country. The Huns live there. That's the worst of doing all the
attacking; we live on the recent battlefields we have won, whereas the
enemy retreats into untouched cleanness. One can see church steeples
peeping above woods, chateaus gleaming, and stretches of shining
river. It looks innocent and kindly, but from the depth of its
greenness invisible eyes peer out. Do you make one unwary movement,
and over comes a flock of shells.
At night from out this swamp of vileness a phantom city floats up; it
is composed of the white Very lights and multi-coloured flares which
the Hun employs to protect his front-line from our patrols. For brief
spells No Man's Land becomes brilliant as day. Many of his flares are
prearranged signals, meaning that his artillery is shooting short or
calling for an S.O.S. The combination of lights which mean these
things are changed with great frequency, lest we should guess. The
on-looker, with a long night of observing before him, becomes
imaginative and weaves out for the dancing lights a kind of Shell-Hole
Nights' Entertainment. The phantom city over there is London, New
York, Paris, according to his fancy. He's going out to dinner with his
girl. All those flares are arc-lamps along boulevards; that last white
rocket that went flaming across the sky, was the faery taxi which is
to speed him on his happy errand. It isn't so, one has only to
remember.
We were in the Somme for several months. The mud was up to our knees
almost all the time. We were perishingly cold and very rarely dry.
There was no natural cover. When we went up forward to observe, we
would stand in water to our knees for twenty-four hours rather than go
into the dug-outs; they were so full of vermin and battened
flies. Wounded and strayed men often drowned on their journey back
from the front-line. Many of the dead never got buried; lives couldn't
be risked in carrying them out. We were so weary that the sight of
those who rested for ever, only stirred in us a quiet envy. Our
emotions were too exhausted for hatred--they usually are, unless some
new Hunnishness has roused them. When we're having a bad time, we
glance across No Man's Land and say, “Poor old Fritzie, he's getting
the worst of it.” That thought helps.
An attack is a relaxation from the interminable monotony. It means
that we shall exchange the old mud, in which we have been living, for
new mud which may be better. Months of work and preparation have led
up to it; then one morning at dawn, in an intense silence we wait with
our eyes glued on our watches for the exact second which is zero
hour. All of a sudden our guns open up, joyously as a peal of
bells. It's like Judgment Day. A wild excitement quickens the
heart. Every privation was worth this moment. You wonder where you'll
be by night-fall--over there, in the Hun support trenches, or in a
green world which you used to sing about on Sundays. You don't much
care, so long as you've completed your job. “We're well away,” you
laugh to the chap next you. The show has commenced.
When you have given people every reason you can think of which
explains the spirit of our men, they still shake their heads in a
bewildered manner, murmuring, “I don't know how you stand it.” I'm
going to make one last attempt at explanation.
We stick it out by believing that we're in the right--to believe
you're in the right makes a lot of difference. You glance across No
Man's Land and say, “Those blighters are wrong; I'm right.” If you
believe that with all the strength of your soul and mind, you can
stand anything. To allow yourself to be beaten would be to own that
you weren't.
To still hold that you're right in the face of armed assertions from
the Hun that you're wrong, requires pride in your regiment, your
division, your corps and, most of all, in your own integrity. No one
who has not worn a uniform can understand what pride in a regiment can
do for a man. For instance, in France every man wears his divisional
patch, which marks him. He's jolly proud of his division and wouldn't
consciously do anything to let it down. If he hears anything said to
its credit, he treasures the saying up; it's as if he himself had been
mentioned in despatches. It was rumoured this year that the night
before an attack, a certain Imperial General called his battalion
commanders together. When they were assembled, he said, “Gentlemen, I
have called you together to tell you that tomorrow morning you will be
confronted by one of the most difficult tasks that has ever been
allotted to you; you will have to measure up to the traditions of the
division on our left--the First Canadian Division, which is in my
opinion the finest fighting division in France.” I don't know whether
the story is true or not. If the Imperial General didn't say it, he
ought to have. But because I belong to the First Canadian Division, I
believe the report true and set store by it. Every new man who joins
our division hears that story. He feels that he, too, has got to be
worthy of it. When he's tempted to get the “wind-up,” he glances down
at the patch on his arm. It means as much to him as a V. C.; so he
steadies his nerves, squares his jaws and plays the man.
There's believing you're right. There's your sense of pride, and then
there's something else, without which neither of the other two would
help you. It seems a mad thing to say with reference to fighting men,
but that other thing which enables you to meet sacrifice gladly is
love. There's a song we sing in England, a great favourite which,
when it has recounted all the things we need to make us good and
happy, tops the list with these final requisites, “A little patience
and a lot of love.” We need the patience--that goes without saying;
but it's the love that helps us to die gladly--love for our cause, our
pals, our family, our country. Under the disguise of duty one has to
do an awful lot of loving at the Front. One of the finest examples of
the thing I'm driving at, happened comparatively recently.
In a recent attack the Hun set to work to knock out our artillery. He
commenced with a heavy shelling of our batteries--this lasted for some
hours. He followed it up by clapping down on them a gas-barrage. The
gunners' only chance of protecting themselves from the deadly fumes
was to wear their gas-helmets. All of a sudden, just as the gassing of
our batteries was at its worst, all along our front-line
S.O.S. rockets commenced to go up. Our infantry, if they weren't
actually being attacked, were expecting a heavy Hun counter-attack,
and were calling on us by the quickest means possible to help them.
Of a gun-detachment there are two men who cannot do their work
accurately in gas-helmets--one of these is the layer and the other is
the fuse-setter. If the infantry were to be saved, two men out of the
detachment of each protecting gun must sacrifice themselves.
Instantly, without waiting for orders, the fuse-setters and layers
flung aside their helmets. Our guns opened up. The unmasked men lasted
about twenty minutes; when they had been dragged out of the gun-pits
choking or in convulsions, two more took their places without a
second's hesitation. This went on for upwards of two hours. The
reason given by the gunners for their splendid, calculated devotion to
duty was that they weren't going to let their pals in the trenches
down. You may call their heroism devotion to duty or anything you
like; the motive that inspired it was love.
When men, having done their “bit” get safely home from the Front and
have the chance to live among the old affections and enjoyments, the
memory of the splendid sharing of the trenches calls them back. That
memory blots out all the tragedy and squalor; they think of their
willing comrades in sacrifice and cannot rest.
I was with a young officer who was probably the most wounded man who
ever came out of France alive. He had lain for months in hospital
between sandbags, never allowed to move, he was so fragile. He had had
great shell-wounds in his legs and stomach; the artery behind his left
ear had been all but severed. When he was at last well enough to be
discharged, the doctors had warned him never to play golf or polo, or
to take any violent form of exercise lest he should do himself a
damage. He had returned to Canada for a rest and was back in London,
trying to get sent over again to the Front.
We had just come out from the Alhambra. Whistles were being blown
shrilly for taxis. London theatre-crowds were slipping cosily through
the muffled darkness--a man and girl, always a man and a girl. They
walked very closely; usually the girl was laughing. Suddenly the
contrast flashed across my mind between this bubbling joy of living
and the poignant silence of huddled forms beneath the same starlight,
not a hundred miles away in No Man's Land. He must have been seeing
the same vision and making the same contrast. He pulled on my
arm. “I've got to go back.”
“But you've done your 'bit,'” I expostulated. “If you do go back and
don't get hit, you may burst a blood vessel or something, if what the
doctors told you is true.”
He halted me beneath an arc-light. I could see the earnestness in his
face. “I feel about it this way,” he said, “If I'm out there, I'm just
one more. A lot of chaps out there are jolly tired; if I was there,
I'd be able to give some chap a rest.”
That was love; for a man, if he told the truth, would say, “I hate the
Front.” Yet most of us, if you ask us, “Do you want to go back?” would
answer, “Yes, as fast as I can.” Why? Partly because it's difficult to
go back, and in difficulty lies a challenge; but mostly because we
love the chaps. Not any particular chap, but all the fellows out there
who are laughing and enduring.
Last time I met the most wounded man who ever came out of France
alive, it was my turn to be in hospital. He came to visit me there,
and told me that he'd been all through the Vimy racket and was again
going back.
“But how did you manage to get into the game again?” I asked. “I
thought the doctors wouldn't pass you.”
He laughed slily. “I didn't ask the doctors. If you know the right
people, these things can always be worked.”
More than half of the bravery at the Front is due to our love of the
folks we have left behind. We're proud of them; we want to give them
reason to be proud of us. We want them to share our spirit, and we
don't want to let them down. The finest reward I've had since I became
a soldier was when my father, who'd come over from America to spend my
ten days' leave with me in London, saw me off on my journey back to
France. I recalled his despair when I had first enlisted, and compared
it with what happened now. We were at the pier-gates, where we had to
part. I said to him, “If you knew that I was going to die in the next
month, would you rather I stayed or went?” “Much rather you went,” he
answered. Those words made me feel that I was the son of a soldier,
even if he did wear mufti. One would have to play the game pretty low
to let a father like that down.
When you come to consider it, a quitter is always a selfish man. It's
selfishness that makes a man a coward or a deserter. If he's in a
dangerous place and runs away, all he's doing is thinking of himself.
I've been supposed to be talking about God As We See Him. I don't know
whether I have. As a matter of fact if you had asked me, when I was
out there, whether there was any religion in the trenches, I should
have replied, “Certainly not.” Now that I've been out of the fighting
for a while, I see that there is religion there; a religion which will
dominate the world when the war is ended--the religion of
heroism. It's a religion in which men don't pray much. With me, before
I went to the Front, prayer was a habit. Out there I lost the habit;
what one was doing seemed sufficient. I got the feeling that I might
be meeting God at any moment, so I didn't need to be worrying Him all
the time, hanging on to a spiritual telephone and feeling slighted if
He didn't answer me directly I rang Him up. If God was really
interested in me, He didn't need constant reminding. When He had a
world to manage, it seemed best not to interrupt Him with frivolous
petitions, but to put my prayers into my work. That's how we all feel
out there.
God as we see Him! I couldn't have told you how I saw Him before I
went to France. It's funny--you go away to the most damnable
undertaking ever invented, and you come back cleaner in spirit. The
one thing that redeems the horror is that it does make a man
momentarily big enough to be in sympathy with his Creator--he gets
such glimpses of Him in his fellows.
There was a time when I thought it was rather up to God to explain
Himself to the creatures He had fashioned--since then I've acquired
the point of view of a soldier. I've learnt discipline and my own
total unimportance. In the Army discipline gets possession of your
soul; you learn to suppress yourself, to obey implicitly, to think of
others before yourself. You learn to jump at an order, to forsake your
own convenience at any hour of the day or night, to go forward on the
most lonely and dangerous errands without complaining. You learn to
feel that there is only one thing that counts in life and only one
thing you can make out of it--the spirit you have developed in
encountering its difficulties. Your body is nothing; it can be smashed
in a minute. How frail it is you never realise until you have seen men
smashed. So you learn to tolerate the body, to despise Death and to
place all your reliance on courage--which when it is found at its best
is the power to endure for the sake of others.
When we think of God, we think of Him in just about the same way that
a Tommy in the front-line thinks of Sir Douglas Haig. Heaven is a kind
of General Headquarters. All that the Tommy in the front-line knows of
an offensive is that orders have reached him, through the appointed
authorities, that at zero hour he will climb out of his trench and go
over the top to meet a reasonable chance of wounds and death. He
doesn't say, “I don't know whether I will climb out. I never saw Sir
Douglas Haig--there mayn't be any such person. I want to have a chat
with him first. If I agree with him, after that I may go over the
top--and, then again, I may not. We'll see about it.”
Instead, he attributes to his Commander-in-Chief the same patriotism,
love of duty, and courage which he himself tries to practice. He
believes that if he and Sir Douglas Haig were to change places, Sir
Douglas Haig would be quite as willing to sacrifice himself. He obeys;
he doesn't question.
That's the way every Tommy and officer comes to think of God--as a
Commander-in-Chief whom he has never seen, but whose orders he blindly
carries out.
The religion of the trenches is not a religion which analyses God with
impertinent speculation. It isn't a religion which takes up much of
His time. It's a religion which teaches men to carry on stoutly and to
say, “I've tried to do my bit as best I know how. I guess God knows
it. If I 'go west' to-day, He'll remember that I played the game. So I
guess He'll forget about my sins and take me to Himself.”
That is the simple religion of the trenches as I have learnt it--a
religion not without glory; to carry on as bravely as you know how,
and to trust God without worrying Him.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's The Glory of the Trenches, by Coningsby Dawson