Next to the Jocks, I used to find the Gunners the cheeriest souls about
a hut. Nor do I believe that mine was a chance experience; for the
constant privilege of inflicting damage on the Hun must be, despite a
very full share of his counter-attentions, a perpetual source of
satisfaction. A Gunner is oftener up and doing, far seldomer merely
suffering, than any other being under arms. The Infantry have so much to
grin and bear, so very much that would be unbearable without a grin,
that it is no wonder if the heroic symbol of their agony be less in
evidence upon ordinary occasions. Cheeriness with them has its own awful
connotation: they are almost automatically at their best when things are
at their worst; but the gunner is always enjoying the joke of making
things unpleasant for the other side. He is the bowler who is nearly
certain of a good match.
He used to turn up at our hut at all hours, sometimes in a Balaclava
helmet that reminded one of other winter sports, often with his
extremities frozen by long hours in the saddle or on his limber, but
never wearied by much marching and never in any but the best of
spirits. He was always an interesting man, who knew the Line as a
strolling player knows the Road, but neither knew nor cared where he was
to give the next performance. I associate him with a ruddy visage and a
hearty manner that brought a breeze in from the outer world, as a good
stage sailor brings one from the wings.
One great point about the Gunners is that you can see them at their job.
I had seen them at it on a former brief visit to the front, and even had
a foretaste of their quality of humour, which is by no means so heavy as
a civilian wag might apprehend. The scene was the tight-rope road
between Albert and Bapaume, then stretched across a chasm of
inconceivable devastation, and only three-parts in our hands; in fact we
were industriously shelling Bapaume and its environs when a car from the
Visitors' Chateau dumped two of us, attended by a red-tabbed chaperon,
in the very middle of our guns.
Not even in later days do I remember such a row as they were making.
Shells are as bad, but I imagine one does not hear a great many quite so
loud and live to write about it. Drum-fire must be worse at both ends;
but I have heard only distant drum-fire, and on the spot it must have
this advantage, that its continuity precludes surprise. But a series of
shattering surprises was the essence of our experience before Bapaume.
The guns were all over the place, and fiendishly camouflaged. I was
prepared for all sorts of cunning and picturesque screens and
emplacements, and indeed had looked for them. I was not prepared for
absolutely invisible cannon of enormous calibre that seemed to loose off
over our shoulders or through our legs the moment our backs were turned.
If you happened to be looking round you were all right. You saw the
flash, and your eye forewarned your ear in the fraction of a second
before the bang, besides reassuring you as to the actual distance
between you and the blazing gun; but whenever possible it took a mean
advantage, and had me ducking as though somebody had shouted 'Heads!' I
say 'me,' not before it was time; for I can only speak with honesty for
myself. By flattering chance I was pretending to enjoy this experience
in good company indeed; but the great man might have been tramping his
own moor, and doing the shooting himself, for all the times I saw his
eyelids flicker or his massive shoulders wince. He made no more of a
howitzer that jovially thundered and lightened in our path, over our
very heads, than of the brace of sixty-pounders whose peculiarly
ear-destroying duet 'scratched the brain's coat of curd' as we stood
only too close behind them. They might have been a brace of Irish
Members for all their intimidatory effect on my illustrious companion.
But the fun came when we adjourned to the Battery Commander's dug-out,
and somebody suggested that the Forward Observing Officer would feel
deeply honoured by a word on the telephone from so high an Officer of
State. All urbanity, the O.S. took down the receiver, and was heard
introducing himself to the F.O.O. by his official designation, as though
high office alone could excuse such a liberty. The receiver cackled like
a young machine-gun, and the O.S. beamed dryly on the O.C.
'He wants to know who the devil I _really_ am!' he reported with due
zest.
Hastily the spectacled young Major vouched for the other speaker. The
receiver changed hands once more. The Forward Observing Officer was
evidently as good as his style and title.
'He says--"in that case"--I'd better look him up!' twinkled the O.S. 'Is
there time? He says he's quite close to the sugar factory.'
The sugar factory was unmistakable, not as a flagrant sugar factory but
as the only fragment of a building left standing within the sky-line. It
proved a snare. Our F.O.O. was unknown there; if he had ever been at the
ex-factory, he had kept himself to himself and gone without leaving an
address; and though we sought him high and low among the shell-holes,
under the belching muzzles of our guns, it was not intended by
Providence (nor yet peradventure by himself) that we should track that
light artillery comedian to his place of concealment.
Still, one can get at a gunner (in the above sense only) quicker than at
any other class of acquaintance in the Line.
It is, after all, a very small war in the same sense as it is said to be
a small world; and in our ruined town I was always running into some
soldier whom I had known of old in leather or prunella. I have had the
pleasure of serving an old servant as an impressive N.C.O., of welcoming
others of all ranks on both sides of the counter. Thus it was that one
day I had a car lent me to go pretty well where I liked, subject to the
approval of a young Staff Officer, my escort. I thought of a Gunner
friend hidden away somewhere in those parts. He was an Old Boy of my old
school. So, as it happened, was the High Commander to whom the car
belonged; so, by an extraordinary chance, was the young Staff Officer.
The oldest of them, of course, long years after my time; but an All
Uppingham Day for me, if ever I had one! I only wish we could have
claimed the hero of the day as well.
The car took us to within a couple of miles of my friend, who was not
above another mile from No-Man's Land. It was a fairly lively sector at
the best of times, which was about the time I was there. The enemy had
shown unseasonable activity only the night before, and we met some of
the casualties coming down a light railway, up which we walked the last
part of the way. Two or three khaki figures pushing a truck laden with a
third figure--supine, blanketed, and very still: that was the picture we
passed several times in the thin February sunlight. One man looked as
dead as the livid landscape; one had a bloody head and a smile that
stuck; one was walking, supported by a Red Cross man, coughing weakly as
he went. Round about our destination were a number of shell-sockets,
very sharp and clean, all made in the night.
It was quite the deepest dug-out I was ever in, but I was not sorry when
I had found my eyes in the twilight of its single candle. Warm, down
there; a petrol engine throbbing incomprehensibly behind a curtain at
the foot of the flight; a ventilating shaft at the inner end; hardly any
more room than in an Uppingham study. How we talked about the old place,
three school generations of us, sitting two on a bed until I broke down
the Major's! The Major might have been bored before that--he who alone
had not been there. But even my ponderous performance did not disturb a
serene forbearance, a show of more than courteous interest, which
encouraged us to persist in that interminable gossip about masters (with
imitations!) so maddening to the uninitiated. At length the petrol
engine stopped; I doubt if we did, though steak and onions now arrived.
May I never savour their crude smell again without remembering that time
and place; the oftener the better, if there be those present who do not
know about the Major.
His second-in-command, my Uppingham friend, told me as he saw us along
the light railway on our way back. In 1914 the Major had been a
Nonconformist Minister. Never mind the Denomination, or the part of
Great Britain: because the Call sounded faint there, and his flock were
slow to answer, the shepherd showed the way, himself enlisting in the
ranks: because he was what he was, and came whence he came, here and
thus had I found him in 1918, commanding a battery on the Somme, at the
age--but that would be a tale out of school. A legion might be made up
of the men whose real ages are nobody's business till the war is over;
then they might be formed into a real Old Guard of Honour, and
_splendidissime mendax_ might be their motto.
I do not say the Major would qualify. I have forgotten exactly what it
was I heard upon the point. But I am not going to forget something that
reached me later from another source altogether, namely the lips of a
sometime N.C.O. of the Battery.
'There was not,' he asserted, 'better discipline in any battery in
France. But not a man of us ever heard the Major swear.'
It was a great friend of mine that I had gone forth to see: a cricketer
whose only sin was the century that kept him out of the pavilion: a man
without an enemy but the one he turned out to fight at forty. Yet the
man I am gladdest to have seen that day on the Somme is not my friend,
but my friend's friend and Major.... And to think that he opened his
kindly fire upon me by saying absurd things about the only book of mine
which has very many friends; and that I let him, God forgive me, instead
of bowing down before the gorgeous man!