... It did not wake me up till four or five in the morning. Then I knew
it had begun. The row was incessant rather than tremendous; not nearer
than it had often been, when that big local gun was at home, but
indubitably different. Some supplementary sound followed most of the
reports, as the receding swish of a shattered breaker follows the first
crash. I guessed what it was, but I wanted to be sure. I wanted to ask
the mate, on the other side of the partition behind my head; but I
didn't want to wake him up on purpose. The only unnerved man I met in
France, one of our workers whose railway-carriage had been blown in by a
bomb on the last stage of his journey from the coast, had awakened the
man in the next bed for company's sake the night after. He was brave
enough to own it. _I_ wanted company, but I had not the hardihood to
sing out for it until I heard a movement through the partition.
The mate, of course, did not believe it was the push; but he confessed
it sounded the sort of thing one would expect to hear if the Germans
were fools enough to make a push. It sounded like rather distant
thunder, with sporadic claps in the middle distance. I smoked a pipe
with my _Spectator_ before trying for some more sleep, and was just
dropping off when our orderly arrived with jaunty tread.
'It's Fritz,' said he, with sardonic unconcern. 'You can hear the houses
coming down.'
And there followed the tale of damage done so far.
I am afraid we were both up with the wind, if not with the sun. But we
shaved without bloodshed; for it is remarkable how a shell-burst can
fail to jog your elbow, or to spill your tea, when you have been
educated up to that type of disturbance. We had grown so used to guns in
the night that the quiet nights were the uncanny ones; and even they
were generally punctuated first or last by a comfortable bang from the
local heavy; the 'All's Well!' of that night-watchman, which, if it woke
us up, only encouraged us to go to sleep again with an increased sense
of security. A shell-burst at a decent distance sounded much the same
for the first--and only startling--second. And all that morning, and
generally throughout the day, they kept their distance with quite
unexpected decency.
But they did sing over our heads; they did keep the blue above us vocal
with their shrill, whining cries; it was astounding to look up into the
unruffled heavens and see no trace of their course. As one gazed, the
crash came in the streets a few hundred yards away; and often after the
crash, by an interval of seconds, a noise as of some huge cart shooting
its rubbish. Somebody said it was like a great lash whistling over us
and cracking amid the herd of living houses just beyond. It really was;
and what followed was the groan as yet another piece was taken out of
the palpitating town.
Two things came home to us while the day was young. It was biggish stuff
that was coming in, at a longish range; and it was coming in on
business, not on pleasure. Its business was to feel for barracks,
batteries, and other sound investments for valuable munitions; not to
have a sporting flutter here, there, and everywhere; much less to
indulge in the sheer luxury of pestling a ruined area to powder. If or
when they made some ground, and brought up their field-guns, it would be
a different matter; then it might pay them to keep us skipping in all
parts of the town at once; but, for the present, we in our part were in
quite ignoble security--unless Fritz lost his strength! We had, however,
to remember that we were in a straight line between wicket and wicket;
nor did his singing deliveries give us much chance of forgetting the
fact.
News was not long in reaching us from less fortunate localities. The
station was catching it; and we had a busy hut all but adjoining the
station. We looked upon our comrades at the Station Hut with mingled
envy and commiseration, when one or two of them dropped in to recount
their adventures and escapes. A short-pitched one had killed four
officers in the street in their direction. And it so happened that
business took me to the spot during the course of the morning.
It would be idle to pretend it was an enjoyable expedition. A friend
went with me; we wore our shrapnel helmets, and everybody we met was
wearing his. That alone gave the streets an altered appearance;
otherwise everything wore its normal aspect; the March sun was more like
May than ever, the sky more innocently blue, the cool light hand of
spring softer and more caressing. On the way we met two chaplains of the
Guards, who gave us details of the tragedy; on its scene we saw clean
wounds on the stone facing of a house, the chipped places standing out
in the strong sunlight, but did not investigate too closely. Two of the
officers had been standing in the doorway, two crossing the open space
we skirted; two had been killed outright, and two were dying or dead of
their wounds. Shells whistled continuously as we walked, but not one
burst before our eyes.
On my return the mate and I had a look at a dungeon under the Town Hall,
as a possible sleeping-place. It was part of an underground system for
which the town was famous. One could walk for miles, from chamber to
chamber, as one can crawl from cell to cell in the foundations of most
big houses. We had long talked of going to ground there, with all our
books, in the day of battle; and now we viewed provisional sites, though
only one of us allowed that the day had dawned.
'This is not the push,' I was stoutly assured. 'This is only a feint,
man. They are not such fools ...'
After lunch we opened to the bang and whistle of our own guns, for a
change. The sacred mid-day meal was never followed up by enemy gun-fire
in my hearing; the time-table obviously included a methodical siesta,
which it was our daily delight to spoil. Not that my Rest Hut crowd
betrayed much pleasure in the proceedings; for once, indeed, I could not
help thinking them rather a stolid lot. There they sat as usual under
the sunny skylights, dredging the day's news as though it were the one
uninteresting thing in the hut, or playing dominoes and draughts, like a
nurseryful of unnaturally good children. It is difficult to describe
their demeanour. To say that they looked as though nothing was
happening is to imply a studied unconcern; and there was certainly
nothing studied on their side of the counter; on ours, it seemed as if
the Rest Hut had only needed this external din to make it really
restful.
'Our friend Jerry's a bit saucy this morning,' said the emissary of a
sick Sergeant who sent for a fresh Maurice Hewlett every day that week.
It was the first comment of the afternoon on the day's events. 'Our
friend Jerry' had risen from his siesta and was giving us whistle and
bang for our bang and whistle; and still every shot sounded plumb over
the hut. It was like the middle of a tennis-court during a hard rally;
but I never heard anybody suggest that either side might hit into the
net.
Then, I remember, came a new-comer, a husky lad with a poisoned wrist.
'Gimme one o' them books.'