It was nearly dark when our journey ended at one of those sunken roads
which make a name for themselves on all battle-fields, and duly
complicate the Western Front. Sometimes they cut the trench as a level
crossing does a street, and then it is not a bad rule to cross as though
a train were coming. Sometimes it is the trench that intersects the
sunken road; this happened here. We squeezed through a gap in the
sand-bags, a gap exactly like a stile in a stone fence, and from our
feet the bleak road rose with a wild effect into the wintry sunset.
It was a road of some breadth, but all crinkled and misshapen in its
soiled bandage of frozen snow. Palpable shell-holes met a touchy eye for
them on every side; one, as clean-cut as our present footprints,
literally adjoined a little low sand-bagged shelter, of much the same
dimensions as a blackfellow's gunyah in the bush. This inviting
habitation served as annex to a small enough hut at least three times
its size; the two cowered end to end against the sunken roadside, each
roof a bit of bank-top in more than camouflage, with real grass doing
its best to grow in real sods.
'No,' said the other man, 'only the second half of the hut's our hut.
This first half's a gum-boot store. The sand-bagged hutch at the end of
all things is where we sleep.'
The three floors were sunk considerably below the level of the road, and
a sunken track of duck-boards outside the semi-detached huts was like
the bottom of a baby trench. We looked into our end; it was colder and
darker than the open air, but cubes of packing-case and a capacious
boiler took stark shape in the gloom.
'I should think we might almost start our fire,' said the other man. 'We
daren't by daylight, on account of the smoke; we should have a shell on
us in no time. As it is, we only get waifs and strays from their
machine-guns; but one took the rim off a man's helmet, as neat as you
could do it with a pair of shears, only last night out here on these
duck-boards.'
Yet those duck-boards outside the hut were the next best cover to the
hut itself; accordingly the men greatly preferred waiting about in the
open road, which the said machine-guns could spray at pleasure on the
chance of laying British dust. So I gathered from the other man: so I
very soon saw for myself. Night had fallen, and at last we had lighted
our boiler fire, with the help of a raw-boned orderly supplied by the
battalion of Jocks then holding the front line. And the boiler fire had
retaliated by smoking all three of us out of the hut.
This was an initial fiasco of each night I was there; to it I owe sights
that I can still see as plain as the paper under my pen, and bits of
dialogue and crashes of orchestral gun-fire, maddeningly impossible to
reproduce. Are there no gramophone records of such things? If not, I
make a present of the idea to those whom it officially concerns. They
are as badly needed as any films, and might be more easily obtained.
The frosty moon was now nearly full, and a grey-mauve sky, wearing just
the one transcendent jewel of light, as brilliant in its way as the
dense blue of equatorial noon. Upon this noble slate the group of armed
men, waiting about in the road above the duck-boards, was drawn in
shining outline; silvered rifles slung across coppery leathern
shoulders; earthenware mugs turned to silver goblets in their hands, and
each tilted helmet itself a little fallen moon. A burst of gun-fire, and
not a helmet turned; the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun, but no shining
shoulder twinkled with the tiniest shrug. And yet the devil's orchestra
might have been tuning up at their feet, under the very stage they trod
with culpable unconcern.
Two melodramatic little situations (as they seemed to me, but not to
them) came about for our immediate benefit, and in appropriately quick
succession as I remember them. A wounded Jock figured in each; neither
was a serious case; the first one too light, it was feared, to score at
all. The man did just come limping along our duck-boards, but only very
slightly, though I rather think a comrade's arm played a fifth-wheel
part in the proceedings. It was only a boot that had been sliced across
the instep. A shoemaker's knife could not have made a cleaner job so
far; but 'a bit graze on ma fut' was all the sufferer himself could
claim, amid a murmur of sympathy that seemed exaggerated, ill as it
became a civilian even to think so.
The other casualty was a palpable hit in the fore-arm. First aid had
been applied, including an empty sand-bag as top bandage, before the
wounded man appeared with his escort in the moonlight; but now there was
a perverse shortage of that very commiseration which had been lavished
upon the man with the wounded boot. This was a real wound, 'a Blighty
one' and its own reward: the man who could time matters to so cynical a
nicety with regard to Christmas, and then only 'get it in the arrum,'
which notoriously means a long time rather than a bad one, was obviously
not a man to be pitied. He was a person to be plied with the driest
brand of North British persiflage. Signs of grim envy did not spoil the
joke, for there were those of as grim a magnanimity behind it all; and
the pale lad himself, taking their nonsense in the best of part, yet
shyly, as though they had a right to complain, and he only wished they
could all have been wounded and sent home together, was their match in
simple subtlety and hidden kindness. And between them all they were
better worth seeing and hearing than the moonlight and the guns.
It is easy to make too much of a trifle that was not one to me, but in a
sense my first casualty, almost a poignant experience. But there are no
trifles in the trenches in the dead of winter; there is not enough
happening; everything that does happen is magnified accordingly; and the
one man hit on a quiet day is a greater celebrity than the last survivor
of his platoon in the day of big things. The one man gets an audience,
and the audience has time to think twice about him.
In the same way nothing casts a heavier gloom than an isolated death in
action, such as the one which had occurred here only the previous day.
All ranks were still talking about the man who had lain unburied where
his comrades were now laughing in the moonlight; detail upon detail I
heard before the night was out, and all had the pathos of the isolated
case, the vividness of a portrait as against a group. The man had been a
Lewis gunner, and he had died flushed with the crowning success of his
career. That was the consoling detail: in his last week on earth, in
full view of friend and foe, he had brought off the kind of shot a whole
battalion boasts about. His bird still lay on No-Man's Land, a jumble of
wire and mangled planes; not the sight to sober a successful sportsman,
and him further elated by the promise of special and immediate leave. No
time for a lad of his mettle to weary of well-doing; and he knew of a
sniper worth adding to his bag. The sniper, however, would seem to have
known of him, and in the ensuing duel took special care of himself. Not
so the swollen-hearted sportsman who was going on leave and meant
earning it. Many shots had been exchanged without result; at last,
unable to bear it any longer, our poor man had leapt upon the parapet,
only to drop back like a stone, shot dead not by the other duellist but
by a second sniper posted elsewhere for the purpose. And this tragically
ordinary tragedy was all the talk that night over the mugs. Grim
snatches linger. One quite sorrowful chum regretted the other's braces,
buried with him and of all things the most useless in a grave, and he
himself in need of a new pair. It did seem as though he might have
taken them off the body, and with the flown spirit's hearty sanction.
They did not say where they had buried him, but our sunken roadside was
not without its own wooden cross of older standing. It was the tiniest
and flimsiest I ever saw, and yet it had stood through other days, when
the road was in other hands; those other hands must have put it up. 'An
Unknown British Hero of the R.F.A.' was all the legend they had left to
endure with this ironical tenacity.
About midnight we came to an end of our water, supplied each morning by
a working-party detailed for the job: with more water we might have done
worse than keep open all night and kill the bitter day with sleep. As it
was, we were soon creeping through a man-hole curtained by a frozen
blanket into the corrugated core of the sand-bagged gunyah. It was as
much as elbow-high down the middle of the span; the beds were side by
side, so close together that we had to get in by the foot; and only for
a wager would I have attempted to undress in the space remaining.
But not for any money on such a night! A particularly feeble oil-stove,
but all we had to warm the hut by day, had been doing what it could for
us here at the eleventh hour; but all it had done was to stud the roof
with beads of moisture and draw the damp out of the blankets. We got
between them in everything except our boots; even trench-coats were not
discarded, nor fleece linings any longer to be despised. The other man
was soon asleep. But I had provided myself with appropriate reading, and
for some time burnt a candle to old James Grant and _The Romance of
War_.
There are those who delight in declaring there is no romance in this
war; there was enough for me that night. Not many inches from my side
the nearest shell had burst, not many days ago by some miracle without
blowing in a sand-bag; not many inches from my head, and perhaps no
deeper in the earth, lay the skull of our 'unknown hero of the R.F.A.' I
for one did not sleep the worse for his honoured company, or for our
common lullaby the guns.