The tiny hut is an abode of darkness made visible by a single candle,
mounted in its own grease in the worst available position for giving
light, lest the opening of the door cast the faintest beam into the
sunken road outside. On the shelf flush with the door glimmer parental
urns with a large family of condensed-milk tins, opened and unopened,
full and empty; packing-cases in similar stages litter the duck-board
flooring, or pile it wall-high in the background; trench-coats,
gas-masks, haversacks and helmets hang from nails or repose on a ledge
of the inner wall, which is sunken roadside naked and unashamed. Two
weary figures cower over the boiler fire; they are the other man and yet
another who has come up for the night. A third person, who may look more
like me than I feel like him, hovers behind them, smoking and peering at
his watch. It is the last few minutes of Christmas Eve, and for a long
hour there has been little or nothing doing. Earlier in the evening,
from seven or so onwards, there seemed no end to the queue of armed men,
calling for their mug of cocoa and their packet of biscuits, either
singly, each for himself, or with dixies and sand-bags to be filled for
comrades on duty in the trenches.
The quiet has been broken only by the sibilant song of the boiler, by
desultory conversation and bursts of gunfire as spasmodic and
inconsequent. Often a machine-gun has beaten a brief but furious tattoo
on the doors of darkness; but now come clogged and ponderous
footfalls--mud to mud on the duck-boards leading from the communication
trench--and a chit is handed in from the outer moonlight.
'24--12--17.
'To Y.M.C.A. Canteen,
'---- Avenue.
'DEAR SIRS,--I will be much obliged if you will supply
the bearer with hot cocoa (sufficient for 90 men)
which I understand you are good enough to issue to
units in this line. The party are taking 2 hot-food
containers for the purpose.
'Thanking you in anticipation,
'I am, yours faithfully,
'(Illegible),
'O/C B Co.,
'1/8 (Undesirable).'
Torpid trio are busy men once more. Not enough cocoa ready-made for
ninety; fresh brew under way in fewer seconds than it takes to state
the fact. Third person already anchored beside open packing-case,
enormous sand-bag gaping between his knees, little sealed packets flying
through his hands from box to bag in twins and triplets. By now it is
Christmas morning; cakes and cigarettes are forthwith added to statutory
biscuits, and a sack is what is wanted. Third person makes shift with
second sand-bag, which having filled, he leaves his colleagues working
like benevolent fiends in the steam of fragrant cauldrons, and joins the
group outside among the shell-holes.
They are consuming interim dividends of the nightly fare, as they stand
about in steely silhouette against the shrouded moonlight. The scene is
not quite so picturesque as it was last night, when no star of heaven
could live in the light of the frosty moon and every helmet was a
shining halo; to-night the only twinkle to be seen is under a helmet's
rim.
'Merry Christmas, sir, an' many of 'em,' says a Tyneside voice, getting
in the first shot of a severe bombardment. The third person retaliates
with appropriate spirit; the interchange could not have been franker or
heartier in the days of actual peace on earth and apparent good-will
among men. But here they both are for a little space this Christmas
morning. Cannon may drum it in with thunderous irony, and some
corner-man behind a machine-gun oblige with what sounds exactly like a
solo on the bones, but here in the midst of those familiar alarms the
Spirit of Christmas is abroad on the battle-field. He may be frightened
away--or become a casualty--at any moment. One lucky flourish with the
bones, one more addition to these sharp-edged shell-holes, and how many
of the party would have a groan left in him? One of them groans in
spirit as he thinks, never so vividly, of countless groups as full of
gay vitality as this one, blown out of existence in a blinding flash.
But his hardy friends are above such morbid imaginings; the cold appears
to be their only trouble, and of it they make light enough as they stamp
their feet. Some are sea-booted in sand-bags, and what with their
jerkins and low, round helmets, look more like a watch in oilskins and
sou'-westers than a party of Infantry.
'We nevaw died o' wintaw yet,' says the Tynesider. 'It takes a lot to
kill an old soljaw.' But he owns he was a shipyard hand before the war;
and not one of them was in the Army.
All hope it is the last Christmas of the war, but the Tyneside
prognostication of 'anothaw ten yeaws' is received with perfect
equanimity. There is general agreement, too, when the same oracle
dismisses the latest peace offer as 'blooff.' But it must be confessed
that articulate ardour is slightly damped until somebody starts a
subject a great deal nearer home.
'Who'd have thought that we should live to see a Y.M. in the support
line!'
Flattering echoes from entire group.
'Do you remember that chap who kept us all awake in barracks, talking of
it?'
'I nevaw believed him. I thought it was a myth, sir. And nothing to pay
an' all! It must be costing the Y.M. a canny bit o' money, sir?'
The third person--who has been hovering on the verge of the inveterate
first--only commits himself to the statement that he helped to give away
785 cups of cocoa and packets of biscuits the night before. Rapid
calculations ensue. 'Why, that must be nearly ten pounds a night, sir?'
'Something like that.'
'Heaw that, Corporal! An' now it's cigarettes an' cakes an' all!'
But the containers are ready, lids screwed down upon their steaming
contents. Strong arms hoist them upon stronger backs; the plethoric
sand-bags are shouldered with still less ado, and off go the party into
the slate-coloured night, off through the communication trenches into
the firing-line they are to hold for England until the twelve hundred
and thirty-ninth daybreak of the war.
Peering after them with wistful glasses, the third person relapses
altogether into the first. Take away the odd two hundred, and for a
thousand days and nights my heart has been where their muffled feet will
be treading in another minute. Yes; a round thousand must be almost the
exact length of days since I first came out here in the spirit, and to
stay. But never till this year did I seriously dream of following in the
flesh, or till this moment feel the front line like a ball at my feet.
Even the day before yesterday the arrangement was not so definite as it
is to-day; it was not the Colonel himself who was to have taken us round
by special favour and appointment. Yet how easily, had the Strafe
happened half-an-hour later than it did, might we not have come in for
it, perhaps at the very place where the parapet was blown down! It would
have been a wonderful experience, especially as there were no
casualties. Will anything of the kind happen to-day? I have a feeling
that something may; but then I have had that feeling every sentient
moment up the Line. And nothing that can come can come amiss; that is
another of my feelings here, if not the strongest of them all. This
Christmas morning it rings almost like a carol in the heart, almost like
a peal of Christmas bells--jangled indeed by the heart's own bitter
flaws, and yet piercing sweet as Life itself.
But for all my elderly civilian excitement, before a risk too tiny to
enter a young fighting head at all, sleep does not fail me on a new
couch of my own construction. The sand-bagged lair was none too dry in
the late hard frost; in the unseasonable thaw that seems to be setting
in, it is no place for crabbed age. Youth is welcome to the two beds
with the water now standing on their indiarubber sheets, and youth seems
quite honestly to prefer them; so I make mine on the biscuit-boxes in
the shed, turn my toes to the still glowing coke in the boiler fire,
press my soles to the hot-water bottle which has distinguished itself by
freezing during the day, and huddle down as usual in all the indoor and
outdoor garments I have with me, under my share of the blankets, which I
have been drying assiduously every evening. _The Romance of War_
performs its nightly unromantic office ... and I have had many a worse
night upon a spring-mattress.
Colonel finished breakfast when I reach the mess; ready for me by the
time I have had mine. We glove and muffle ourselves, adjust gas-masks
'at the ready,' and sally forth on his common round and my high
adventure, tapping the still slippery duck-boards with our sticks.
A colourless morning, neither freezing nor thawing; visibility probably
low, luminosity certainly mediocre; in fact, typical Christmas weather
of the modern realistic school, as against the Christmas Number weather
of the last ten days. Yet it is the Christmas Number atmosphere that
haunts me as an aura the more tenacious for its utter absence on all
sides: the sprig of holly in the cake, the presents on the table, the
joys of parent and child--never more at one--and blinding visions in
both capacities, down to that last war-time Christmas dinner at the
Carlton ... such are the sights that await me after all in the
front-line trench! I have dreamt of it for years, yet now that I am here
it is of the dead years I dream, or of this Christmas morning anywhere
but where it is one's beatitude to be spending it.
Not that I fail to see a good deal of what is before my eyes at last;
but never for many yards is the trench that we are in the only one I
seem to see, and a comparison between the two is irresistible. Perhaps
the width and solidity of this trench would impress me less if it were
not all so different from Belgium as I all but knew it in 1915; the
machine-gunners at their posts in the deep bays, like shepherds
sheltering behind a wall, yet somehow able to see through the wall,
would stand out less if the fire-step also were manned in the old way.
But now trenches are held more by machinery and by fewer men, at any
rate, in daytime; and at night men evidently do not sleep so near their
work as then they did; at least, I look in vain for dug-outs in this
sector of the front line. And I still look in vain for trouble, though
all the time I feel all sorts of possibilities impending: a strange
mixture of curiosity and dread it is--ardent curiosity, and quite
pleasurable dread--that weaves itself into the warp of all inward and
outward impressions whatsoever: can it be peculiar to self-ridden
civilians, or are there really brave men like the Colonel in front of me
(with a bar to his D.S.O.) who have undergone similar sensations at
their baptism of fire?
It is not exactly mine; nothing comes anything like so near me as that
sniper's bullet on the way up the other day; but little black bursts do
keep occurring high overhead, where one of our airmen is playing peep
among the clouds. The fragments must be falling somewhere in the
neighbourhood; and a more alarming kind of shell has just burst on the
high ground between our parados and the support line. Not very close--I
must have been listening to something else--but the Colonel points out
the smoking place with his stick and his quiet smile. His smile is part
of him, very quiet and contained, full of easy-going power, and a
kindness incapable of condescension. He might be my country-house host
pointing out the excellence of his crop, but his touch is lighter and I
am not expected to admire. He is, of all soldiers I ever met, just the
one I would choose to be alongside if I had to be hit. I don't believe
his face would alter very much, and I should be dying not to alter it
more than I could help.
But, in spite of all interior preparation, it is not to be. He has given
me a glimpse of No-Man's Land, not through a periscope but in a piece of
ordinary looking-glass; we are nearing the damaged place where his
presence is required and mine emphatically is not. Not that he says
anything of the sort, but I see it in his kindly smile as he hands me
over to his runner for safe-conduct to the place from whence I came.
Still as much disappointed as relieved, as though a definite excitement
had been denied to me, I turned and went with equal reluctance and
alacrity.
'The bravest officer in the British Army!' was the runner's testimony to
our friend. I have heard the honest words before, but this
hero-worshipper had chapter and verse for his creed: 'Six times he has
been wounded in this war, and never yet gone back to Blighty for a
wound!'
I had not noticed the six gold stripes--if any--but it is not everybody
who wears his full allowance. And if ever I met a man who cared less
than most brave men about all such things, I believe I said good-bye to
him last Christmas Day.
We were to meet again in the evening; in the meantime I was to have my
Christmas dinner with the other Colonel and his merry men, now in
reserve. I found them in an ex-Hun dug-out, more like a forecastle than
the other headquarters; everything underground, and the bunks ranged
round the board; but there was the same sheen on the table-cloth, the
same glitter of glass and plate, the same good cheer and a turkey worthy
of the day, and a ham worthy of the turkey, and a plum-pudding worthy of
them both. It is not for the guest of a mess to say grace in public; but
Christmas dinner in the trenches is a case apart. As the school tag
might have had it, _non cuivis civi talia contingunt_.
There were crackers, too, I suddenly remember, and the old idiotic paper
caps and mottoes, and Christmas cards wherever one went. In the new
legions there is nearly always some cunning hand to supply the unit with
a topical Christmas card: one of our two Battalions had a beauty, and
even the Y.M.C.A. made bold to circulate an artistic apotheosis of our
quarters on the sunken road. But those are not the Christmas cards I
still preserve; my ill-gotten souvenirs are typewritten scraps on
typewriting-paper, unillustrated, but all the more to the point: 'Best
wishes for Xmas and Good Luck in 1918, from the Brigadier and Staff,
--th Infantry Brigade.'--'Christmas Greetings and All Good Luck from
--th Infantry Brigade Headquarters.'--'Christmas Greetings and Good Luck
from ----th Divisional Artillery.' I must say this kind appealed to me,
though I sent away a good many of the more ambitious variety. In neither
was there any conventional nonsense about a 'happy' or even a 'merry'
Christmas; and that, in view of the well-known perversity of the Comic
Spirit, may have been one reason why so much merriment accrued. Nor did
the contrast between unswerving ceremonial and a sardonic simplicity, as
shown in this matter of the Christmas cards, begin or end there; for
while I had followed crystal and fine table-linen into reserve for my
Christmas dinner, the hospitable board behind the front line was now
spread with newspapers, and we drank both our whisky-and-soda and our
coffee out of the same enamelled cup.
The Colonel who had taken me into the front line after breakfast was not
at dinner that night; for all his wounds he had gone down with common
influenza, and I was desolated. It was my last chance of thanking him,
as the other man and I were leaving in the early morning. All day I had
been thinking of all that I had seen, and of all I had but foreseen,
though so vividly that I felt more and more as though I had actually had
some definite escape; besides, the things I had heard about him after
we parted made me covet the honour of shaking hands once more with so
very brave a man. I had my wish. In the middle of dinner a servant
emerged from below to say: 'The Colonel would like to see the Y.M.C.A.
officer before he went.'
I can see him still, as I found him, hot and coughing on the bunk in the
corner by itself. 'I thought you would be interested to hear,' said he,
'that the very minute you left me this morning a rum-jar burst on the
parados just behind me. You know how I wear my helmet, with the strap
behind? It blew it off.'
So my escape had been fairly definite after all, and the thing I was so
ready for had really happened 'the very minute' my back was turned! But
that, unhappily, is not the whole coincidence. Five months later it was
written of 'this good and gallant leader' that 'while inspecting his
battalion in the trenches he was struck by a fragment of shell from a
trench mortar (i.e. a rum-jar) and killed instantaneously.' My
parenthesis; the rest from _The Times_ notice, which also bears out the
story of the six wounds, except that they were seven, and four of them
earned ('with an immediate award of the D.S.O.') on a single occasion.
There is more in the notice that I should like to quote, more still that
I could say even on the strength of that one morning's work; but who am
I to praise so grand a man? I only know that I shall never see another
Christmas without seeing that front-line trench, and a quiet, dark man
in the pride and prime of perfect soldierhood, self-saddled with an old
camp-follower who felt as a child beside him.