Brigade would have to move forward. I could go on leave now that the
adjutant was back--Beadle and myself were the only two officers in the
Brigade who had gone through the March retreat and not yet been on
leave to England; but I was keen on another trip forward with the
colonel, and on the morning of the 4th Wilde and I joined him on a
prospecting ride, looking for new positions for the batteries.
It was a journey that quickened all one's powers of observation. We
went forward a full five miles, over yellow churned wastes that four
days before had been crowded battlefields; past shell-pocked stretches
that had been made so by our own guns. At first we trotted along a
straight road that a short time before had been seamed with Boche
trenches and barbed wire. The colonel's mare was fresh and ready to shy
at heaps of stones and puddles. "She's got plenty of spirit still,"
said the colonel, "but she's not the mare she was before the hit in the
neck at Commenchon. However, I know her limitations, and she's all
right providing I spare her going uphill."
Just outside the half-mile long village of Ronssoy he pointed to a
clump of broken bricks and shattered beams. "That's the farm that D
Battery insisted was Gillemont Farm, when we were at Cliffe Post on
September 19," he explained. "The day I was with him at the 'O.P.,'
Wood couldn't understand why he was unable to see his shells fall. He
telephoned to the battery to check the range they were firing at, and
then decided that the map was wrong. When I told him to examine his map
more closely he spotted the 140 contour between this place and
Gillemont Farm. It made Gillemont Farm invisible from the 'O.P.' Of
course Gillemont Farm is 2000 yards beyond this place."
We reached a battered cross-roads 1200 yards due south of Duncan Post,
that cockpit of the bitter hand-to-hand fighting of Sept. 19th and
20th. A couple of captured Boche 4.2's--the dreaded high-velocity
gun--stood tucked behind a low grassless bank, their curved, muddy,
camouflaged shields blending with the brown desolation of the
landscape. Two American soldiers saluted the colonel gravely--lean,
tanned, straight-eyed young fellows. For the first time I noticed that
the Americans were wearing puttees like our men, instead of the canvas
gaiters which they sported when first in France. Their tin hats and
box-respirators have always been the same make as ours.
The colonel stopped to look at his map. "We'll turn north-east here and
cross the canal at Bony," he said. We rode round newly-dug shell-slits,
and through gaps in the tangled, rusted barbed wire; at one spot we
passed eighteen American dead, laid out in two neat rows, ready for
removal to the cemetery that the U.S. Army had established in the
neighbourhood; we went within twenty yards of a disabled tank that a
land mine had rendered _hors de combat_; we came across another tank
lumbered half-way across a road. "Tanks always seem to take it into
their heads to collapse on a main road and interrupt traffic," muttered
the colonel sardonically.
There were twelve hundred yards of a straight sunken road for us to
ride through before we reached Bony. That road was a veritable gallery
of German dead. They lay in twos and threes, in queer horrible
postures, along its whole unkempt length, some of them with blackened
decomposed faces and hands, most of them newly killed, for this was a
road that connected the outer defences of the Hindenburg Line with the
network of wire and trenches that formed the Hindenburg Line itself.
"Best sight I've seen since the war," said Wilde with satisfaction. And
if the colonel and myself made no remark we showed no disagreement.
Pity for dead Boche finds no place in the average decent-minded man's
composition. Half a dozen of our armoured cars, wheels off,
half-burned, or their steering apparatus smashed, lay on the entrenched
and wired outskirts of Bony, part of the Hindenburg Line proper. In the
village itself we found Red Cross cars filling up with wounded; Boche
prisoners were being used as stretcher-bearers; groups of waiting
infantry stood in the main street; runners flitted to and fro.
"We'll leave our horses here," said the colonel; and the grooms guided
them to the shelter of a high solid wall. The colonel, Wilde, and I
ascended the main street, making eastward. A couple of 5.9's dropped
close to the northern edge of the village as we came out of it. We met
a party of prisoners headed by two officers--one short, fat, nervous,
dark, bespectacled; the other bearded, lanky, nonchalant, and of good
carriage. He carried a gold-nobbed Malacca cane. Neither officer looked
at us as we passed. The tall one reminded me of an officer among the
first party of Boche prisoners I saw in France in August 1916. His
arrogant, disdainful air had roused in me a gust of anger that made me
glad I was in the war.
We went through a garden transformed into a dust-bin, and dipped down a
hummocky slope that rose again to a chalky ridge. Shells were screaming
overhead in quick succession now, and we walked fast, making for a
white boulder that looked as if it would offer shielded observation and
protection. We found ourselves near the top of one of the giant
air-shafts that connected with the canal tunnel. Tufts of smoke spouted
up at regular intervals on the steep slope behind the village below us.
"We're in time to see a barrage," remarked the colonel, pulling out his
binoculars. "Our people are trying to secure the heights. I didn't know
that Gouy was quite clear of Boche. There was fighting there
yesterday."
"There are some Boche in a trench near that farm on the left," he added
a minute later, after sweeping the hills opposite with his glasses.
"Can you see them?"
I made out what did appear to be three grey tin-helmeted figures, but I
could see nothing of our infantry. The shelling went on, but time
pressed, and the colonel, packing up his glasses, led us eastwards
again, down to a light-railway junction, and through a quaint little
ravine lined with willow-trees. Many German dead lay here. One young
soldier, who had died with his head thrown back resting against a
green bank, his blue eyes open to the sky, wore a strangely perfect
expression of peace and rest. Up another ascending sunken road. The
Boche guns seemed to have switched, and half a dozen shells skimmed the
top of the road, causing us to wait. We looked again at the fight being
waged on the slopes behind the village. Our barrage had lifted, but we
saw no sign of advancing infantry.
The colonel turned to me suddenly and said, "I'm going to select
positions about a thousand yards south of where we are at this
moment--along the valley. Wilde will come with me. You go back and pick
up the horses, and meet us at Quennemont Farm. I expect we shall be
there almost as soon as you."
I followed the direct road to return to Bony. A few shells dropped on
either side of the road, which was obviously a hunting-ground for the
Boche gunners. At least a dozen British dead lay at intervals huddled
against the sides of the road. One of them looked to be an artillery
officer, judged by his field-boots and spurs. But the top part of him
was covered by a rain-proof coat, and I saw no cap.
Quennemont Farm was a farm only in name. There was no wall more than
three feet high left standing; the whole place was shapeless, stark,
blasted into nothingness. In the very centre of the mournful chaos lay
three disembowelled horses and an overturned Boche ammunition waggon.
The shells were still on the shelves. They were Yellow Cross, the
deadliest of the Boche mustard-gas shell.
I went on leave next morning, and got a motor-car lift from Peronne as
far as Amiens. Before reaching Villers-Bretonneux, of glorious, fearful
memories, we passed through Warfusee-Abancourt, a shell of its former
self, a brick heap, a monument of devastation. An aged man and a slim
white-faced girl were standing by the farm cart that had brought them
there, the first civilians I had seen since August. The place was
deserted save for them. In sad bereavement they looked at the cruel
desolation around them.
"My God," said my companion, interpreting my inmost thought, "what a
home-coming!"
XVIII. A LAST DAY AT THE O.P.
When, on October 21, I returned to France, the war had made a very big
stride towards its end. Cambrai had been regained, and Le Cateau--"Lee
Katoo," the men insisted on calling it--taken. Ostend was ours, Lille
was ours; over Palestine we had cast our mantle. Our own Division,
still hard at it, had gone forward twenty-four miles during my
fortnight's leave in England. Stories of their doings trickled towards
me when I broke the journey at Amiens on my way back to the lines. I
met an Infantry captain bound for England.
"It's been all open fighting this last fortnight--cavalry, and forced
marches, and all that--and I don't want to hear any more talk of the
new Armies not being able to carry out a war of movement," he said
chirpily. "The men have been magnificent. The old Boche is done now;
but we're making no mistakes--we're after him all the while.
"Dam funny, you know, some of the things that are happening up there.
The Boche has left a lot of coal dumps behind, and every one's after
it. There's a 2000-ton pile at Le Cateau, and it was disappearing so
rapidly that they put a guard on it. I was walking with my colonel the
other day, and we came across an Australian shovelling coal from this
dump into a G.S. waggon. A sentry, with fixed bayonet, was marching up
an' down.
"The colonel stopped when we came to the sentry, and asked him what he
was supposed to be doing.
"'Guarding the coal dump, sir.'
"'But what is this Australian doing? Has he any authority to draw coal?
Did he show you a chit?'
"'No, sir,' replied the sentry. 'I thought, as he had a Government
waggon, it would be all right.'
"'Upon my Sam!' said the colonel, astonished. Then he tackled the
Australian.
"'What authority have you for taking away this coal?' he asked.
"The Australian stood up and said, 'I don't want any authority--I bally
well fought for it,' and went on with his shovelling.
"Frankly, the colonel didn't know what to say; but he has a sense of
humour. 'Extraordinary fellows!' he said to me as we walked off.
"Then we came across an American who was 'scrounging' or something in
an empty house. He jumped to attention when he saw the colonel, and
saluted very smartly. But what do you think? He saluted with a bowler
hat on,--found it in the house, I expect.... I tell you, it was an
eye-opening day for the colonel."
I lorry-hopped to the village that I had been told was Divisional
Headquarters; but they had moved the day before, seven miles farther
forward. There were nearly 200 civilians here. I saw a few faded,
ancient men in worn corduroys and blue-peaked caps; a bent old crone,
in a blue apron, hobbled with a water-bucket past a corner shop--a
grocer's--shuttered, sluttish from want of paint; three tiny children,
standing in doorways, wore a strangely old expression. There was a
pathetically furtive air about all these people. For four years they
had been under the Boche. Of actual, death-bringing, frightening war
they had seen not more than five days. The battle had swept over and
beyond them, carrying with it the feared and hated German, and the main
fighting force of the pursuing British as well. But it was too soon yet
for them to forget, or to throw off a sort of lurking dread that even
now the Boche might return.
I got a lift in another lorry along a road crumbling under the unusual
amount of traffic that weighed upon it. Our advance had been so swift
that the war scars on the countryside had not entirely blighted its
normal characteristics. Here were shell-holes, but no long succession
of abandoned gun-positions, few horse-tracks, fewer trenches, and no
barbed wire. The villages we went through had escaped obliterating
shell fire. I learned that our attacks had been planned thus-wise. Near
a bleak cross-roads I saw Collinge of B Battery, and got off the lorry
to talk to him.
"Brigade Headquarters are at Bousies, about six miles from here," he
said. "I'm going that way. The batteries are all in Bousies."
"What sort of a time have you had?" I inquired.
"Oh, most exciting! Shan't forget the day we crossed the Le Cateau
river. We were the advance Brigade. The Engineers were supposed to put
bridges across for us; the material came up all right, but the pioneers
who were to do the work missed the way. The sapper officer who had
brought the material wanted to wait till the proper people arrived, but
the Boche was shelling and machine-gunning like mad, and the colonel
said that bridge-building must be got on with at once. The colonel was
great that day. Old Johns of D Battery kept buzzing along with
suggestions, but the colonel put his foot down, and said, 'It's the
sapper officer's work; let him do it.' And the bridges were really well
put up. All the guns got across safely, although C Battery had a team
knocked out."
I walked by Collinge's side through a village of sloping roofs,
single-storied red-brick houses, and mud-clogged streets. It was the
village which our two brigades of artillery occupied when the Armistice
was signed, where the King came to see us, and M. le Maire, in his
excitement, gave His Majesty that typically French, shall I say? clasp
of intimacy and brotherliness, a left-handed handshake.
"Curious thing happened on that rise," remarked Collinge when we were
in open country again. "The colonel and the adjutant were with an
infantry General and his Staff officers, reconnoitring. The General had
a little bitch something like a whippet. She downed a hare, and though
it brought them into view of the Boche, the General, the colonel, and
the others chased after them like mad. I believe the colonel won the
race--but the adjutant will tell you all about it."
Away on the left a lone tree acted as a landmark for a sunken road.
"Brigade tried to make a headquarters there," went on Collinge, "but a
signaller got knocked out, and the Boche began using the tree as a
datum point; so the colonel ordered a shift." Twenty rough wooden
crosses rose mournful and remote in a wide, moist mangel-field. "The
cavalry got it badly there," said Collinge. "A 4.2 gun turned on them
from close range, and did frightful execution." We were near to a
cross-road, marked balefully by a two-storied house, cut in half so
that the interior was opened to view like a doll's house, and by other
shell-mauled buildings. "The batteries came into action under that
bank," he continued, pointing his cane towards a valley riddled with
shell-holes. "That's where Dumble did so well. Came along with the
cavalry an hour and a half before any Horse Artillery battery, and
brought his guns up in line, like F.A.T.... See that cemetery on the
top of the hill?... the Boche made it in August 1914; lot of the old
Army buried there, and it's been jolly well looked after. The colonel
walked round and looked at every grave one day; he said he'd never seen
a better cared-for cemetery.... We had an 'O.P.' there for the
Richemont River fight. The Boche shelled it like blazes some days....
And we saw great sights up that _pave_ road there, over the dip. They
held a big conference there; all sorts of Generals turned up.... Staff
cars that looked like offices, with the maps and operation orders
pinned up inside; and when our battery went by, the road was so packed
with traffic that infantry were marching along in fours on either side
of the road."
We reached the outskirts of Le Cateau, descending a steep _pave_ road.
"They shelled this place like stink yesterday," Collinge told me.
"Headquarters were in one of those little houses on the left for one
night, and their waggon line is there now, so you'll be able to get a
horse.... I heard that Major Bartlett had both his chargers killed
yesterday when C Battery came through.... Isn't that one of them, that
black horse lying under the trees?"
I looked and saw many horses lying dead on both sides of the road, and
thought little of it. That was war. Then all my senses were strung up
to attention: a small bay horse lay stretched out on the pathway, his
head near the kerb. There was a shapeliness of the legs and a fineness
of the mud-checkered coat that seemed familiar. I stepped over to look.
Yes, it was my own horse "Tommy," that old Castle, our ex-adjutant, had
given me--old Castle's "handy little horse." A gaping hole in the head
told all that needed to be told. I found "Swiffy" and the doctor in the
workman's cottage that had become Brigade waggon-line headquarters.
Yes, "Tommy" had been killed the day before. My groom, Morgan, was
riding him. The Boche were sending over shrapnel, high in the air, and
one bullet had found its billet. Poor little horse! Spirited, but easy
to handle, always in condition, always well-mannered. Ah, well! we had
had many good days together. Poor little horse!
* * * * *
I want always to remember Bousies, the village of gardens and hedgerows
and autumn tints where we saw the war out, and lay under shell fire for
the last time; whence we fought our final battle on November 4th, when
young Hearn of A Battery was killed by machine-gun bullets at 70 yards'
range, and Major Bullivant, with a smashed arm and a crippled thigh,
huddled under a wall until Dumble found him--the concluding fight that
brought me a strange war trophy in a golfing-iron found in a hamlet
that the Boche had sprawled upon for four full years.... And the name
punched on the iron was that of an Oxford Street firm.
Collinge and I rode into Bousies in the wan light of an October
afternoon. At a cross-roads that the Boche had blown up--"They didn't
do it well enough; the guns got round by that side track, and we were
only held up ten minutes," said Collinge--Brigade Headquarters'
sign-board had been planted in a hedge. My way lay up a slushy
tree-bordered lane; Collinge bade me good-bye, and rode on down the
winding street.
There were the usual welcoming smiles. Manning gave me a "Had a good
leave, sir?" in his deep-sea voice, and Wilde came out to show where my
horse could be stabled. "It's a top-hole farm, and after the next move
we'll bring Headquarters waggon line up here.... The colonel says you
can have his second charger now that you've lost 'Tommy.' He's taking
on Major Veasey's mare, the one with the cold back that bucks a bit.
She's a nice creature if she's given plenty of work."
"How is the colonel?" I asked.
"Oh, he's in great form; says the war may end any minute. Major Simpson
and Major Drysdale are both away on leave, and the colonel's been up a
good deal seeing the batteries register.... We got a shock when we came
into this place yesterday. A 4.2 hit the men's cook-house, that small
building near the gate.... But they haven't been troublesome since."
The end wall of the long-fronted narrow farmhouse loomed up gauntly
beside the pillared entrance to the rectangular courtyard. A
weather-vane in the form of a tin trotting horse flaunted itself on the
topmost point. This end wall rose to such height because, though the
farmhouse was one-storied, its steep-sloping roof enclosed an attic big
enough to give sixty men sleeping room. Just below the weather-vane was
a hole poked out by the Boche for observation purposes. Our adjutant
used to climb up to it twice daily as a sort of constitutional. Some
one had left in this perch a bound volume of a Romanist weekly, with
highly dramatic, fearfully coloured illustrations. As the house
contained some twenty of these volumes, I presumed that they betrayed
the religious leanings of the farm's absent owner. A row of decently
ventilated stables faced the farmhouse, while at the end of the
courtyard, opposite to the entrance gates, stood an enormous
high-doored barn. The entrance-hall of the house gave, on the left, to
two connecting stone-flagged rooms, one of which Manning used as a
kitchen--Meddings, our regular cook, was on leave. The other room, with
its couple of spacious civilian beds, we used as a mess, and the
colonel and the adjutant slept there. The only wall decorations were
two "samplers" executed by a small daughter of the house, a school
certificate in a plain frame, and a couple of gaudy-tinselled religious
pictures. A pair of pot dogs on the mantelpiece were as stupidly ugly
as some of our own mid-Victorian cottage treasures. And there were the
usual glass-covered orange blossoms mounted on red plush and gilt
leaves--the wedding custom traditional to the country districts of
Northern France. The inner door of this room opened directly into the
stable where our horses were stalled. An infantry colonel and his staff
occupied the one large and the two small rooms to the right of the
entrance-hall; but after dinner they left us to go forward, and my
servant put down a mattress on the stone floor of one of the smaller
rooms for me to sleep upon. Wilde took possession of the other little
chamber. The large room, which contained a colossal oak wardrobe,
became our mess after breakfast next day. The signallers had fixed
their telephone exchange in the vaulted cellar beneath the house, and
the servants and grooms crowded there as well when the Boche's
night-shelling grew threatening.
After a long deprivation we had come into a country where cabbages and
carrots, turnips and beetroot, were to be had for the picking; and
there were so many plates and glasses to be borrowed from the
farmhouse cupboards that I feared greatly that Manning would feel
bound to rise to the unexampled occasion by exercising his well-known
gift for smashing crockery. We dined pleasantly and well that night;
and when the night-firing programme had been sent out to the
batteries--the Boche was in force in the big thick forest that lay
three thousand yards east of our farm--we settled down to a good hour's
talk. Wilde told me of the German sniper they had found shot just
before the advance to this village; the adjutant narrated the
magnificent gallantry of an officer who had relinquished his job of
Reconnaissance officer to the C.R.A. in order to join a battery, and
had now gone home with his third wound since Zillebeke. "You remember
how he came back in time for the August advance and got hit immediately
and wouldn't let them send him back to England--you know we loaned him
to the --rd Brigade because they were short of officers. Well, he
rolled up again about ten days ago, and got hit again in the Le Cateau
attack. Major 'Pat' told me he was wonderful.... Lay in a shell-hole
with his leg smashed--they poured blood out of his boots--and commanded
his battery from there, blowing his whistle and all that, until they
made him let himself be taken away." The colonel, who listened and at
the same time wrote letters, said that the thing that pleased him most
during the last few days was the patriotic instinct of some cows. When
the Hun evacuated Le Cateau he took away with him all the able-bodied
Frenchmen and all the cows. But his retreat became so rapid and so
confused, that numbers of the men escaped. So did the cows: for three
days they were dribbling back to their homesteads and pasturages.
All through the night the enemy shelled Bousies. He planted only two
near us, but a splinter made a hole in the roof of the big barn and
caught a mule on the shoulder.
The doctor came up from the waggon line next morning and accompanied me
on a tour of the batteries. "If you follow the yellow wire you'll come
to B Battery," said Wilde. "They are in the corner of a meadow. A
Battery are not far away, across the stream." It was a golden autumn
day, and our feet rustled through the fallen yellow leaves that
carpeted a narrow lane bowered by high, luxuriant, winding hedges.
"Why, this place must be a paradise in peace times," said the doctor,
entranced by the sweet tranquillity of the spot. "It's like a lover's
walk you see in pictures." We strode over fallen trees and followed the
telephone wire across a strip of rich green. B Battery's guns were
tucked beneath some stubby full-leaved trees that would hide them from
the keenest-eyed aerial observer. "No sick, doctor," called Bob
Pottinger from underneath the trench-cover roof of his three-foot hole
in the ground. "We're improving the position and have no time to be
ill." The doctor and I crossed a sticky water-logged field, and passed
over the plank-bridge that spanned the slow vagrant stream. A battery
had their mess in one of the low creeper-clad cottages lining the road.
Their guns were thrust into the hedge that skirted the neat garden at
the back.