a stretcher nicely and smoothly and walking off at a gentle and even
walk, you must alter the picture in all its details. The ground where
the lieutenant had fallen, the ground for many acres round him, was a
half-liquefied mass of mud churned up into lumps and hummocks pitted
and cratered with shell-holes intersected with rivulets and pools of
water. When Drew was lifted on to the stretcher, it sank until the
mud oozed out and up from either side and began to slop in over the
edges. When the bearers had lifted him on, they moved each to his own
end, and they moved one step at a time, floundering and splashing and
dragging one foot clear after the other. When they took hold of the
stretcher ends and lifted, both staggered to keep their balance on the
slippery foothold; and to move forward each had to steady himself on
one foot, wrench the other up out of the mud, plunge it forward and
into the mud again, grope a minute for secure footing, balance, and
proceed to repeat the performance with the other foot. The stretcher
lurched and jolted and swayed side to side, backward and forward. The
movement at first gave Drew severe stabs of pain, but after a little
the pain dulled down into a steady throbbing ache.
The bearers had some 400 or 500 yards to go over the ground covered
by the advance. After this they would find certain sketchy forms of
duck-board walks—if the German shells had not wiped them out—and,
farther back, still better and easier methods of progress to the aid
post. But first there was this shell-ploughed wilderness to cross.
Drew remembered vaguely what a struggle it had been to him to advance
that distance on his own feet, and carrying nothing but his own weight
and his equipment. It was little wonder the bearers found the same
journey a desperate effort with his weight sagging and jolting between
them and pressing them down in the mud.
In the first five yards the leading bearer slipped, failed to recover
his balance, and fell, letting his end down with a jolt and a splash.
He rose smothered in a fresh coat of wet mud, full of mingled curses
on the mud and apologies to the wounded man. Drew slid off into a
half-faint. He woke again slowly, as the bearers worked through a
particularly soft patch. The mud was nearly thigh deep, and they were
forced to take a step forward, half-lift, half-drag the stretcher on,
lay it down while they struggled on another foot or two, turn and haul
their load after them. It took them a full hour to move a fair 60 paces.
The work was not performed, either, without distractions other than the
mud and its circumventing, and the trouble of picking the best course.
An attack was in full progress, and streams of shells were screaming
and howling overhead, with odd ones hurtling down and bursting on
the ground they were traversing, flinging up gigantic geysers of
spouting mud, clods of earth, and black smoke, erupting a whirlwind of
shrieking splinters and fragments. Several times the bearers laid the
stretcher down and crouched low in the mud from the warning roar of an
approaching shell, waited the muffled crash of its burst, the passing
of the flying fragments. From the nearer explosions a shower of dirt
and clods rained down about them, splashing and thudding on the wet
ground; from the farther ones an occasional piece of metal would drop
whistling or droning angrily and “whutt” into the mud. Then the bearers
lifted their burden and resumed their struggling advance. Fortunately
the waves of attacking infantry had passed beyond them, and most of the
German guns were busy flogging the front lines and trying to hold or
destroy them; but there were still shells enough being flung back on
the ground they had to cover to make matters unpleasantly risky. To add
to the risk there was a constant whistle and whine of passing bullets,
and every now and then a regular shower of them whipping and smacking
into the mud about them, bullets not aimed at them, but probably just
the chance showers aimed a little too high to catch the advancing
attack, passing over and coming to earth a few hundred yards back.
The little party was not alone, although the ground was strangely empty
and deserted to what it had been when the attack went over. There
were odd wounded men, walking wounded struggling back alone, others
more seriously hurt toiling through the mud with the assistance of
a supporting arm, others lying waiting their turn to be carried in,
placed for the time being in such cover as could be found, the cover
usually of a deep shell-crater with soft, wet sides, and a deep pool
at the bottom. There were odd bunches of men moving up, men carrying
bombs, or ammunition, or supplies of some sort for the firing line,
all ploughing slowly and heavily through the sticky mud.
Drew lost all count of time. He seemed to have been on that stretcher,
to have been swaying and swinging, bumping down and heaving up, for
half a lifetime—no, more, for all his life, because he had no thought
for, no interest in anything that had happened in the world before
this stretcher period, still less any interest in what might happen
after it ended—if ever it did end. Several times he sank into stupor
or semi-unconsciousness, through which he was still dimly sensible
only of the motions of the stretcher, without any connected thought as
to what they meant or how they were caused. Once he awoke from this
state to find himself laid on the ground, one of his bearers lying in
a huddled heap, the other stooping over him, lifting and hauling at
him. Everything faded out again, and in the next conscious period he
was moving on jerkily once more, this time with two men in the lead
with a stretcher-arm apiece, and one man at the rear end. His first
stretcher-bearer they left there, flat and still, sinking gradually in
the soft ooze.
Again everything faded, and this time he only recovered as he was being
lifted out of the stretcher and packed on a flat sideless truck affair
with four upright corner posts. Somewhere near, a battery of field guns
was banging out a running series of ear-splitting reports—and it was
raining softly again—and he was sitting instead of lying. He groped
painfully for understanding of it all.
“Where am I?” he asked faintly.
“You’re all right now, sir,” someone answered him. “You’ll have to sit
up a bit, ‘cos we’ve a lot o’ men an’ not much room. But you’re on the
light railway, an’ the truck’ll run you the half-mile to the Post in a
matter o’ minutes.”
“What time is it?” asked Drew. “How’s the show going?”
“It’s near two o’clock, sir. An’ we hear all the objectives is taken.”
“Near two,” said Drew, and as the truck moved off, “Near two,” he kept
repeating and struggling to understand what had happened to time—had
started at six ... and it was “near two” ... “near two” ... two
o’clock, that was. He couldn’t piece it together, and he gave it up at
last and devoted himself to fitting words and music to the rhythm of
the grinding, murmuring truck wheels. Six o’clock ... two o’clock.
It was little wonder he was puzzled. The attack had started at six. But
it had taken the stretcher-bearers five hours to carry him some 400
yards.
XXI
THE CONQUERORS
THE public room (which in England would be the Public Bar) of the
“Cheval Blanc” estaminet, or “Chevvle Blank” as its present-day
customers know it, had filled very early in the evening. Those members
of the Labour Company who packed the main room had just returned to
the blessings of comparative peace after a very unpleasant spell
in the line which had culminated in a last few days—and the very
last day especially—on a particularly nasty “job o’ work.” Making a
corduroy road of planks across an apparently bottomless pit of mud
in a pouring rain and biting cold wind cannot be pleasant work at
any time. When you stir in to the dish of trouble a succession of
five-point-nine high-explosive shells howling up out of the rain and
crashing thunderously down on or about the taped-out line of road, it
is about as near the limit of unpleasantness as a Labour Company cares
to come. The job was rushed, five-nines being a more drastic driver
than the hardest hustling foreman, but the German gunners evidently
had the old road nicely ranged and had correctly estimated the chance
of its being reconstructed, with the result that their shells pounded
down with a horrible persistency which might have stopped anything
short of the persistency of the Company and the urgency of the road
being put through. The men at work there, stripped to open-throated
and bare-armed shirts, and yet running rivers of sweat for all their
stripping, drove the work at top speed on this last day in a frantic
endeavour to complete before dark. They knew nothing of the tactical
situation, nothing of what it might mean to the success or failure of
“the Push” if the road were not ready to carry the guns and ammunition
waggons by that nightfall, knew only that “Roarin’ Bill, The Terrible
Turk,” had pledged the Company to finish that night, and that “Roarin’
Bill” must not be let down. It must be explained here that “Roarin’
Bill” was the Captain in command of the Company, and although the men
perhaps hardly knew it themselves, or ever stopped to reason it out,
the simple and obvious reason for their reluctance to let him down was
merely because they knew that under no circumstances on earth would
he let them, the Company, down. His nickname was a private jest of
the Company’s, since he had the voice and manners of a sucking dove.
But for all that his orders, his bare word, or even a hint from him,
went farther than any man’s, and this in about as rough and tough a
Company as a Captain could well have to handle. “Bill” had said they
must finish before dark, walked up and down the plank road himself
watching and directing the work, and never as much as looked—that they
knew of—at the watch on his wrist to figure whether they’d make out or
not. “Th’ Terrible Turk ’as spoke; wot ’e ’as said, ’e blanky well ’as
said,” Sergeant Buck remarked once as the Captain passed down the road,
“an’ all the shells as Gerry ever pitched ain’t goin’ to alter it. Come
on, get at it; that blighter’s a mile over.” The gang, who had paused
a moment in their labour to crouch and look up as a shell roared over,
“got at it,” slung the log into place, and had the long spike nails
that held the transverse planks to “the ribbon” or binding edge log
half hammered home before the shell had burst in a cataract of mud and
smoke three hundred yards beyond. The shells weren’t always beyond. Man
after man was sent hobbling, or carried groaning, back over the road
he had helped to build; man after man, until there were six in a row,
was lifted to a patch of slightly drier mud near the roadside and left
there—because the road needed every hand more than did the dead who
were past needing anything.
The job was hard driven at the end, and with all the hard driving
was barely done to time. About 4 o’clock an artillery subaltern rode
over the planks to where the gang worked at the road-end, his horse
slithering and picking its way fearfully over the muddy wet planks.
“Can’t we come through yet?” he asked, and the Captain himself told
him no, he was afraid not, because it would interrupt his work.
“But hang it all,” said the Gunner officer, “there’s a couple of miles
of guns and waggons waiting back there at the Control. If they’re not
through before dark——”
“They won’t be,” said the Captain mildly, “not till my time to finish,
and that’s 5 o’clock. You needn’t look at your watch,” he went on,
“I know it’s not five yet, because I told my men they must finish
by five—and they’re not finished yet.” He said the last words very
quietly, but very distinctly, and those of the gang who heard passed it
round the rest as an excellent jest which had completed the “’tillery
bloke’s” discomfiture. But the Captain’s jest had a double edge. “Start
along at five,” he had called to the retiring Gunner, “and she’ll be
ready for you. This Company puts its work through on time, always.”
And the Company did, cramming a good two hours’ work into the bare
one to make good the boast; picking and spading tremendously at the
shell-torn earth to level a way for the planks, filling in deep and
shallow holes, carrying or dragging or rolling double burdens of logs
and planks, flinging them into place, spiking them together with a
rapid fusillade of click-clanking hammer-blows. They ceased to take
cover or even to stop and crouch from the warning yells of approaching
shells; they flung off the gas-masks, hooked at the “Alert” high on
their chests, to give freer play to their arms; they wallowed in mud
and slime, and cursed and laughed in turn at it, and the road, and the
job, and the Army, and the war. But they finished to time, and actually
at 5 o’clock they drove the last spikes while the first teams were
scrabbling over the last dozen loose planks.
Then the Company wearily gathered up its picks and shovels and dogs and
sleds, and its dead, and trudged back single-file along the edge of the
road up which the streaming traffic was already pouring to plunge off
the end and plough its way to its appointed places.
And now in the “Cheval Blanc” as many of the Company as could find
room were crowded, sitting or standing contentedly in a “fug” you could
cut with a spade, drinking very weak beer and smoking very strong
tobacco, gossiping over the past days, thanking their stars they were
behind in rest for a spell.
The door opened and admitted a gust of cold air; and the cheerful babel
of voices, shuffling feet, and clinking glasses, died in a silence that
spread curiously, inwards circle by circle from the door, as three men
came in and the Company realised them. The Captain was one, and the
other two were—amazing and unusual vision there, for all that it was
so familiar in old days at home—normal, decently dressed in tweeds and
serge, cloth-capped, ordinary “civilians,” obviously British, and of
working class.
The Captain halted and waved them forward. “These two gentlemen,”
he said to the Company, “are—ah—on a tour of the Front. They
will—ah—introduce themselves to you. Corporal, please see them back
to my Mess when they are ready to come,” and he went out.
The two new-comers were slightly ill at ease and felt a little out of
place, although they tried hard to carry it off, and nodded to the
nearest men and dropped a “How goes it?” and “Hullo, mates” here and
there as they moved slowly through the throng that opened to admit
them. Then one of them laughed, still with a slightly embarrassed air,
and squared his shoulders, and spoke up loud enough for the room to
hear.
The room heard—in a disconcerting silence—while he explained that
they were two of a “deputation” of working men brought out to “see the
conditions” at the Front, and go back and tell their mates in the shops
what they saw.
“It’s a pity,” said the Corporal gently when he finished, “you ’adn’t
come to us a day earlier. ’Twoulda bin some condition you’da seen.”
“Wot d’jer want to see?” asked another. “This ... ain’t front ezackly.”
“Listen!” cried another, “ain’t that a shell comin’ over? Take cover!”
And the room tittered, the nearest shell being a good five miles away.
“Want to see everything,” said the deputy. “We’re going in the trenches
to-morrow, but bein’ here to-night we asked your Cap’n where we’d meet
some o’ the boys, an’ he brought us here.”
“Wot trenches—wot part?” he was asked, and when, innocently enough, he
named a part that for years has had the reputation of a Quaker Sunday
School for peacefulness, a smile flickered round. The deputy saw the
smile. He felt uneasy; things weren’t going right; there wasn’t the
eager welcome, the anxious questions after labour conditions and so
on he had expected. So he lifted his voice again and talked. He was
a good talker, which perhaps was the reason he was a chosen deputy.
But he didn’t hold the room. Some listened, others resumed their own
chat, others went on with the business of the evening, the drinking
of thin beer. When he had finished the other man spoke, with even
less success. There is some excuse for this. You cannot quite expect
men who have been working like niggers under the filthiest possible
conditions of wet and mud, weather and squalor, have been living and
working, sleeping and eating, with sudden and violent death at their
very elbows, to come straight out of their own inferno and be in any
way deeply interested in abstract conditions of Labour at Home, or to
be greatly sympathetic to the tea-and-butter shortage troubles of men
who are earning good money, working in comfortable shops, and living in
their own homes. The men were much more interested in affairs in France.
“Wot’s the idea anyway?” asked one man. “Wot’s the good o’ this tour
business?”
“We’ve come to see the facks,” said a deputy. “See ’em for ourselves,
and go back home to tell ’em in the shops what you chaps is doing.”
“Wish they’d let some of us swap places wi’ them in the shops,” was the
answer. “I’d tell ’em something, an’ they’d learn a bit too, doin’ my
job here.”
“The workers, Labour, wants to know,” went on the deputy, ignoring
this. “Some says finish the war, and some says get on with it, and——”
“Which are you doing?” came in swift reply, and “How many is on this
deputation job?”
“There’s three hundred a week coming out,” said the deputy with a touch
of pride, “and——”
“Three hundred!” said a loud voice at the back of the room. “Blimey,
that’s boat an’ train room for three ’undred a week the less o’ us to
go on leaf.”
The talk drifted off amongst the men themselves again, but the
deputation caught snatches of it. “Same ol’ game as ol’ Blank did ...
we’ll see their names in the papers makin’ speeches when they’re home
... wearin’ a tin ’at an’ a gas-mask an’ bein’ warned to keep their
’eads down cos this is the front line—at Vale-o’-tears. Oh Lord!”...
“Square the Quarter-bloke an’ take the shrap helmet home as a souvenir
to hang over the mantel——” (Here a listening deputy blushed faintly
and hastily renounced a long-cherished secret idea.) “Will this trip
entitle ’em to a war medal?” “Lord ’elp the one of ’em I meets wearing
a medal that they gets for a week where they’re goin’, an’ that I’ve
took years to earn, where we come from.”
The deputy began a long speech, worked himself up into a warmth
befitting the subject, begged his hearers to “hold together,” not
to forget they were workers before they were soldiers (“an’ will be
after—with a vote apiece,” struck in a voice), and finally wound up
with a triumphant period about “Union is Strength” and “Labor omnia
vincit—Labour Conquers All,” which last he repeated several times and
with emphasis.
Then the Corporal answered him, and after the first sentence or two
the room stilled and the Company held its breath to listen, breaking
at times into a running murmur of applause. The Corporal spoke well.
He had the gift; still better he had the subject; and, best of all,
he had an audience that understood and could not be shocked by blunt
truths. He told the deputation some details of the work they had been
doing and the conditions under which it was done; what the shell-fire
was like, _and_ what some of the casualties were like; the hours of
their labour and the hours of their rest; how they had made their road
with the shells smashing in at times as fast as it could be made; how
a waggon of timber, six-horse team, and driver had been hit fair by a
five-nine on the road, and how the wreckage (and nothing else that they
could help) had been used to begin fill in the hole; what their daily
pay was and what their rations were, especially on nights when a shell
wrecked the ration-carrying party; and, finally, their total of killed
and wounded in the one day, yesterday.
“Union is strength,” he finished up. “But does their union at home
help our strength here? What strength do we get when a strike wins
and you get more pay—at ’ome, an’ we’re left short o’ the shells or
airyplanes that might save us gettin’ shelled an’ air-bombed in the
ruddy trenches. Labour Conquers All! Does it? Tell that to a five-nine
H.E. droppin’ on you. Ask Black Harry an’ Joe Hullish an’ the rest o’
them we buried yesterday, if Labour Conquers All.”
The deputation had no answer, gave up the argument, and presently
withdrew.
But actually, if they had seen it, and if Labour could see it, they
were entirely right, and the Corporal himself unwittingly had proved
it. Union _is_ strength—if it be the union of the workshops and
the Front; Labour does conquer all—if Labour, Back and Front, pull
together. There was no need to ask the question of Black Harry and Joe
Hullish and the rest, because they themselves were the answer, lying
in their shallow graves that shook and trembled about them to the roar
and rumble of the traffic, the guns and limbers and ammunition waggons
pouring up the road which they had helped to make. They were dead; but
the road was through. Labour _had_ won; they were, are, and—if their
mates, Back and Front, so decree—will be The Conquerors.
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] M.O. Medical Officer
[2] Cushy—easy.
[3] A derisive nickname bestowed by other troops on the A.S.C.
[4] Telephone language for Bx—the technical name for certain shells.
[5] Observation Post.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.