driven gravely in it, at the head of his men. He
wondered whether the solemn Huns would have been capable of seeing the
humour of such a situation.
Horses, too, seemed to have been slaughtered by the score. They looked
like toy horses, nursery things of wood. Their faces were so unreal,
their expressions so glassy. They lay in such odd postures, with their
hoofs sticking so stiffly in the air. It seemed as if they were toys,
and were lying just as children had upset them. Even their dimensions
seemed absurd. Their bodies had swollen to tremendous sizes, destroying
the symmetry of life, confirming the illusion of unreality.
The sight of these carcases burning in the sun, with buzzing myriads of
flies scintillating duskily over their unshod hides, excited a pity that
was almost as deep as his pity for slain human beings. After all, men
came to the war with few illusions, and a very complete knowledge of the
price to be paid. They knew why they were there, what they were doing,
and what they might expect. They could be buoyed up by victory, downcast
by defeat. Above all, they had a Cause, something to fight for, and if
Fate should so decree, something to die for. But these horses were
different; they could neither know nor understand these things. Poor,
dumb animals, a few weeks ago they had been drawing their carts, eating
their oats, and grazing contentedly in their fields. And then suddenly
they were seized by masters they did not know, raced away to places
foreign to them, made to draw loads too great for them, tended
irregularly, or not at all, and when their strength failed, and they
could no longer do their work, a bullet through the brain ended their
misery. Their lot was almost worse than the soldiers'!
To the Subaltern it seemed an added indictment of war that these
wretched animals should be flung into that vortex of slaughter. He
pitied them intensely, the sight of them hurt him; and the smell of them
nauseated him. Every memory of the whole advance is saturated with that
odour. It was pungent, vigorous, demoralising. It filled the air, and
one's lungs shrank before it. Once, when a man drove his pick through
the crisp, inflated side, a gas spurted out that was positively
asphyxiating and intolerable.
However much transport the Germans abandoned, however severe the losses
they sustained, they always found time to break open every estaminet
they passed, and drain it dry. Wretched inns and broken bottles proved
to be just as reliable a clue to their passing as the smell of them.