Haig's report on the Fifth Army Retreat--his 'Times' had just reached
him. He asked the doctor whether it was too early for a
whisky-and-soda, and showed us a Boche barometer, his latest war
trophy. "We've lost quite a lot of men since you've been away," he told
me. "Do you realise the Brigade has been only four days out of the
line since August 1st? You've heard about young Beale being wounded, of
course? I was on leave, and so was Beadle; and Tincler was sick, so
there was only Dumble and Beale running the battery. Beale got hit when
shifting the waggon line, ... and it was rather fine of him. He knew
old Dumble was up to his eyes that day, and told the sergeant-major not
to tell Dumble what had happened to him, until the battle was over. Did
you hear, too, about Manison, one of the new officers? Poor chap!
Killed by a bomb dropped in daylight by one of our own aeroplanes as he
was going to the O.P.
"The Boche hasn't done much night-bombing lately. I don't think he's
got the 'planes. He gave us one terrible night, though, soon after we
crossed the canal, ... knocked out two of my guns and killed any number
of horses. There were ammunition dumps going up all over the place that
night; ... he stopped us from doing our night firing.
"Have you heard the story of the old woman at S----?" he went on. "When
the bombardment was going on the civilians went down into the cellars.
The Germans hooked it, and the people came up from the cellars. But
Boche snipers were still in the village, and our advance parties warned
the inhabitants to keep below.... When, however, our troops came along
in a body, one old woman rushed forward from under the church wall, in
the square, you know.... She was excited, I expect.... A swine of a
Boche in a house on the far side of the square shot her.... Our
infantry surrounded that house."
"Well, I must quit," ejaculated the doctor suddenly. We went out and
made for the village road again. A screaming swish, and a report that
hurt the ears and shattered the windows in the front of the cottage. A
Boche high-velocity shell had crashed a few yards away on the other
side of the stream, and thrown up spouts of black slimy mud. The doctor
and I scurried back to the shelter of the cottage wall. Another shell
and another. A lieutenant-colonel of Infantry, on horseback, swung
violently round the corner and joined us. Three more shells fell. Then
silence. "These sudden bursts of fire are very disconcerting, aren't
they?" remarked the colonel as he mounted and rode away.
"Say, now!" said the doctor to me. "I think we'll call back and have
that whisky-and-soda Major Bullivant offered us before we resume our
journey."
"We'll take a trip up to the 'O.P.' this morning," said the colonel to
me at breakfast on October 28th. The wind was sufficiently drying to
make walking pleasant, and to tingle the cheeks. The sun was a tonic;
the turned-up earth smelt good. Our Headquarter horses had been put out
to graze in the orchard--a Boche 4.2 had landed in it the night
before--and they were frolicking mightily, Wilde's charger "Blackie"
being especially industrious shooing off one of the mules from the
colonel's mare. There was a swirling and a skelter of brown and yellow
leaves at the gap in the lane where we struck across a vegetable
garden. A square patch torn from a bed-sheet flew taut from the top of
a clump of long hop-poles--the sign, before the village was freed, to
warn our artillery observers that civilians lived in the cottage close
by. Similar, now out-of-date, white flags swung to the breeze from many
roof-tops in the village. "The extraordinary feature," the colonel
mentioned, "was the number of Tricolours that the French had been able
to hide from the Germans; they put them out when we came through." He
nodded a pleasant good-day to a good looking young staff officer who
stood on the steps of the house in the _pave_-laid street where one of
our infantry brigades had made their headquarters. The staff officer
wore a pair of those full-below-the-knee "plus 4 at golf" breeches that
the Gardee affects. "For myself, I wouldn't wear that kind of breeches
unless I were actually on duty with the Guards," said the colonel
rather sardonically--"they are so intensely ugly." A tiny piano tinkled
at a corner house near the roofless church and the Grande Place. In
two-foot letters on the walls in the square were painted, "Hommes" on
some houses, "Femmes" on others: reminders of the Boche method of
segregating the sexes before he evacuated the inhabitants he wanted to
evacuate. Only five civilians remained in the village now--three old
men and two feeble decrepit women, numbed and heart-sick with the war,
but obstinate in clinging to their homesteads. Already some of our men
were patching leaky, shrapnel-flicked roofs with biscuit-tins and
strong strips of waterproof sheeting.
We passed through A Battery's garden at nine o'clock. "We won't disturb
them," said the colonel. "Bullivant is a morning sleeper, and is
certain not to be up after the night-firing." Round the corner,
however, stood a new officer who looked smart and fresh, with brightly
polished buttons and Sam Browne belt. He saluted in the nervously
precise fashion of the newly-joined officer. The colonel answered the
salute, but did not speak; and he and I worked our way--following the
track of a Tank--through and between hedges and among fruit-trees that
had not yet finished their season's output. We passed the huddled-up
body of a shot British soldier lying behind a fallen tree-trunk. We
were making for the quarry in which C and D Batteries were neighbours.
On a ditch-bordered road we met ten refugees, sent back that morning
from a hamlet a mile and a half away, not yet considered safe from the
Boche. The men, seeing us, removed their hats and lowered them as far
as the knee--the way in which the Boche had commanded them to proffer
respect. One aged woman in a short blue skirt wore sabots, and British
puttees in place of stockings.
There had been a mishap at D Battery in the early hours of the morning.
Their five useable 4.5 howitzers had been placed in a perfect how.
position against the bank of the quarry. In the excitement of
night-firing a reinforcement gunner had failed to "engage the
plungers," the muzzle had not been elevated, and the shell, instead of
descending five thousand yards away, had hit the bank twelve yards in
front. The explosion killed two of the four men working that particular
how. and wounded a third, and knocked out the N.C.O. in charge of
another how. forty yards distant. The colonel examined the howitzer,
looked gravely severe, and said that an officers' inquiry would be held
next day. He asked Major Bartlett of C Battery, who was housed in a
toy-sized cottage in the centre of the quarry, how his 18-pdrs. were
shooting; and mentioned that the infantry were apprehensive of
short-shooting along a road close to our present front line, since it
lay at an awkward angle for our guns. Major Bartlett, self-possessed,
competent, answered in the way the colonel liked officers to answer--no
"I thinks": his replies either plain "Yes" or "No." Major Bartlett gave
chapter and verse of his battery-shooting during the two previous days,
and said that every round had been observed fire.
Walking briskly--the colonel was the fittest man of forty-five I have
known--we mounted a slope of turnip-fields and fresh-ploughed land.
There was a plantation five hundred yards to right of us, and five
hundred yards to left of us; into the bigger one on the left two 5.9's
dropped as we came level with it. Splashes of newly thrown-up earth
behind tree-clumps, against banks and alongside hedges, showed the
short breast-high trenches, some six yards long, in which the infantry
had fought a few days before. Fifteen hundred yards away the clustering
trees of the great forest where the enemy lay broke darkly against the
horizon. "You see that row of tall straight trees in front of the
forest, to the right of the gabled house where the white flag is
flying," said the colonel, pulling out his glasses--"that's the present
front line." Three ponderous booms from that direction denoted trench
mortars at work.
We descended the other side of the slope, keeping alongside a hedge
that ran towards a red-roofed farm. In two separate places about three
yards of the hedge had been cut away. "Boche soldiering!" remarked the
colonel informatively. "Enabled him to look along both sides of the
hedge and guard against surprise when our infantry were coming up.
"We may as well call at Battalion Headquarters," he added when we
reached the farm. In a wide cellar, where breakfast had not yet been
cleared away, we came upon a lieutenant-colonel, twenty-four years of
age, receiving reports from his company commanders. Suave in manner,
clear-eyed, not hasty in making judgments, he had learnt most things to
be known about real war at Thiepval, Schwaben Redoubt, and other bloody
places where the Division had made history; wounded again in the August
advance, he had refused to be kept from these final phases. The
colonel and he understood each other. There was the point whether
liaison duties between infantry and artillery could be more usefully
conducted in the swift-changing individual fighting of recent days from
infantry brigade or from infantry battalion; there were conflicting
statements by junior officers upon short-shooting, and they required
sifting; a few words had to be said about the battalion's own stretch
of front and its own methods of harassing the enemy. A few crisp
questions and replies, all bearing upon realities, a smile or two, a
consultation of maps, and another portion of the colonel's task for
that day was completed.
We walked across more ploughed land towards a sunken road, where
infantry could be seen congregated in that sort of _dolce far niente_
which, on the part of infantry in support, is really rather deceptive.
A "ping-ping!" whisked past, and stung us to alertness.
"Hullo--machine-guns!" ejaculated the colonel, and we quickened our
steps toward the sunken road.
A major and a subaltern of the machine-gunners clambered down the
opposite bank.
"I believe I've spotted that fellow, sir," burst forth the major with
some excitement. "I think he's in a house over there ... might be a
target for you ... bullets have been coming from that way every now and
again for two days.... I'll show you, if you like, sir."
The major and the colonel crept out on top of the bank, and made for a
shell-hole forty yards in front. I followed them. The major pointed
across the rolling grass lands to a two-storied grey house with a
slate roof, fourteen hundred yards away. "I believe he's in there," he
said with decision.
The colonel looked through his glasses.
The major spoke again. "Do you see the square piece removed from the
church spire, sir?... That looks like an 'O.P.', doesn't it?"
The colonel opened his map and pointed to a tiny square patch. "I make
that to be the house," he said. "Do you agree?"
"Yes, sir," replied the major. "We thought at first it was the house
you see marked four hundred yards more south-east; but I believe that
is really the one."
"I've got an 'O.P.' farther forward. I'm going up there now. We'll have
a shot at the house," responded the colonel simply.
The major went back to the sunken road. The colonel and I walked
straight ahead, each of us in all probability wondering whether the
Boche machine-gunner was still on duty, and whether he would regard us
as worthy targets. That, at any rate, was my own thought. We strode out
over the heavy-going across a strip of ploughed land, and heard the
whizz of machine-gun bullets once more, not far from the spot we had
just left. We did not speak until we descended to a dip in the ground,
and reached a brook that had to be jumped. We were absolutely by
ourselves.
Up the slope, on the far side of the brook. More ploughed land. We were
both breathing hard now.
Before we came to the crest of the slope the colonel stopped. "We're in
view from the Boche front line from the top," he said sharply. "The
'O.P.' is a hole in the ground.... You had better follow me about
twenty yards behind.... And keep low.... Make for the fifth
telegraph-pole from the left that you will see from the top."
He moved off. I waited and then followed, my mind concentrated at first
on the fifth telegraph-pole the colonel had spoken about. There was no
shelling at this moment. A bird twittered in a hedge close by; the
smell of grass and of clean earth rose strong and sweet. No signs or
sound of war; only sunshine and trees and----
The colonel's voice came sharp as whipcord. "Keep down!--keep down!" I
bent almost double and walked fast at the same time. My mind turned to
September 1916, when I walked along Pozieres Ridge, just before the
Courcellette fight, and was shouted at for not crouching down by my
battery commander. But there were shells abroad that day.... I almost
laughed to myself.
I tumbled after the colonel into the square hole that constituted the
"O.P."--it had been a Boche trench-mortar emplacement. The sweat
dripped down my face as I removed my tin hat; my hair was wet and
tangled.
Johns, a subaltern of D Battery, was in the pit with a couple of
telephonists. He was giving firing instructions to the battery.
"What are you firing at, Johns?" inquired the colonel, standing on a
step cut in the side of the pit, and leaning his elbows on the parapet.
"Two hundred yards behind that road, sir--trench mortars suspected
there, sir." He called, "All guns parallel!" down the telephone.
"Don't you keep your guns parallel when you aren't firing?" asked the
colonel quickly. "Isn't that a battery order?"
Johns flushed and replied, "No, sir.... We left them as they were after
night-firing."
"But don't you know that it is an Army order--that guns should be left
parallel?"
"Y-e-es, sir."
"Why don't you obey it, then?"
"I thought battery commanders were allowed their choice. I----"
The colonel cut poor Johns short. "It's an Army order, and has to be
obeyed. Army orders are not made for nothing. The reason that order was
made was because so many battery commanders were making their own
choice in the matter. Consequently there was trouble and delay in
'handing over.' So the Army made a standard ruling."
Then, as was always the case, the colonel softened in manner, and told
Johns to do his shooting just as if he were not looking on.
The new subaltern of A Battery suddenly lowered himself into the pit.
The colonel brightened. "You see the grey house over there!... Can you
see it?... Good!... An enemy machine-gun is believed to be there.... I
want you to fire on that house.... There's the point on the map."
"Sorry, sir, my wire to the battery is not through yet--I've just been
out on it."
The colonel looked at his watch. "It's half-past eleven now. Your line
ought to be through by this time."
"Yes, sir; it's been through once, but it went half an hour ago. I
expect my signallers back any minute."
"Very well! you can be working out your switch angle and your angle of
sight while you wait."
Johns had now got his battery to work, and the sight of his shells
bursting among the hedges and shrubs fired his Celtic enthusiasm and
dissipated the nervousness he had felt in the colonel's presence. "Look
at that! isn't that a fine burst?" he called, clutching my arm,--"and
see that one. Isn't it a topper?"
An exclamation from the colonel, who had stood sphinx-like, his glasses
directed upon the grey house, made every one turn. "I've spotted him,"
he called, his voice vibrating. "He's at the top-floor window nearest
to us.... There he goes again.... I heard the 'ping' and saw dust come
out of the window.... Now then, is that line through yet?"
The line wasn't through, and the excitement of the hunt being upon us,
every one felt like cursing all telephone lines--they always did break
down when they were most wanted. The five minutes before this line was
reported to be through seemed an hour, and when the telephonist had
laboriously to repeat the orders, each one of us itched to seize the
telephone and shout ribald abuse at the man at the other end.
The first shell went into the trees behind the house. So did the round,
three hundred yards shorter in range, by which it had been hoped to
complete a plus and minus bracketing of the target. After a bold
shortening of the range, the subaltern, directing the shooting of A
Battery's guns, was about to order a wide deflection to the left, but
the colonel stopped him. "Your line is all right," he said. "It looks
as if you were too much to the right from the 'O.P.', but that's the
deceptiveness of flank observation. The range is short, that's all.
Give it another hundred yards and see what happens."
A direct hit resulted in twenty rounds, and there was jubilation in the
"O.P." M'Whirter of C Battery turned up, also Captain Hopton of B, and
preparations for a window-to-window searching and harrying of the Boche
machine-gunners were eagerly planned. It was 2 P.M. now, and the
colonel had forgotten all about lunch. "I think we can get back now,"
he said brightly. "Register on that house," he added, turning to the
officers in the pit, "and you can give that machine-gunner a hot time
whenever he dares to become troublesome."
We walked back to the sunken road in the highest of spirits, and after
the major of the Machine-Gun Corps, who had watched the shooting, had
thanked the colonel and expressed the view that the Boche
machine-gunner might in future be reckoned among the down-and-outs, the
colonel talked of other things besides gunnery.
I told him that though on my last leave to England I had noted a new
seriousness running through the minds of people, I had not altogether
found the humble unselfishness, the chastened spirit that many thinkers
had prophesied as inevitable and necessary before the coming of
victory.
"But what about the men who have been out here? Won't they be the
people of England after the war--the real representative people?"
returned the colonel, his eyes lighting up as he talked. "Theirs has
been the chastening experience, at any rate. The man who comes through
this must be the better man for it."
The conversation lost its seriousness when we discussed whether Army
habits would weave themselves into the ordinary workaday world as a
result of the war.
"Some of them would be good for us," said the colonel happily. "Here's
one"--picking up a rifle and carrying it at the slope--"I'm going to
carry this to the first salvage dump, and help to keep down taxation."
"It might be an interesting experiment to run Society on Active Service
lines," I put in. "Fancy being made an Acting-Baronet and then a
Temporary-Baronet before getting substantive rank. And the thought of
an Acting-Duke paralyses one."
We laughed and walked on. Along the road leading back into the village
we met a bombardier, who saluted the colonel with the direct glance and
the half-smile that betokens previous acquaintance. The colonel
stopped. "What's your name, Bombardier?" he demanded. The bombardier
told him. "Weren't you in my battery?"
"Yes, sir," said the man, smiling, "when we first came to France....
I'd like to be back in the old Division, sir."
"I'll see what can be done," said the colonel, taking his name and
number.
"I believe I remember him, because he often came before me as a
prisoner," he told me, with a humorous look, as we continued our walk.
"Very stout fellow, though."
It was a quarter-past three now, and the experiences of the day had
sharpened the appetite. The colonel wasn't finished yet, however. He
turned into the Infantry Brigade Headquarters, and spent a quarter of
an hour with the brigadier general and his brigade-major discussing the
artillery work that would be required for the next big advance. We
discovered a lane we hadn't walked through before, and went that way
to our farmhouse. It was four o'clock when we got back, and two
batteries had prisoners waiting to go before the colonel. So lunch was
entirely wiped off the day's programme, and at a quarter to five we sat
down to tea and large quantities of buttered toast.
XIX. "THE COLONEL----"
We knew now that November 4th was the date fixed for the next battle.
The C.R.A. had offered the Brigade two days at the waggon lines, as a
rest before zero day. The colonel didn't want to leave our farm, but
two nights at the waggon lines would mean respite from night-firing for
the gunners; so he had asked the battery commanders to choose between
moving out for the two days and remaining in the line. They had decided
to stay.
It turned to rain on October 29th. Banks of watery, leaden-hued clouds
rolled lumberingly from the south-west; beneath a slow depressing
drizzle the orchard became a melancholy vista of dripping branches and
sodden muddied grass. The colonel busied himself with a captured German
director and angle-of-sight instrument, juggling with the working parts
to fit them for use with our guns--he had the knack of handling
intricate mechanical appliances. The adjutant curled himself up among
leave-rosters and ammunition and horse returns; I began writing the
Brigade Diary for October, and kept looking over the sandbag that
replaced the broken panes in my window for first signs of finer
weather.
The colonel and the adjutant played Wilde and myself at bridge that
night--the first game in our mess since April. Then the colonel and I
stayed up until midnight, talking and writing letters: he showed me a
diminutive writing-pad that his small son had sent by that day's post.
"That's a reminder that I owe him a letter," he smiled. "I must write
him one.... He's just old enough now to understand that I was coming
back to the war, the last time I said good-bye." The colonel said this
with tender seriousness.
A moaning wind sprang up during the night, and, sleepless, I tossed and
turned upon my straw mattress until past two o'clock. One 4.2 fell near
enough to rattle the remaining window-panes. The wail through the air
and the soft "plop" of the gas shells seemed attuned to the dirge-like
soughing of the wind.
The morning broke calm and bright. There was the stuffiness of
yesterday's day indoors to be shaken off. I meant to go out early. It
was our unwritten rule to leave the colonel to himself at breakfast,
and I drove pencil and ruler rapidly, collating the intelligence
reports from the batteries. I looked into the mess again for my cap and
cane before setting forth. The colonel was drinking tea and reading a
magazine propped up against the sugar-basin. "I'm going round the
batteries, sir," I said. "Is there anything you want me to tell
them--or are you coming round yourself later?"
"No; not this morning. I shall call on the infantry about eleven--to
talk about this next battle."
"Right, sir!"
He nodded, and I went out into the fresh cool air of a bracing autumn
day.
I did my tour of the batteries, heard Beadle's jest about the new groom
who breathed a surprised "Me an' all?" when told that he was expected
to accompany his officer on a ride up to the battery; and, leaving A
Battery's cottage at noon, crossed the brook by the little brick bridge
that turned the road towards our Headquarters farm, six hundred yards
away.
"The colonel rang up a few minutes ago to say that our notice-board at
the bottom of the lane had been blown down. He wanted it put right,
because the General is coming to see him this afternoon, and might miss
the turning.... I've told Sergeant Starling.
"Colonel B---- came in about eleven o'clock," went on the adjutant.
"He's going on leave and wanted to say good-bye to the colonel."
"Where is the colonel now," I asked, picking up some Divisional reports
that had just arrived.
"He's with the Heavies--he's been to the Infantry. I told him Colonel
B---- had called, and he said he'd go round and see him--their mess is
in the village, isn't it?"
At twelve minutes past one the adjutant, Wilde, and myself sat down to
lunch. "The colonel said he wouldn't be late--but we needn't wait,"
said the adjutant.
"No; we don't want to wait," agreed Wilde, who had been munching
chocolate.