Bergicourt was a picturesque little plac_The Grey Wave

a hillside cup. A tiny river ran at the bottom of the hill, the

cottages were dotted with charming irregularity up and down its

flank and the surrounding woody hills protected it a little from

the biting winter winds. The men and horses were billeted among

the cottages. The battery office was in the Mairie, and the mess

was in the presbytery. The Abbé was a diminutive, round-faced,

blue-chinned little man with a black skull cap, whose simplicity

was altogether exceptional. He had once been on a Cook’s tour to

Greece, Egypt and Italy but for all the knowledge of the world he got

from it he might as well have remained in Bergicourt. He shaved on

Sundays and insinuated himself humbly into the mess room--his best

parlour--with an invariable “_Bonjour, mon commandant!_” and a “_je

vous remerc--ie_,” that became the passwords of the battery. The

S sound in _remercie_ lasted a full minute to a sort of splashing

accompaniment emerging from the teeth. We used to invite him in

to coffee and liqueurs after dinner and his round-eyed amazement

when the Captain and one of the subalterns did elementary conjuring

tricks, producing cards from the least expected portions of his

anatomy and so on as he sat there in front of the fire with a drink

in his hand and a cigarette smouldering in his fingers, used to send

us into helpless shrieks of laughter.

He bestowed on me in official moments the most wonderful title,

that even Haig might have been proud of. He called me “_Monsieur le

Commandant des armées anglaises à Bergicourt_,”--a First Command

indeed!

Christmas Day was a foot deep in snow, wonderfully beautiful

and silent with an almost canny stillness. The Colonel and the

Intelligence Officer came and had dinner with us in the middle of the

day, after the Colonel had made a little speech to the men, who were

sitting down to theirs, and been cheered to the echo.

At night there was a concert and the battery got royally tight. It

was the first time they’d been out of action for eight months and it

probably did them a power of good.

Four Christmases back I had been in Florida splashing about in the

sea, revelling in being care free, deep in the writing of a novel.

It was amazing how much water had flowed under the bridges since

then,--one in Fontainehouck, one in Salonica, one in London, and now

this one at Bergicourt with six guns and a couple of hundred men

under me. I wondered where the next would be and thought of New York

with a sigh. If anyone had told me in Florida that I should ever be a

Major in the British Army I should have thought he’d gone mad.

The time was spent in Poix in completing ourselves with all the

things of which the batteries were short--technical stores--in making

rings in the snow and exercising the horses, in trying to get frost

nails without success, in a comic _chasse au sanglier_ organised by a

local sportsman in which we saw nothing but a big red fox and a hare

and bagged neither, in endeavouring to camouflage the fuel stolen by

the men, in wondering what 1918 would bring forth.

The bitter cold lasted day after day without any sign of a break and

in the middle of it came the order to move. We were wanted back in

the line again.

I suppose there is always one second of apprehension on receiving

that order, of looking round with the thought, “Whose turn this

time?” There seemed to be no hope or sign of peace. The very idea was

so remote as to be stillborn. Almost it seemed as if one would have

to go on and on for ever. The machine had run away with us and there

was no stopping it. Every calendar that ran out was another year of

one’s youth burnt on the altar of war. There was no future. How could

there be when men were falling like leaves in autumn?

One put up a notice board on the edge of the future. It said,

“Trespassers will be pip-squeaked.” The present was the antithesis

of everything one had ever dreamed, a ghastly slavery to be borne

as best one could. One sought distractions to stop one’s thinking.

Work was insufficient. One developed a literary gluttony, devouring

cannibalistically all the fiction writers, the war poets, everything

that one could lay hands on, developing unconsciously a higher

criticism, judging by the new standards set by three years of

war--that school of post-impressionism that rubs out so ruthlessly

the essential, leaving the unessential crowing on its dunghill. It

only left one the past as a mental playground and even there the

values had altered. One looked back with a different eye from that

with which one had looked forward only four years ago. One had seen

Death now and heard Fear whispering, and felt the pulse of a world

upheaved by passions.

The war itself had taken on a different aspect. The period of peace

sectors was over. Russia had had enough. Any day now would see the

released German divisions back on the western front. It seemed that

the new year must inevitably be one of cataclysmic events. It was

not so much “can we attack?” as “will they break through?” And yet

trench warfare had been a stalemate for so long that it didn’t seem

possible that they could. But whatever happened it was not going to

be a joy-ride.

We were going to another army. That at least was a point of interest.

The batteries, being scattered over half a dozen miles of country,

were to march independently to their destinations. So upon the

appointed day we packed up and said good-bye to the little priest and

interviewed the mayor and haggled over exorbitant claims for damages

and impossible thefts of wood and potatoes, wondering all the while

how the horses would ever stand up on the frozen roads without a

single frost nail in the battery. It was like a vast skating rink and

the farrier had been tearing his hair for days.

But finally the last team had slithered down to the gun park, hooked

in and everything was reported ready. Billeting parties had gone on

ahead.

It is difficult to convey just what that march meant. It lasted four

days, once the blizzard being so thick and blinding that the march

was abandoned, the whole brigade remaining in temporary billets.

The pace was a crawl. The team horses slid into each other and

fell, the leads bringing the centres down, at every twenty yards

or so. The least rise had to be navigated by improvising means of

foothold--scattering a near manure heap, getting gunners up with

picks and shovels and hacking at the road surface, assisting the

horses with drag-ropes--and all the time the wind was like a razor

on one’s face, and the drivers up on the staggering horses beat

their chests with both arms and changed over with the gunners when

all feeling had gone from their limbs. Hour after hour one trekked

through the blinding white, silent country, stamping up and down at

the halts with an anxious eye on the teams, chewing bully beef and

biscuits and thanking God for coffee piping hot out of a thermos

in the middle of the day. Then on again in the afternoon while the

light grew less and dropped finally to an inky grey and the wind grew

colder,--hoping that the G.S. wagons, long since miles behind, would

catch up. Hour after hour stiff in the saddle with icy hands and

feet, one’s neck cricked to dodge the wind, or sliding off stiffly

to walk and get some warmth into one’s aching limbs, the straps

and weight of one’s equipment becoming more and more irksome and

heavy with every step forward that slipped two back. To reach the

destination at all was lucky. To get there by ten o’clock at night

was a godsend, although watering the horses and feeding them in the

darkness with frozen fingers that burned on straps and buckles drew

strange Scotch oaths. For the men, shelter of sorts, something at

least with a roof where a fire was lit at risk of burning the whole

place down. For the officers sometimes a peasant’s bed, or valises

spread on the floor, unpacking as little as possible for the early

start on the morning, the servants cooking some sort of a meal,

either on the peasant’s stove or over a fire of sticks.

The snow came again and one went on next day, blinded by the feathery

touch of flakes that closed one’s eyes so gently, crept down one’s

neck and pockets, lodged heavily in one’s lap when mounted, clung in

a frozen garment to one’s coat when walking, hissed softly on one’s

pipe and made one giddy with the silent, whirling, endless pattern

which blotted out the landscape, great flakes like white butterflies,

soft, velvety, beautiful but also like little hands that sought to

stop one persistently, insidiously. “Go back,” said their owner, “go

back. We have hidden the road and the ditches and all the country.

We have closed your eyelids and you cannot see. Go back before you

reach that mad place where we have covered over silent things that

once were men, trying to give back beauty to the ugliness that you

have made. Why do you march on in spite of us? Do you seek to become

as they? Go back. Go back,” they whispered.

But we pushed blindly through, stumbling to another billet to hear

that the snow had stalled the motor lorries and therefore there were

no rations for the men and that the next day’s march was twenty miles.

During the night a thaw set in. Snowflakes turned to cold rain and

in the dawn the men splashed, shivering, and harnessed the shivering

horses. One or two may have drunk a cup of coffee given them by the

villagers. The rest knew empty stomachs as well as shivering. The

village had once been in the war zone and only old women and children

clung precariously to life. They had no food to give or sell. The

parade was ordered for six o’clock. Some of the rear wagons, in

difficulties with teams, had not come in till the dawn, the Captain

and all of them having shared a biscuit or two since breakfast. But

at six the battery was reported ready and not a man was late or sick.

The horses had been in the open all night.

So on we went again with pools of water on the icy crust of the road,

the rain dripping off our caps. Would there be food at the other end?

Our stomachs cried out for it.

And back in England full-fed fathers hearing the rain splashing

against the windows put an extra coal on the fire, crying again, “We

will fight to the last man!”; railway men and munitioners yelled,

“Down tools! We need more pay!” and the Government flung our purses

to them and said, “Help yourselves--of course we shall count on you

to keep us in power at the next election.”

The village of Chuignolles, ice-bound, desolate, wood-patched was

our destination. The battles of the Somme had passed that way,

wiping everything out. Old shell holes were softened with growing

vegetation. Farm cottages were held together by bits of corrugated

iron. The wind whistled through them, playing ghostly tunes on

splintered trunks that once had been a wood.

Two prison camps full of Germans, who in some mysterious way knew

that we had been in the Cambrai push and commented about it as we

marched in, were the only human beings, save the village schoolmaster

and his wife and child, in whose cottage we shared a billet with a

Canadian forester. The schoolmaster was minus one arm, the wife had

survived the German occupation, and the child was a golden-haired boy

full of laughter, with tiny teeth, blue eyes and chubby fingers that

curled round his mother’s heart. The men were lodged under bits of

brick wall and felting that constituted at least shelter, and warmed

themselves with the timber that the Canadian let them remove from

his Deccaville train which screamed past the horse lines about four

or five times a day. They had stood the march in some marvellous way

that filled me with speechless admiration. Never a grouse about the

lack of rations, or the awful cold and wet, always with a song on

their lips they had paraded to time daily, looked after the horses

with a care that was almost brotherly, put up with filthy billets and

the extremes of discomfort with a readiness that made me proud. What

kept them going? Was it that vague thing patriotism, the more vague

because the war wasn’t in their own country? Was it the ultimate

hope of getting back to their Flos and Lucys, although leave, for

them, was practically non-existent? What had they to look forward to

but endless work in filth and danger, heaving guns, grooming horses,

cleaning harness eternally? And yet their obedience and readiness and

courage were limitless, wonderful.

We settled down to training and football and did our best to acquire

the methods of the new army. My Major, who had been in command of the

brigade, had fallen ill on the march and had been sent to England.

The doctor was of opinion that he wouldn’t be coming out again.

He was worn out. How characteristic of the wilfully blind system

which insists that square pegs shall be made to fit round holes!

There was a man who should have been commanding an army, wasted in

the command of a battery, while old men without a millionth part

of his personality, magnetism or knowledge recklessly flung away

lives in the endeavour to justify their positions. In the Boer War

if a General lost three hundred men there was an inquiry into the

circumstances. Now if he didn’t lose three hundred thousand he was a

bad General. There were very few bad ones apparently!

At least one could thank God that the Major was out of it with a

whole skin, although physically a wreck.

The guns we drew from Ordnance at Poix and Chuignolles were not

calibrated, but there was a range half a day’s march distant and

we were ordered to fire there in readiness for going back into the

line. So one morning before dawn we set out to find the pin-point

given us on the map. Dawn found us on a road which led through a

worse hell than even Dante visited. Endless desolation spread away on

every side, empty, flat, filled with an infinite melancholy. No part

of the earth’s surface remained intact. One shell hole merged into

another in an endless pattern of pockmarks, unexploded duds lying in

hundreds in every direction. Bits of wreckage lay scattered, shell

baskets, vague shapes of iron and metal which bespoke the one-time

presence of man. Here and there steam rollers, broken and riddled,

stuck up like the bones of camels in the desert. A few wooden crosses

marked the wayside graves, very few. For the most part the dead had

lain where they fell, trodden into the earth. Everywhere one almost

saw a hand sticking up, a foot that had worked up to the surface

again. A few bricks half overgrown marked where once maidens had

been courted by their lovers. The quiet lane ringing with the songs

of birds where they had met in the summer evenings at the stroke

of the Angelus was now one jagged stump, knee-high, from which the

birds had long since fled. The spirits of a million dead wailed

over that ghastly graveyard, unconsecrated by the priests of God.

In the grey light one could nearly see the corpses sit up in their

countless hundreds at the noise of the horses’ feet, and point with

long fingers, screaming bitter ridicule through their shapeless

gaping jaws. And when at last we found the range and the guns broke

the eerie stillness the echo in the hills was like bursts of horrible

laughter.

And on the edge of all this death was that little sturdy boy with the

golden hair, bubbling with life, who played with the empty sleeve of

his young father spewed out of the carnage, mutilated, broken in this

game of fools.

February found us far from Chuignolles. Our road south had taken us

through a country of optimism where filled-in trenches were being

cultivated once more by old women and boys, barbed wire had been

gathered in like an iron harvest and life was trying to creep back

again like sap up the stem of a bruised flower. Their homes were

made of empty petrol tins, bits of corrugated iron, the wreckage

of the battlefield,--these strange persistent old people, clinging

desperately to their clod of earth, bent by the storm but far from

being broken, ploughing round the lonely graves of the unknown dead,

sparing a moment to drop a bunch of green stuff on them. Perhaps some

one was doing the same to their son’s grave.

We came to Jussy and Flavy-le-Martel, an undulating country of

once-wooded hillsides now stamped under the Hun’s heel and where even

then the spiteful long-range shell came raking in the neatly swept

muck heaps that once had been villages. The French were there, those

blue-clad, unshaven poilus who, having seen their land laid waste,

turned their eyes steadily towards Germany with the gleam of faith

in them that moves mountains, officered by men who called them “_mes

enfants_” and addressed each one as “thou.”

We had reached the southern end of the British line and were to take

over the extra bit down to Barisis. Our own zone was between Essigny

and Benay and in a morning of thick fog the Divisional Battery

Commanders and ourselves went up to the gun positions held by the

slim French 75’s. They welcomed us politely, bowing us into scratches

in the earth and offering sausages and red wine and cigarettes

of Caporal. It appeared that peace reigned on that front. Not a

shell fell, hardly was a round ever fired. Then followed maps and

technical details of pin-points and zero lines and O.P.’s and the

colour of S.O.S. rockets. We visited the guns and watched them fire

a round or two and discussed the differences between them and our

eighteen-pounders and at last after much shaking of hands bade them

au revoir and left them in the fog.

The relief took place under cover of night without a hitch, in a

silence unbroken by any gun, and finally, after having journeyed to

the O.P. with the French Battery Commander, up to our thighs in mud,

fired on the zero point to check the line, reported ourselves ready

to take on an S.O.S. and watched the French officer disappear in

the direction of his wagon line, we found ourselves masters of the

position.

The fog did eventually lift, revealing the least hopeful of any

gun positions it has ever been my lot to occupy. The whole country

was green, a sort of turf. In this were three great white gashes

of upturned chalk visible to the meanest intelligence as being the

three battery positions. True, they were under the crest from any

Hun O.P., but that didn’t minimize the absurdity. There were such

things as balloons and aeroplanes. Further inspection revealed shell

holes neatly bracketing the guns, not many, but quite sufficient to

prove that Fritz had done his job well. Beside each gun pit was a

good deep dugout for the detachment and we had sleeping quarters that

would stop at least a four-two. The mess was a quaint little hut of

hooped iron above ground, camouflaged with chalky earth, big enough

to hold a table and four officers, if arranged carefully. We rigged

up shelves and hung new fighting maps and Kirchners and got the stove

to burn and declared ourselves ready for the war again. We spent

long mornings exploring the trenches, calling on a rather peevish

infantry whose manners left much to be desired, and found that as

usual the enemy had all the observation on the opposite ridge. Behind

the trench system we came upon old gun positions shelled out of all

recognition, and looked back over an empty countryside with rather a

gloomy eye. It was distinctly unprepossessing. If there were ever a

show----

So we played the gramophone by night and invented a knife-throwing

game in the door of the hut and waited for whatever Fate might have

in store for us. The Captain had gone on leave from Chuignolles. The

night after his return he came up to the guns as my own leave was due

again. So having initiated him into the defence scheme and the S.O.S.

rules I packed up my traps and departed,--as it turned out for good.

Fate decreed that my fighting was to be done with the battery which I

had helped to make and whose dead I had buried.

On my return from leave fourteen days later, towards the end of

February, I was posted back to them. The end of February,--a curious

period of mental tightening up, of expectation of some colossal

push received with a certain incredulity. He’d push all right, but

not here. And yet, in the depths of one’s being, there formed a

vague apprehension that made one restless and took the taste out

of everything. The work seemed unsatisfactory in the new battle

positions to which we were moved, a side-step north, seven thousand

yards from the front line, just behind Essigny which peeped over a

million trenches to St. Quentin. The men didn’t seem to have their

hearts in it and one found fault in everything. The new mess, a

wooden hut under trees on a hilltop with a deep dugout in it, was

very nice, allowing us to bask in the sun whenever it shone and

giving a wonderful view over the whole zone, but seemed to lack

privacy. One yearned to be alone sometimes and always there was some

one there. The subalterns were practically new to me, and although

one laughed and talked one couldn’t settle down as in the old days

with the Major and Pip Don. The Scots Captain was also occupying

the hilltop. It was good to go off on long reconnaissances with him

and argue violently on all the known philosophies and literatures,

to challenge him to revolver shooting competitions and try and

escape the eternal obsession that clouded one’s brain, an uneasiness

that one couldn’t place, like the feeling that makes one cold in

the pit of the stomach before going down to get ready for a boxing

competition, magnified a million times.

The weather was warm and sunny after misty dawns and the whole

country was white with floating cobwebs. The last touches were being

put to the gun position and a narrow deep trench ran behind the guns

which were a quarter of a mile beyond the hilltop, down beyond the

railway line under camouflage in the open. Word came round that “The

Attack,” was for this day, then that, then the other, and the heavy

guns behind us made the night tremble with their counter-preparation

work, until at last one said, “Please God, they’ll get on with it,

and let’s get it over!” The constant cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” was trying.

Everybody knew about it and all arrangements were made, extra

ammunition, and extra gunners at the positions, details notified as

to manning O.P.’s, the probable time at which we should have to open

fire being given as ten o’clock at night at extreme range.

My Captain, a bloodthirsty Canadian, had gone on leave to the south

of France, which meant leaving a subaltern in the wagon line while I

had three with me.

The days became an endless tension, the nights a jumpy stretch of

darkness, listening for the unknown. Matters were not helped by my

brother’s rolling up one day and giving out the date definitely as

the twenty-first. It was on the ninth that he arrived and took me for

a joy-ride to Barisis to have a look at the Hun in the Forêt de St.

Gobain, so deeply wooded that the car could run to within a hundred

yards of the front-line trench. We dined at the charming old town of

Noyon on the way back and bought English books in a shop there, and

stayed the night in a little inn just off the market square. The next

morning he dropped me at the battery and I watched him roll away in

the car, feeling an accentuated loneliness, a yearning to go with him

and get out of the damned firing line, to escape the responsibility

that rode one like an Old Man from the Sea.

In war there is only one escape.

The nights of the eighteenth and nineteenth were a continuous roll of

heavy guns, lasting till just before the dawn, the days comparatively

quiet. Raids had taken place all along the front on both sides and

identifications made which admitted of no argument.

On the night of the twentieth we turned in as usual about midnight

with the blackness punctuated by flashes and the deep-voiced rumble

of big guns a sort of comfort in the background. If Brother Fritz

was massing anywhere for the attack at least he was having an

unpleasant time. We were unable to join in because we were in battle

positions seven thousand yards behind the front line. The other

eighteen-pounders in front of us were busy, however, and if the show

didn’t come off we were going up to relieve them in a week’s time. So

we played our goodnight tune on the gramophone, the junior subaltern

waiting in his pyjamas while the last notes were sung. Then he

flicked out the light and hopped into bed, and presently the hut was

filled by his ungentle snores. Then one rang through a final message

to the signaller on duty at the guns and closed one’s eyes.

The twenty-first of March, 1918, has passed into history now, a page

of disaster, blood and prisoners, a turning point in the biggest war

in history, a day which broke more hearts than any other day in the

whole four and a half years; and yet to some of us it brought an

infinite relief. The tension was released. The fight was on to the

death.

We were jerked awake in the darkness by a noise which beat upon the

brain, made the hill tremble and shiver, which seemed to fill the

world and all time with its awful threat.

I looked at my watch,--4 a.m.

The subaltern who lay on the bed beside mine said, “She’s off!” and

lit a candle with a laugh. He was dead within six hours. We put coats

over our pyjamas and went out of the hut. Through the fog there

seemed to be a sort of glow along the whole front right and left,

like one continuous gun flash. The Scots Captain came round with his

subalterns and joined us, and two “Archie” gunners who shared a tent

under the trees and messed with us. We stood in a group, talking

loudly to make ourselves heard. There was nothing to be done but to

stand by. According to plan we should not come into action until

about 10 p.m. that night to cover the retreat, if necessary, of the

gunners and infantry in the line. Our range to start with would be

six thousand yards.

So we dressed and talked to Brigade, who had no information. At six

o’clock Brigade issued an order, “Man O.P.’s at once.” The fog still

hung like a blanket, and no news had come through from the front

line. The barrage was reported thick in front of and in Essigny with

gas.

The signallers were ready, three of them. The subaltern detailed had

only to fill his pockets with food.

The subaltern detailed! It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it isn’t

any fun detailing a man to go out into a gas barrage in any sort

of a show, and this was bigger than the wildest imagination could

conceive. I wondered, while giving him instructions, whether I

should ever see him again. I never did. He was taken prisoner, and

the signallers too.

They went out into the fog while the servants lit the fire and

bustled about, getting us an early breakfast. The Anti-Aircraft

discussed the advisability of withdrawing immediately or waiting to

see what the barrage would do. They waited till about 9 a.m. and then

got out. The Scots Captain and I wished them luck and looked at each

other silently and refilled pipes.

There was a hint of sun behind the fog now, but visibility only

carried about two hundred yards. The Guns reported that the barrage

was coming towards them. The Orderly Officer had been down and

found all things in readiness for any emergency. None of the O.P.’s

answered. Somewhere in that mist they were dodging the barrage while

we sat and waited, an eye on the weather, an eye on the time, an ear

always for the buzz of the telephone; box respirators in the alert

position, the guns laid on the S.O.S. loaded with H.E.

Does one think in times like that? I don’t know. Only little details

stand out in the brain like odd features revealed in a flash of

lightning during a storm. I remember putting a drawing-pin into the

corner of a Kirchner picture and seeing the headlines of the next

day’s paper at home; I saw the faces of my people as they read them.

I saw them just coming down to breakfast at the precise moment that

I was sticking in the drawing-pin, the door open on to the lawn--in

America, still asleep, as they were six hours behind, or possibly

only just turning in after a dance--in Etaples, where perhaps the

noise had already reached one of them. When would they hear from me

again? They would be worrying horribly.

The ’phone buzzed. “Brigade, sir!”

“Right. Yes?--S.O.S. 3000! _Three_ thousand?--Right! Battery! Drop to

_three_ thousand, S.O.S.--Three rounds per gun per minute till I come

down.”

It was 10 a.m. and that was the range, when according to plan it

shouldn’t have come till 10 p.m. at double the range.

The subalterns were already out, running down to the guns as I

snatched the map and followed after, to hear the battery open fire as

I left the hut.

The greater significance of this S.O.S. came to me before I’d left

the hut. At that range our shells would fall just the other side of

Essigny, still a vague blur in the mist. What had happened to the

infantry three thousand yards beyond? What had become of the gunners?

There were no signs of our people coming back. The country, as far

as one could see in the fog, was empty save for the bursting shells

which were spread about between Essigny and the railway, with the

battery in the barrage. The noise was still so universal that it was

impossible to know if any of our guns farther forward were still in

action. They couldn’t be if we were firing. It meant--God knew what

it meant!

The subalterns went on to the guns while I stopped in the control dug

into the side of the railway and shed my coat, sweating after the

quarter-mile run. Five-nines and pip-squeaks were bursting on the

railway and it seemed as if they had the battery taped.

To get off my coat was a matter of less than half a minute. It had

only just dropped to the ground when the signaller held me the

instrument. “Will you speak here, sir?”

I took it.

“Is that the Major?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come, sir? Mr. B.’s badly wounded. Sergeant ---- has lost

an eye and there’s no one here to----”

“Go on firing. I’m coming over.” Badly wounded?

I leaped up out of the dugout and ran. There was no shell with

my name on it that morning. The ground went up a yard away from

me half a dozen times but I reached the guns and dived under the

camouflage into the trench almost on top of poor old B. who was lying

motionless, one arm almost smashed off, blood everywhere. It was he

who had said “She’s off!” and lit the candle with a laugh. A man was

endeavouring to tie him up. Behind him knelt a sergeant with his face

in his hands. As I jumped down into the trench he raised it. “I’m

blind, sir,” he said. His right eye was shot away.

The others were all right. I went from gun to gun and found them

firing steadily.

Somehow or other we tied up the subaltern and carried him along the

narrow trench. Mercifully he was unconscious. We got him out at last

on to a stretcher. Four men went away with it, the sergeant stumbling

after. The subaltern was dead before they reached a dressing station.

He left a wife and child.

There were only the junior subaltern and myself left to fight the

battery. He was twenty last birthday and young at that. If I stopped

anything there was only that boy between King and country and the

Hun. Is _any_ reward big enough for these babes of ours?

Perhaps God will give it. King and country won’t.

* * * * *

Vague forms of moving groups of men could be seen through my glasses

in the neighbourhood of Essigny impossible to say whether British or

German. The sun was struggling to pierce the mist. The distance was

about a thousand yards. We were still firing on the S.O.S. range, as

ordered.

I became aware of a strange subaltern grinning up at me out of the

trench.

“Where the devil do you spring from?” said I.

He climbed out and joined me on the top, hatless, minus box

respirator, cheery. Another babe.

“I’m from the six-inch section straight in front, sir,” he said.

“They’ve captured my guns. Do you think you could take ’em on?”

They _were_ Germans, then, those moving forms!

I swept the glasses round once more anxiously. There were six, seven,

ten, creeping up the railway embankment on the left flank _behind_

the battery. Where the hell were our infantry reinforcements? My Babe

sent the news back to Brigade while I got a gun on top and fired at

the six-inch battery in front over open sights at a thousand yards

with fuse 4. The Hun was there all right. He ran at the third round.

Then we switched and took on individual groups as they appeared.

The party on the railway worried me. It was improper to have the

enemy behind one’s battery. So I got on the ’phone to the Scots

Captain and explained the position. It looked as if the Hun had

established himself with machine guns in the signal box. The skipper

took it on over open sights with H.E. At the fourth round there was

only a settling mass of red brick dust. I felt easier in my mind

and continued sniping groups of two or three with an added zest and

most satisfactory results. The Hun didn’t seem to want to advance

beyond Essigny. He hung about the outskirts and, when he showed, ran,

crouching low. From his appearance it looked as if he had come to

stay. Each of them had a complete pack strapped on to his back with

a new pair of boots attached. The rest of the battery dropped their

range and searched and swept from the pits. The Skipper joined in the

sniping.

A half platoon of infantry came marching at a snail’s pace along the

railway behind me,--on the top of course, in full view! I wanted

to make sure of those Huns on the embankment, so I whistled to the

infantry officer and began semaphoring, a method of signalling at

which I rather fancied myself.

It seemed to frighten that infantry lad. At the first waggle he

stopped his men and turned them about. In twenty leaps I covered the

hundred yards or so between us, screaming curses, and brought him to

a halt. He wore glasses and looked like a sucking curate. He may have

been in private life but I gave tongue at high pressure, regardless

of his feelings, and it was a very red-faced platoon that presently

doubled along the other side of the railway under cover towards

the embankment, thirsting for blood, mine for choice, Fritz’s from

_embarras de richesse_.

I returned to my sniping, feeling distinctly better, as the little

groups were no longer advancing but going back,--and there was that

ferocious platoon chivvying them in the rear!

Things might have been much worse.

A megaphone’s all right, but scream down it for three hours and

see what happens to your voice. Mine sounded much like a key in

a rusty lock. Hunger too was no longer to be denied about three

o’clock in the afternoon after breakfast at cock-crow. The six-inch

subaltern had tried unsuccessfully to get back to his guns. The Hun,

however, had established a machine-gun well the other side of them

and approach single-handed was useless. Lord knew where his gunners

were! Prisoners, probably. So he returned and asked if I had any use

for him. Stout lads of his kidney are not met with every day. So I

sent him up the hill to get food and a box respirator. He returned,

grinning more cheerily than before, so I left him and the Babe to

fight the good fight and went to get a fresh point of view from the

tree O.P. up the hill. They seemed to be doing useful work between

them by the time I got up the tree, so I left them to it and went to

the mess to get some food.

It seemed curiously empty. Kits, half-packed, lay about the floor.

The breakfast plates, dirty, were still on the table. I called each

servant by name. No answer.

The other battery’s servants were round the corner. I interviewed

them. They had seen nothing of my people for hours. They thought

that they had gone down to the wagon line. In other words it meant

that while we were stopping the Hun, with poor old B. killed and the

sergeant with an eye blown out, those dirty servants had run away!

It came over me with something of a shock that if I put them under

arrest the inevitable sentence was death.

I had already sent one officer and three men to their death, or

worse, at the O.P. and seen another killed at the guns. Now these

four! Who would be a Battery Commander?

However, food was the immediate requirement. The other battery helped

and I fed largely, eased my raw throat with pints of water and drank

a tot of rum for luck. Those precious servants had left my even more

precious cigars unpacked. If the Hun was coming I’d see him elsewhere

before he got those smokes. So I lit one and filled my pockets with

the rest, and laden with food and a flask of rum went back to the

guns and fed my subaltern. The men’s rations had been carried over

from the cook house.

A few more infantry went forward on the right and started a bit of a

counter-attack but there was no weight behind it. They did retake

Essigny or some parts of it, but as the light began to fail they

came back again, and the Hun infantry hung about the village without

advancing.

With the darkness we received the order to retire to Flavy as soon as

the teams came up. The barrage had long since dropped to desultory

fire on the Hun side, and as we were running short of ammunition, we

only fired as targets offered. On returning up the hill I found it

strongly held by our infantry, some of whom incidentally stole my

trench coat.

The question of teams became an acute worry as time went on. The Hun

wasn’t too remote and one never knew what he might be up to in the

dark, and our infantry were no use because the line they held was a

quarter of a mile behind the nearest battery. The skipper and I sent

off men on bicycles to hurry the teams, while the gunners got the

guns out of the pits in the darkness ready to hook in and move off at

a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile we ate again and smoked and summoned what patience we

could, endeavouring to snatch a sleep. It wasn’t till ten o’clock

that at last we heard wheels,--the gun limbers, cooks’ cart and a

G.S. wagon came up with the wagon line officer who had brought the

servants back with him. There was no time to deal with them. The

officer went down to hook in to the guns and I saw to the secret

papers, money, maps and office documents which are the curse of all

batteries. The whole business of packing up had to be done in pitch

darkness, in all the confusion of the other battery’s vehicles and

personnel, to say nothing of the infantry. We didn’t bother about the

Hun. Silence reigned.

It was not till midnight that the last of the guns was up and the

last of the vehicles packed, and then I heard the voice of the Babe

calling for me. He crashed up on a white horse in the darkness and

said with a sob, “Dickie’s wounded!”

“Dickie” was the wagon line subaltern, a second lieutenant who had

got the D.S.O. in the Cambrai show, one of the stoutest lads God ever

made. In my mind I had been relying on him enormously for the morrow.

“Is he bad? Where is he?”

“Just behind, sir,” said the Babe. “I don’t know how bad it is.”

Dickie came up on a horse. There was blood down the horse’s shoulder

and he went lame slightly.

“Where is it, Dickie, Old Thing?”

His voice came from between his teeth. “A shrapnel bullet through the

foot,” he said. “I’m damn sorry Major.”

“Let’s have a look.” I flashed a torch on it. The spur was bent into

his foot just behind the ankle, broken, the point sticking in.

There was no doctor, no stretcher, no means of getting the spur out.

“Can you stick it? The wagon is piled mountains high. I can’t shove

you on that. Do you think you can hang on till we get down to Flavy?”

“I think so,” he said.

He had a drink of rum and lit a cigarette and the battery got

mounted. I kept him in front with me and we moved off in the dark,

the poor little horse, wounded also, stumbling now and again. What

that boy must have suffered I don’t know. It was nearly three hours

later before the battery got near its destination and all that time

he remained in the saddle, lighting one cigarette from another and

telling me he was “damn sorry.” I expected him to faint every moment

and stood by to grab him as he fell.

At last we came to a crossroads at which the battery had to turn off

to reach the rendezvous. There was a large casualty clearing station

about half a mile on.

So I left the battery in charge of the Babe and took Dickie straight

on, praying for a sight of lights.

The place was in utter darkness when we reached it, the hut doors

yawning open, everything empty. They had cleared out!

Then round a corner I heard a motor lorry starting up. They told me

they were going to Ham. There was a hospital there.

So Dickie slid off his horse and was lifted into the lorry.

As my trench coat had been stolen by one of the infantry he insisted

that I should take his British warm, as within an hour he would be

between blankets in a hospital.

I accepted his offer gladly,--little knowing that I was not to take

it off again for another nine days or so!

Dickie went off and I mounted my horse again, cursing the war and

everything to do with it, and led his horse, dead lame now, in search

of the battery. It took me an hour to find them, parked in a field,

the gunners rolled up in blankets under the wagons.

The 21st of March was over. The battery had lost three subalterns, a

sergeant, three signallers and a gunner.

France lost her temper with England.

Germany, if she only knew it, had lost the war.

The new line of defence was to be the canal at Flavy.

After two hours’ sleep in boots, spurs and Dickie’s coat, a servant

called me with tea and bacon. Washing or shaving was out of the

question. The horses were waiting--poor brutes, how they were worked

those days--and the Quartermaster-sergeant and I got mounted and rode

away into the unknown dark, flickering a torch from time to time on

to the map and finding our way by it.

With the Captain on leave, one subaltern dead, another left behind in

Germany, a third wounded, one good sergeant and my corporal signaller

away on a course, it didn’t look like a very hopeful start for

fighting an indefinite rearguard action.

I was left with the Babe, keen but not very knowledgeable, and one

other subaltern who became a stand-by. They two were coming with me

and the guns; the sergeant-major would be left with the wagon line.

Furthermore I had absolutely no voice and couldn’t speak above a

whisper.

Of what had happened on the flanks of our army and along the whole

front, there was absolutely no news. The Divisional infantry and

gunners were mostly killed or captured in the mist. We never saw

anything of them again but heard amazing tales of German officers

walking into the backs of batteries in the fog and saying, “Will you

cease fire, please? You are my prisoners,” as polite as you please.

What infantry were holding the canal, I don’t know,--presumably

those who had held our hilltop overnight. All we knew was that our

immediate job was to meet the Colonel in Flavy and get a position in

the Riez de Cugny just behind and pump shells into the Germans as

they advanced on the canal. The Babe and the Stand-by were to bring

the battery to a given rendezvous. Meanwhile the Colonel and all of

us foregathered in a wrecked cottage in Flavy and studied maps while

the Colonel swallowed a hasty cup of tea. He was ill and a few hours

later was sent back in an ambulance.

By eight o’clock we had found positions and the guns were coming in.

Camouflage was elementary. Gun platforms were made from the nearest

cottage wall or barn doors. Ammunition was dumped beside the gun

wheels.

While that was being done I climbed trees for an O.P., finding one

eventually in a farm on a hill, but the mist hid everything. The Huns

seemed to get their guns up as if by magic and already shells were

smashing what remained of Flavy. It was impossible to shoot the guns

in properly. The bursts couldn’t be seen so the line was checked and

rechecked with compass and director, and we opened fire on targets

ordered by Brigade, shooting off the map.

Riez de Cugny was a collection of cottages with a street running

through and woods and fields all around and behind. The inhabitants

had fled in what they stood up in. We found a chicken clucking

hungrily in a coop and had it for dinner that night. We installed

ourselves in a cottage and made new fighting maps, the Scots Captain

and I--his battery was shooting not a hundred yards from mine--and

had the stove lit with anything burnable that came handy, old chairs,

meat rolling boards, boxes, drawers and shelves.

It seemed that the attack on the canal was more or less half-hearted.

The bridges had been blown up by our sappers and the machine gunners

made it too hot for the Hun. Meanwhile we had the gun limbers hidden

near the guns, the teams harnessed. The wagon line itself was a

couple of miles away, endeavouring to collect rations, forage and

ammunition. The sergeant-major was a wonder. During the whole show he

functioned alone and never at any time did he fail to come up to the

scratch.

Even when I lost the wagon line for two days I knew that he was all

right and would bring them through safely. Meanwhile aeroplanes

soared over and drew smoke trails above the battery and after a

significant pause five-nines began searching the fields for us. Our

own planes didn’t seem to exist and the Hun explored at will. On

the whole things seemed pretty quiet. Communication was maintained

all the time with Brigade; we were quietly getting rid of a lot of

ammunition on targets indicated by the infantry and the five-nines

weren’t near enough to worry about. So the Scot and I went off in

the afternoon and reconnoitred a way back by a cross-country trail

to the wagon line,--a curious walk that, across sunny fields where

birds darted in and out of hedges in utter disregard of nations which

were stamping each other into the earth only a few hedges away. Tiny

buds were on the trees, tingling in the warmth of the early sun.

All nature was beginning the new year of life while we fools in our

blind rage and folly dealt open-handedly with death, heeding not the

promise of spring in our veins, with its colour and tenderness and

infinite hope.

Just a brief pause it was, like a fleecy cloud disappearing from

view, and then we were in the wagon lines, soldiers again, in a

tight position, with detail trickling from our lips, and orders

and arrangements. Dickie was well on his way to England now, lucky

Dickie! And yet there was a fascination about it, an exhilaration

that made one “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth

of distance run.” It was the real thing this, red war in a moving

battle, and it took all one’s brain to compete with it. I wouldn’t

have changed places with Dickie. A “Blighty” wound was the last thing

that seemed desirable. Let us see the show through to the bitter end.

We got back to the guns and the cottage and in front of us Flavy

was a perfect hell. Fires in all directions and shells spreading

all round and over the area. Our wagons returned, having snatched

ammunition from blazing dumps, like a new version of snapdragon, and

with the falling darkness the sky flared up and down fitfully. That

night we dished out rum all round to the gunners and turned half of

them in to sleep beside the guns while the other half fought. Have

you ever considered sleeping beside a firing eighteen-pounder? It’s

easy--when you’ve fought it and carried shells for forty-eight hours.

We had dinner off that neglected fowl, both batteries in the cottage,

and made absurd remarks about the photos left on the mantelpiece and

fell asleep, laughing, on our chairs or two of us on a bed, booted

and spurred still, taking turns to wake and dash out and fire a

target, called by the liaison officer down there with the infantry,

while the others never moved when the salvos rocked the cottage to

its foundations, or five-nines dropped in the garden and splashed it

into the street.

The Hun hadn’t crossed the canal. That was what mattered. The

breakfast was very nearly cooked next morning about seven and we were

shooting gun fire and salvos when the order came over the ’phone

to retire immediately and rendezvous on the Villeselve-Beaumont

crossroads. Fritz was over the canal in the fog. The Babe dashed

round to warn the teams to hook in. They had been in cottages about

two hundred yards from the guns, the horses harnessed but on a line,

the drivers sleeping with them. The Stand-by doubled over to the

guns and speeded up the rate of fire. No good leaving ammunition

behind. The signallers disconnected telephones and packed them on gun

limbers. Both gunners and drivers had breakfasted. We ate ours half

cooked in our fingers while they were packing up.

The mist was like a wet blanket. At twenty yards objects lost their

shape and within about twenty minutes of receiving the order the

battery was ready. We had the other battery licked by five good

minutes and pulled out of the field on to the road at a good walk.

In the fog the whole country looked different. Direction was

impossible. One prayed that one wasn’t marching towards Germany--and

went on. At last I recognised the cross-country track with a sigh

of relief. It was stiff going for the horses, but they did it and

cut off a mile of road echoing with shouts and traffic in confusion,

coming out eventually on an empty main road. We thought we were well

ahead but all the wagon lines were well in front of us. We caught up

their tail-ends just as we reached Beaumont, which was blocked with

every kind of infantry, artillery and R.A.M.C. transport, mules,

horses and motors. However there was a Headquarters in Beaumont with

Generals buzzing about and signallers, so I told the Stand-by to take

the battery along with the traffic to the crossroads and wait for me.

Our own General was in that room. I cleaved a passage to him and

asked for orders. He told me that it was reported that the Hun was

in Ham--right round our left flank. I was, therefore, to get into

position at the crossroads and “Cover Ham.”

“Am I to open fire, sir?”

“No. Not till you see the enemy.”

I’d had enough of “seeing the enemy” on the first day. It seemed to

me that if the Hun was in Ham the whole of our little world was bound

to be captured. There wasn’t any time to throw away, so I leaped on

to my horse and cantered after the battery followed by the groom.

At the crossroads the block was double and treble while an officer

yelled disentangling orders and pushed horses in the nose.

The map showed Ham to be due north of the crossroads. There proved to

be an open field, turfed just off the road with a dozen young trees

planted at intervals. What lay between them and Ham it was impossible

to guess. The map looked all right. So I claimed the traffic

officer’s attention, explained that a battery of guns was coming into

action just the other side and somehow squeezed through, while the

other vehicles waited. We dropped into action under the trees. The

teams scattered about a hundred yards to a flank and we laid the line

due north.

At that moment a Staff subaltern came up at the canter. “The General

says that the Hun is pretty near, sir. Will you send out an officer’s

patrol?”

He disappeared again, while I collected the Stand-by, a man of

considerable stomach.

The orders were simply, “Get hold of servants, cooks, spare

signallers and clerks. Arm them with rifles and go off straight into

the fog. Spread out and if you meet a Hun fire a salvo and double

back immediately to a flank.”

While that was being done the Babe went round and had a dozen shells

set at fuse 4 at each gun. It gives a lovely burst at a thousand

yards. The Stand-by and his little army went silently forth. The

corner house seemed to indicate an O.P. I took a signaller with me

and we climbed upstairs into the roof, knocked a hole in the tiles

and installed a telephone which eventually connected with Brigade.

I began to get the fidgets about the Stand-by. This cursed fog was

too much of a good thing. It looked as if the God the Huns talked so

much about was distinctly on their side. However, after an agonising

wait, with an ear strained for the salvo of rifle fire, the fog

rolled up. Like dots in the distant fields I saw the Stand-by with

two rows of infantry farther on. The Stand-by saw them too and turned

about. More than that, through glasses I could see troops and horse

transports advancing quickly over the skyline in every direction.

Columns of them, Germans, far out of range of an eighteen-pounder.

As near as I could I located them on the map and worried Brigade for

the next hour with pin-points.

Ham lay straight in front of my guns. The Germans were still shelling

it and several waves of our own infantry were lying in position in

series waiting for their infantry to emerge round the town. It was

good to see our men out there, although the line looked dangerously

bulgy.

After a bit I climbed down from the roof. The road had cleared of

traffic and there was a subaltern of the Scot’s battery at the corner

with the neck of a bottle of champagne sticking out of his pocket. A

thoughtful fellow.

So was I! A little later one of the Brigade Headquarters officers

came staggering along on a horse, done to the world, staying in the

saddle more by the grace of God than his own efforts. Poor old thing,

he was all in, mentally and physically. We talked for a while but

that didn’t improve matters and then I remembered that bottle of

fizz. In the name of humanity and necessity I commandeered it from

the reluctant subaltern and handed it up to the man in the saddle.

Most of it went down his unshaven chin and inside his collar, but it

did the trick all right.

What was left was mine by right of conquest, and I lapped it down, a

good half bottle of it. There were dry biscuits forthcoming too, just

as if one were in town, and I was able to cap it with a fat cigar.

Happy days!

Then the Scot arrived upon his stout little mare followed by his

battery, which came into position on the same crossroads a hundred

yards away, shooting at right angles to me, due east, back into Cugny

from where we had come. Infantry were going up, rumours of cavalry

were about and the bloodstained Tommies who came back were not very

numerous. There seemed to be a number of batteries tucked away

behind all the hedges and things looked much more hopeful. Apart from

giving pin-points of the far distant enemy there was nothing to be

done except talk to all and sundry and try and get news. Some French

machine-gunner officers appeared who told us that the entire French

army was moving by forced marches to assist in stopping the advance

and were due to arrive about six o’clock that night. They were late.

Then too, we found that the cellar of the O.P. house was stored with

apples. There weren’t many left by the time the two batteries had

helped themselves. As many horses as the farmyard would hold were

cleared off the position and put under cover. The remainder and the

guns were forced to remain slap in the open. It was bad luck because

the Hun sent out about a dozen low-flying machines that morning and

instead of going over Ham, which would have been far more interesting

for them, they spotted us and opened with machine guns.

The feeling of helplessness with a dozen great roaring machines

spitting at you just overhead is perfectly exasperating. You can’t

cock an eighteen-pounder up like an Archie and have a bang at them,

and usually, as happened then, your own machine gun jams. It was a

comic twenty minutes but trying for the nerves. The gunners dived

under the gun shields and fired rifles through the wheels. The

drivers stood very close to the horses and hoped for the best. The

signallers struggled with the machine gun, uttering a stream of

blasphemies. And all the time the Hun circled and emptied drum after

drum from a height of about a hundred feet. I joined in the barrage

with my revolver.

Two horses went down with a crash and a scream. A man toppled over in

the road. Bullets spat on the ground like little puffs of smoke. Two

went through my map, spread out at my feet, and at last away they

roared,--presumably under the impression that they had put us out of

action. The horses were dead!

The man was my servant, who had run away on the first morning. Three

through his left leg. Better than being shot at dawn, anyhow.

Curiously enough, the mess cook had already become a casualty. He was

another of the faint-hearted and had fallen under a wagon in the fog

and been run over. A rib or two went. Poetic justice was rampant that

morning. It left me two to deal with. I decided to let it go for the

time and see if fate would relieve me of the job. As a matter of fact

it didn’t, and many many lifetimes later, when we were out of action,

I had the two of them up in a room with a ceiling and a cloth on the

table, and the Babe stood at my elbow as a witness.

One was a man of about thirty-eight or forty, a long-nosed, lazy,

unintelligent blighter. The other was a short, scrubby, Dago-looking,

bullet-headed person,--poor devils, both cannon fodder. My face may

have looked like a bit of rock but I was immensely sorry for them.

Given a moment of awful panic, what kind of intelligence could they

summon to fight it, what sort of breeding and heredity was at the

back of them? None. You might as well shoot two horses for stampeding

at a bursting shell. They were gripped by blind fear and ran for it.

They didn’t want to. It was not a reasoned thing. It was a momentary

lack of control.

But to shoot them for it was absurd, a ridiculous parody of justice.

Supposing I had lost my nerve and cleared out? The chances are that

being a senior officer I should have been sent down to the base as

R.T.O. or M.L.O. and after a few months received the D.S.O. It has

been done. They, as Tommies, had only earned the right to a firing

party.

It seemed to me, therefore, that my job was to prevent any

recurrence, so in order to uproot the fear of death I implanted the

fear of God in them both. Sweat and tears ran down their faces at the

end of the interview,--and I made the Dago my servant forthwith.

He has redeemed himself many times under worse shell fire than that

barrage of the 21st of March.

Headquarters gave me another subaltern during the day. He had been

with the battery in the early days at Armentières but for various

reasons had drifted to another unit.

He joined us just before the order was received to take up another

position farther back and lay out a line on the Riez de Cugny. The

enemy was apparently coming on. So we hooked in once more about 4.30

in the afternoon and trekked up the road on to a ridge behind which

was the village of Villeselve. The Hun seemed to have taken a dislike

to it. Five-nines went winging over our heads as we came into action

and bumped into the village about two hundred yards behind. The Babe

rode back to Brigade to report and ask for orders. There were no

means of knowing where our infantry were except through Brigade who

were at infantry headquarters, and obviously one couldn’t shoot blind.

Meanwhile the Dago servant collected bread and bully and a Tommy’s

water bottle, which stank of rum but contained only water, and the

Stand-by, the new lad and myself sat under a tree watching the Hun

barrage splash in all directions and made a meal.

The Babe didn’t return as soon as he ought to have done. With all

that shooting going on I was a little uneasy. So the new lad was told

to go to Brigade and collect both the orders and the Babe.

It was getting dark when the Scot brought up his battery and wheeled

them to drop into action beside us. As he was doing so the Babe and

the new lad returned together. Their news was uncomforting. Brigade

Headquarters had retired into the blue, and the other two batteries

which had been on the road had also gone. There was no one there at

all.

So the Scotsman and I held a council of war, while the Stand-by

went off on a horse to reconnoitre a passable way round the shelled

village. The light had gone and the sky behind us was a red glare.

The village was ablaze and at the back of it on the next ridge some

aeroplane hangars were like a beacon to guide storm-tossed mariners.

The crackling could be heard for miles.

There was no one to give us the line or a target, no means of finding

where the headquarters were or any likelihood of their finding us as

we hadn’t been able to report our position. We were useless.

At the back of my brain was the word Guivry. I had heard the Adjutant

mention it as a rendezvous. On the map it seemed miles away, but

there was always the chance of meeting some one on the way who would

know. So while the other people snatched a mouthful of ration biscuit

we brought the teams up and hooked in.

The Scotsman led as his battery was nearest the track that the

Stand-by reported passable. The only light was from the burning

hangars and we ran into mud that was axle deep. Incidentally we ran

into the barrage. A subaltern of the other battery was blown off

his feet and deposited in a sitting position in a mud hole. He was

fished out, spluttering oaths, and both batteries went off at a trot

that would have made an inspecting General scream unintelligible

things in Hindustani. Mercifully they don’t inspect when one is

trying to hurry out of a barrage, so we let it rip up the slope

until we had got past the hangars in whose glow we showed up most

uncomfortably on the top of the ridge. As soon as we had got into

darkness again we halted and took stock of ourselves. No one was hurt

or missing, but all the dismounted men were puffing and using their

sleeves to wipe the sweat off their faces. I was one.

It was from this point that the second phase of the retreat began.

It was like nothing so much as being in that half dead condition on

the operating table when the fumes of ether fill one’s brain with

phantasies and flapping birds and wild flights of imagination just

before one loses consciousness, knowing at the time that one hasn’t

quite “gone.” Overfatigue, strain, lack of food and above all was a

craving to stop everything, lie down, and sleep and sleep and sleep.

One’s eyes were glued open and burnt in the back of one’s head, the

skin of one’s face and hands tightened and stretched, one’s feet were

long since past shape and feeling; wherever the clothes touched one’s

body they irritated--not that one could realize each individual ache

then. The effect was one ceaseless dolour from which the brain flung

out and away into the no man’s land of semi-consciousness, full of

thunder and vast fires, only to swing back at intervals to find the

body marching, marching, endlessly, staggering almost drunkenly,

along the interminable roads of France in the rain and cold. Hour

after hour one rode side by side with the Scot, silent, swaying in

the saddle, staring hollow-eyed into the dark ahead, or sliding with

a stiff crash to the ground and blundering blindly from rut to rut,

every muscle bruised and torn. Unconsciously every hour one gave a

ten-minute halt. The horses stood drooping, the men lay down on the

side of the road, motionless bundles like the dead, or sprawled over

the vehicles, limp and exhausted, not smoking, not talking, content

to remain inert until the next word of command should set them in

motion again; wonderful in their recognition of authority, their

instant unquestioning obedience, their power of summoning back all

their faculties for just one more effort, and then another after that.

The country was unknown. Torches had given out their last flicker.

Road junctions were unmarked. We struck matches and wrestled with

maps that refused to fold in the right place, and every time Guivry

seemed a million miles away. The noise of shelling dropped gradually

behind until it became a mere soothing lullaby like the breaking

of waves upon a pebble beach while we rolled with crunching wheels

down the long incline into Buchoire, a village of the dead, without

lights, doors creaking open at the touch of the wind.

We halted there to water the horses and give them what forage could

be scraped together. The Scot and I rode on alone to Guivry, another

seven kilometres. As we neared it so the sound of guns increased

again as though a military band had died away round one corner and

came presently marching back round another, playing the same air,

getting louder as it came.

In a small room lit by oil lamps, Generals and Staffs were bending

over huge maps scored heavily with red and blue pencils. Telephones

buzzed and half conversations with tiny voices coming from back there

kept all the others silent. Orderlies came in motor overalls with all

the dust of France over them.

They gave us food,--whisky, bully and bread, apples with which we

filled our pockets. Of our Corps they knew nothing, but after much

telephoning they “thought” we should find them at Château Beines.

The Scot and I looked at one another. Château Beines was ten minutes

from the burning hangars. We had passed it on our way down empty,

silent, hours ago, in another life. Would the horses get us back up

that interminable climb? Who should we find when we got there--our

people or Germans? We rode back to Buchoire and distributed apples to

the Babe, the Stand-by and the others and broke it to them that we

had to go back on the chance of finding our brigade. The horses had

been watered but not fed.

We turned about and caught up French transport which had blocked the

road in both directions. We straightened them out, a wagon at a time,

after endless wagging of hands and tongues and finally got to Château

Beines to find a French Headquarters installed there who knew nothing

about our brigade. There were English artillery in the farm a mile

farther.

We went there. The farm was a ruin wreathed in fog, but from beneath

the now smoking hangars a battery of ours was spitting shells into

the night. Headquarters was somewhere in the farm cellar. We followed

up a chink of light to its source and found a row of officers lying

on wooden beds of rabbit netting, a signaller squatting on a reel

of wire in the corner over a guttering candle, the concrete roof

dripping moisture upon them. It was 3 a.m.

Orders were to come into action at once and open fire on a certain

main-road junction.

The Scot and I went out and scoured ploughed fields waist-deep in

drifting mist, looking for a position, found a belt of turf on the

edge of a road and fetched the guns up. Locating the position on the

map, working out the angle of the line of fire and the range with

protractors took us back to the cellar where those lucky devils

who were not commanding batteries were lying stertorous. Horses and

men sweated their heart’s blood in getting the guns into position

on the spongy ground and within an hour the first ear-splitting

cracks joined in the chorus of screaming resistance put up by the

other two batteries, with gunners who lost their balance at the

weight of a shell and fell upon their faces, picking themselves up

without even an oath and loading up again in a stupor by a process of

sub-conscious reflex energy.

What are the limits of human endurance? Are there any? We had three

more days and nights of it and still those men went on.

Sometime or other the Babe, the Stand-by and the other lad got some

tea down in the cellar and fell asleep over their cups. Sometime or

other I too got some tea, closed my eyes and fell off the box on

which I was sitting. Sometime or other we got the order to cease

fire and seek covered positions for the day’s work. Time, as one

ordinarily recognizes it, had ceased. There was no night, marked by

rest, nor day divided off into duties and meals. Time was all one,

a blurry mixture of dark and cold; light, which hurt one’s eyes,

and sweat. Sleep and rest were not. What was happening we did not

know. It might have been the end of the world and we shouldn’t have

known till we were in the next. There were just guns to be fired at

given points for ever and ever, always and always, world with or

without end, amen. Guns, guns and nothing but guns, in front, behind,

right and left, narrowing down to those of mine which grew hot and

were sponged out and went on again and still on, unhurriedly,

remorselessly into the German advance, and would go on long and long

after I was dead.

One’s mind refused to focus anything but angles and ranges and

ammunition supply. There was nothing of importance in the world but

those three things, whether we moved on or stayed where we were,

whether we walked or whether we rode, whether we ate or whether we

starved. In a sort of detached fog one asked questions and gave

orders about food and forage and in the same fog food eventually

appeared while one stared at the map and whispered another range

which the Stand-by shouted down the line of guns.

With spades we cut a gap in a hedge which shut off an orchard from

the road. The ditch was filled with stones and bricks from the farm.

The horses took the guns in one by one, and other gaps were cut in

the front hedge for the gun muzzles. Platforms were dug and trail

beds, and ammunition began to pile up beside each gun as the sun came

out and thinned the fog.

A telephone line ran away across the fields and a new voice came

through the receiver, tickling one’s ear,--that of an uncaptured

Colonel of a captured brigade who honoured us by taking command of

our brigade. With a shaven face and washed hands he had looked upon

our bearded chins and foul appearance and talked of the condition of

our horses.

In front of the guns a long line of French machine gunners had dug

themselves in and we were on the top of a high ridge. Below us the

ground sloped immediately away to a beautiful green valley which

rose up again to a feathery wood about to burst into green and ran

past it in undulations like the green rollers of the Atlantic.

Away in the distance were the great bulbous ever-watching eyes of

the enemy,--balloons, which as the sun came up, advanced steadily,

hypnotically, many of them strung out in a long line. Presently from

the wood below came trickling streams of men, like brown insects

coming from a dead horse. The sun glinted on their rifles. Steadily

they came, unhurriedly, plodding up to the ridge, hundreds of them,

heedless of the enemy barrage which began climbing too in great

hundred-yard jumps.

“What news?” said I, as one trickle reached me. It was led by a

Colonel.

He shook his head. “We’ve been relieved by the French,” said he, not

stopping.

“Relieved? But God’s truth, isn’t there a war on?”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” He flung it over his shoulder and

his men followed him away.

Somehow it didn’t seem credible. And yet there all along the ridge

and the valley was the entire British infantry, or what looked like

it, leisurely going back, while the French machine gunners looked

at them and chattered. I got on the ’phone to Brigade about it. The

Colonel said, “Yes, I know.”

We went on firing at long range. The teams were just behind the guns,

each one under an apple tree, the drivers lying beside their horses.

The planes which came over didn’t see us. The other batteries were

in the open behind the crest tucked into folds of the ground, all

the wagon lines clinging to a farmhouse about a mile back where the

headquarters was. The Hun barrage was quickly coming nearer.

A troop of cavalry trotted down into it and took cover under one

end of the wood. They had only one casualty. A shell struck a tree

and brought it crashing down on top of a horse and rider. The last

of our infantry had passed behind us and the wood was empty again.

The opposite ridge was unoccupied; glasses showed no one in the

country that stretched away on the left. Only the balloons seemed

almost on top of us. The cavalry left the wood and trotted over the

ridge in a long snake of half sections, and then the fringe of the

barrage reached us. It splashed into the orchard. Drivers leaped to

the horses’ heads. No man or animal was touched. Again one heard

it coming, instinctively crouching at its shriek. Again it left us

untouched as with an inattentive eye I saw the cavalry come trotting

quietly back. It was followed by a chattering of the French. The

reason was obvious. Out of the wood other streams came trickling,

blue this time, in little parties of four and five, momentarily

increasing in number and pace.

The first lot reached the battery and said they were the second line.

The Boche was a “_sale race, b’en zut alors!_” and hitching their

packs they passed on.

The machine gunners began to get ready. The battery began to look at

me. The Stand-by gave them another salvo for luck and then ordered

ten rounds per gun to be set at fuse 6--the edge of the wood was

about fifteen hundred.

The next stream of poilus was hotter. They sweated much all among

the orchard and told me with a laugh that the Boche would be here in

five minutes. But when I suggested that they should stay and see what

we could do together they shrugged their shoulders, spat, said, “_En

route!_” and en routed.

The gunners had finished setting the fuses and were talking earnestly

together. The machine gunners weren’t showing much above ground. The

barrage had passed over to our rear.

I called up the Colonel again and told him. He told me I could drop

the range to three thousand.

The Stand-by passed the order. It got about as far as the first

gun and there died of inanition. The battery was so busy talking

about the expected arrival of the Boche that orders faded into

insignificance. The Stand-by repeated the order. Again it was not

passed. I tried a string of curses but nothing more than a whisper

would leave my throat. The impotence of it was the last straw. I

whispered to the Stand-by to repeat word for word what I said.

He megaphoned his hands and you could have heard him across the

Channel,--a lovely voice, a bull of Bashan, that rose above the crash

of shells and reached the last man at the other end of the line of

guns. What he repeated was totally unprintable. If voice failed

me, vocabulary hadn’t. I rose to heights undreamed of by even the

Tidworth sergeant-major.

At the end of two minutes we began a series which for smartness,

jump, drive, passing and execution of orders would have put a

Salisbury depot battery into the waste-paper basket. Never in my life

have I seen such gunnery as those fellows put up. Salvos went over

like one pistol shot. Six rounds battery fire one second were like

the ticking of a stop watch. Gun fire was like the stoking of the

fires of hell by demons on hot cinders.

One forgot to be tired, one forgot to look out for the Hun in the

joy of that masterly performance, a fortissima cantata on a six pipe

organ of death and hate. Five minutes, ten minutes? I don’t know, but

the pile of empty shell cases became a mountain behind each gun.

A signaller tugged at my arm and I went to the ’phone.

“Retire immediately! Rendezvous at Buchoire!”

I was still caught up with the glory of that shooting.

“What the hell for?” said I. “I can hang on here for ages yet.”

“Retire immediately!” repeated the Colonel.

I came to earth with a bang and began to apologize. Somehow it

doesn’t do to talk like that to one’s Colonel even in moments of

spiritual exaltation.

We ceased fire and packed up and got mounted and hooked in like

six bits of black ginger, but the trouble was that we had to leave

the comparative safety of our orchard and go out into the barrage

which was churning up the fields the other side of the hedge. I

collected the Stand-by and gave him the plan of campaign. They were

to follow me in column of route at a trot, with twenty yards between

guns,--that is, at right angles to the barrage, so as to form a

smaller target. No man can have failed to hear his voice but for some

unknown reason they failed to carry out the order. The leading gun

followed me over the ditch on to the field, shells bursting on every

side. About sixty yards across the field I looked over my shoulder

and saw that they were all out of the orchard but wheeling to form

line, broadside on to the barrage.

The leading gun, which the Stand-by took on, was the only one that

got safely away. The five others all stuck with horses dead and men

wounded, and still that barrage dropped like hail.

We cut out the dead horses and shot the badly wounded ones and

somehow managed a four-horse team for each gun. The wounded who

couldn’t walk were lifted on to limbers and held there by the others,

and the four-horse teams nearly broke their hearts before we got

the guns off that devilish bit of ploughed land on to a road, and

after another twenty minutes had got out of the shell fire. Three

sergeants were wounded, a couple of drivers and a gunner. The road

was one solid mass of moving troops, French and English, infantry,

gunners and transport. There was no means of going cross-country with

four-horse teams. One had to follow the stream. Fortunately there

were some R.A.M.C. people with stretchers and there was a motor

ambulance. Between the two we got all our casualties bandaged and

away. The other batteries had been gone already three quarters of an

hour. There was no sign of them anywhere.

My own battery was scattered along a mile of traffic; one gun here,

another there, divided by field kitchens and French mitrailleuse

carts, marching infantry and limbered G.S. wagons. Where the

sergeant-major was with the wagon line was beyond the bounds of

conjecture. One hoped to find him at the rendezvous at Buchoire.

There was nothing with us in the way of rations or forage and we

only had the limbers full of ammunition. Fortunately the men had

had a midday ration issued in the orchard, and the horses had been

watered and fed during the morning. In the way of personnel I had the

Quartermaster-sergeant, and two sergeants. The rest were bombardiers,

gunners, and drivers,--about three men per gun all told. The outlook

was not very optimistic.

The view itself did not tend to lighten one’s depression. We climbed

a fairly steep slope which gave a view of the country for miles on

either side. The main roads and every little crossroad as far as the

eye could carry were all massed with moving troops going back. It

looked like the Allied armies in full retreat, quite orderly but none

the less routed. Where would it end? From rumours which ran about we

were almost surrounded. The only way out was south. We were inside a

bottle which we could not break, all aiming for the neck.

And yet everywhere on that slope French infantry had dug themselves

in, each man in a little hole about knee-deep with a tiny bank of mud

in front of him, separated from the next man by a few yards. They

sat and smoked in their holes, so like half-dug graves, waiting for

the enemy, watching us go back with a look in their eyes that seemed

to be of scorn. Now and again they laughed. It was difficult to meet

those quiet eyes without a surge of rage and shame. How much longer

were we going to retreat? Where were our reinforcements? Why had

our infantry been “relieved” that morning? Why weren’t we standing

shoulder to shoulder with those blue-clad poilus? What was the brain

at the back of it all? Who was giving the orders? Was this the end of

the war? Were we really beaten? Could it be possible that somewhere

there was not a line of defence which we could take up and hold,

hold for ever? Surely with magnificent men like ours who fought till

they dropped and then picked themselves up and fought again, surely

something could be done to stop this appalling débâcle!

The tide of traffic took us into Guiscard where we were able to pull

out of the stream one by one and collect as a battery,--or at least

the gun part of it. While studying the map a mounted orderly came up

and saluted.

“Are you the ---- Brigade, sir?” he said.

I said yes.

“The orders are to rendezvous at Muiraucourt instead of Buchoire.”

To this day that man remains a mystery. The rest of the brigade did

rendezvous at Buchoire and fought twice again that day. The Colonel

never gave any order about Muiraucourt and had never heard of the

place. Where the orderly came from, who he was, or how he knew the

number of the brigade are unsolved problems. I never saw him again.

Having given the message he disappeared into the stream of traffic,

and I, finding the new rendezvous to be only about three kilometres

away in a different direction to Buchoire and out of the traffic road

led on again at once.

We passed French gunners of all calibres firing at extreme range and

came to Muiraucourt to find it absolutely empty and silent. While the

horses were being watered and the wounded ones bandaged I scouted on

ahead and had the luck to find an A.S.C. officer with forage for us

and a possibility of rations if we waited an hour. It was manna in

the wilderness.

We drew the forage and fed the starving horses. At the end of the

hour an A.S.C. sergeant rode in to say that the ration wagons had

been blown up.--We took up an extra hole in our Sam Brownes. It

appeared that he had seen our headquarters and the other batteries

marching along the main road in the direction of Noyon, to which

place they were undoubtedly going.

The Quartermaster whispered something about bread and tea. So we

withdrew from the village and halted on a field just off the road

and started a fire. The bread ration was a snare and a delusion.

It worked out at about one slice per every other man. He confided

this to me sadly while the men were spread-eagled on the bank at

the roadside, enjoying all the anticipation of a full stomach. We

decided that it wasn’t a large enough quantity to split up so I went

over and put the position to them, telling them that on arrival at

Noyon we hoped to find the brigade looking out for us with a meal

for everybody ready. Meanwhile there wasn’t enough to go round. What

about tossing for it?... The ayes had it. They tossed as if they were

going to a football match, the winners sending up a cheer, and even

the losers sitting down again with a grin.

I decided to ride on into Noyon and locate the brigade and find out

where to get rations. So I handed the battery to the Stand-by to

bring on when ready, left him the Babe and the other lad, and took

the Quartermaster on with me.

It was a nightmare of a ride through miles and miles of empty

villages and deserted country, blown-up bridges like stricken giants

blocking every way, not a vehicle on the roads, no one in sight,

the spirit of desertion overhanging it all, with the light failing

rapidly and Noyon apparently as far off as ever. The horses were so

done that it was difficult to spur them out of a walk, we ourselves

so done that we could hardly raise the energy to spur them. At last

after hours of riding we came to the main Roye-Noyon road but didn’t

recognize it in the dark and turned the wrong way, going at least

half an hour before we discovered our mistake! It was the last straw.

A thing that added to our anxiety was the sight of big guns on

caterpillars all coming away from the place we were going to and

as we got nearer the town the roar of bursting shells seemed to be

very near. One didn’t quite know that streams of the enemy would

not pour over the crest at any minute. Deep in one’s brain a vague

anxiety formed. The whole country was so empty, the bridges so well

destroyed. Were we the last--had we been cut off? Was the Hun between

us and Noyon? Suppose the battery were captured? I began to wish

that I hadn’t ridden on but had sent the Stand-by in my place. For

the first time since the show began, a sense of utter loneliness

overwhelmed me, a bitter despair at the uselessness of individual

effort in this gigantic tragedy of apocalyptic destruction. Was it

a shadow of such loneliness as Christ knew upon the Cross when He

looked out upon a storm-riven world and cried, “My God, my God, why

hast Thou forsaken Me?” All the evil in the world was gathered here

in shrieking orgy, crushing one to such mental and physical tiredness

that death would only have been a welcome rest.

Unaided I should not have regretted that way out, God knows. But two

voices came to me through the night,--one from a little cottage among

the pine trees in England, the other calling across the Atlantic with

the mute notes of a violin.

“Your men look to you,” they whispered. “_We_ look to you....”

We came to Noyon!

It was as though the town were a magnet which had attracted all the

small traffic from that empty countryside, letting only the big guns

on caterpillars escape. The centre of the town, like a great octopus,

has seven roads which reach out in every direction. Each of these was

banked and double-banked with an interlocked mass of guns and wagons.

Here and there frantic officers tried to extricate the tangle but for

the most part men sat silent and inert upon their horses and vehicles

beyond effort and beyond care.

Army Headquarters told me that Noyon would begin to be shelled in

an hour’s time and gave me maps and a chit to draw food from the

station, but they had never heard of the brigade and thought the

Corps had been wiped out. As I left, the new lad came up and reported

that the battery had halted on the outskirts of the town. We went

back to it and collected the limbers and tried to take them with us

to the station, with hearts beating high at the thought of food. It

was impossible, so we left them on the pavement and dodged single

file between wagon wheels and horses’ legs. After an hour’s fighting

every yard of the way we got to the station to find a screaming

mob of civilians carrying bundles, treading on each other in their

efforts to enter a train, weeping, praying, cursing, out of all

control.

The R.S.O. had gone. There was no food.

We fought our way back to Army Headquarters where we learned that a

bombardier with two wagons of rations destined to feed stray units

like us had gone to Porquericourt, five kilometres out. If we found

him we could help ourselves. If we didn’t find him--a charming smile,

and a shrug of the shoulders.

I decided to try the hotel where I had spent a night with my brother

only three weeks ago. Three weeks, was it possible? I felt years

older. The place was bolted and barred and no amount of hammering or

shouting drew an answer. The thought of going back empty-handed to my

hungry battery was an agony. The chances of finding that bombardier

were about one in a million, so small that he didn’t even represent a

last hope. In utter despair one called aloud upon Christ and started

to walk back. In a narrow unlit street we passed a black doorway in

which stood a soldier.

“Can you give me a drink of water?” said I.

“Yes,” said he. “Come in, sir. This is the officers’ club.”

Was it luck? Or did Christ hear? You may think what you like but I am

convinced that it was Christ.

We went in. In one room were sleeping officers all over the floor.

The next was full of dinner tables uncleared, one electric light

burning. It was long after midnight. We helped ourselves to bits of

bread from each table and drank the leavings of milk which had been

served with the coffee. Then a waiter came. He said he would cook us

some tea and try and find a cold tongue or some ham. I told him that

I had a starving battery down the road and wanted more than tea and

ham. I wanted food in a sack, two sacks, everything he could rake up,

anything.

He blinked at me through his glasses. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,”

he said and went away.

We had our tea and tongue and he brought a huge sack with loaves and

tins of jam and bits of cheese and biscuits and packets of cigarettes

and tins of bully. Furthermore he refused all payment except two

francs for what we had eaten.

“That’s all right, sir,” he said. “I spent three days in a shell hole

outside Wipers on one tin o’ bully.--That’s the best I can do for

you.”

I wrung him by the hand and told him he was a brother and a pal, and

between us the lad and I shouldered the sack and went out again,

thanking God that at least we had got something for the men to eat.

On returning to the battery I found that they had been joined by six

wagons which had got cut off from the sergeant-major’s lot and the

entire wagon line of the Scots Captain’s battery with two of his

subalterns in charge. They, too, were starving.

The sack didn’t go very far. It only took a minute or so before the

lot was eaten. Then we started out, now a column about a mile long,

to find Porquericourt, a tiny village some two kilometres off the

main road, the gunners sleeping as they walked, the drivers rocking

in the saddle, the horses stumbling along at a snail’s pace. None

of us had shaved or washed since the 21st. We were a hollow-eyed,

draggled mob, but we got there at last to be challenged by sentries

who guarded sleeping bits of units who had dropped where they stood

all over the place. While my two units fixed up a wagon line I took

the Quartermaster with me and woke up every man under a wagon or near

one asking him if he were Bombardier So and So,--the man with the

food. How they cursed me. It took me an hour to go the rounds and

there was no bombardier with food. The men received the news without

comment and dropped down beside the wagons. The Babe had collected

a wagon cover for us to sleep under and spread it under a tree. The

four of us lay on it side by side and folded the end over ourselves.

There was a heavy dew. But my job wasn’t over. There was to-morrow

to be considered. I had given orders to be ready to move off at six

o’clock unless the Hun arrived before that. It was then 3 a.m.

The Army had told me that if our Corps was not completely wiped out,

their line of retreat was Buchoire, Crissolles and so back in the

direction of Lassigny. They advised me to go to Crissolles. But one

look at the map convinced me that Crissolles would be German by six

o’clock in the morning. So I decided on Lagny by the secondary road

which went straight to it from Porquericourt. If the brigade was not

there, surely there would be some fighting unit who would have heard

of them, or who might at least be able to spare us rations, or tell

us where we could get some. Fighting on scraps of bread was all right

but could not be prolonged indefinitely.

At six o’clock we set out as a squadron of cavalry with slung lances

trotted like ghosts across the turf. We had only been on the march

five minutes when a yell from the rear of the battery was passed

quickly up to me as I walked in the lead.

“Halt! Action rear!”

My heart stood still. Were the Germans streaming up in the mist?

Were we caught at last like rats in a trap? It _couldn’t_ be. It was

some fool mistake. The Babe was riding just behind me. I called

him up. “Canter back and find out who gave that order and bring him

here.--You, lead driver! Keep on walking till I give you the order to

do anything else.”

We went on steadily. From moment to moment nothing seemed to happen,

no rifle or machine-gun fire.--The Babe came back with a grin. “The

order was ‘All correct in rear,’ sir.”

Can you get the feeling of relief? We were not prisoners or fighting

to the last man with clubbed rifles in that cold grey dawn on empty

stomachs.

I obeyed the natural instinct of all mothers who see their child

snatched from destruction,--to slap the infant. “Find out the man who

passed it up wrongly and damn his soul to hell?”

“Right, sir,” said the Babe cheerily, and went back. Good Babe, he

couldn’t damn even a mosquito properly!

The road was the most ungodly track imaginable, blocked here and

there by 60-pounders coming into action. But somehow the horses

encompassed the impossible and we halted in the lane outside the

village at about seven o’clock. The Stand-by remained in charge of

the battery while the Babe and I went across gardens to get to the

village square. There was an old man standing at a door. He gazed

at us motionless. I gave him _bon jour_ and asked him for news of

British troops, gunners. Yes, the village was full. Would we care

for some cider? Wouldn’t we! He produced jugfuls of the most perfect

cider I’ve ever drunk and told us the story of his life. He was a

veteran of 1870 and wept all down himself in the telling. We thanked

him profusely, shook his trembling hand and went out of his front

door into the main street.

There were wagons with the brigade mark! I could have wept with joy.

In a couple of minutes we had found Headquarters. The man I’d dosed

with champagne on the road corner two days before fell on my neck

with strong oaths. It appeared that I’d been given up as wiped out

with the whole battery, or at least captured. He looked upon me as

back from the dead.

The Colonel had a different point of view. He was no longer shaved

and washed, and threatened to put me under arrest for not having

rendezvoused at Buchoire! Relations between us were strained,

but everybody was in the act of getting mounted to reconnoitre

positions so there was no time for explanations or recriminations.

Within three-quarters of an hour the battery was in action, but the

Quartermaster had found the sergeant-major, who, splendid fellow, had

our rations. He functioned mightily with cooks. Tea and bacon, bread

and butter,--what could the “Carlton” have done better than that?

And later, when the sun came out, there was no firing to be done, and

we slept beside the gun wheels under an apple tree, slept like the

dead for nearly a whole hour.

The Hun was indeed at Crissolles, for the brigade had fought there

the previous evening. So much for Army advice.

The day was marked by two outstanding events; one, the return of

the Major of the Scots Captain’s battery, his wound healed, full of

bloodthirst and cheeriness; the other, that I got a shave and wash.

We advanced during the morning to cover a village called Bussy. We

covered it,--with gun fire and salvos, the signal for each salvo

being a wave from my shaving brush. There was a hell of a battle in

Bussy, street fighting with bayonets and bombs. The brigade dropped

a curtain of fire on the outer fringe of the village and caught

the enemy in full tide. Four batteries sending over between them a

hundred rounds a minute of high explosive and shrapnel can make a

nasty mess of a pin-point. The infantry gloated,--our infantry.

On our right Noyon was the centre of a whirlwind of Hun shells. We

were not out any too soon. The thought added zest to our gun fire.

Considering the amount of work those guns had done in the last five

days and nights it was amazing how they remained in action without

even breaking down. The fitter worked like a nigger and nursed them

like infants. Later the Army took him from me to go and drive rivets

in ships!

We pulled out of action again as dusk was falling, and the word was

passed that we had been relieved and were going out of the line. The

brigade rendezvoused at Cuy in a field off the road while the traffic

crept forward a yard and halted, waited an hour and advanced another

yard, every sort of gun, wagon, lorry, ambulance and car, crawling

back, blocked at every crossroads, stuck in ditches, sometimes

abandoned.

All round the sky glared redly. Hour after hour we sat in that cup

of ground waiting for orders, shivering with cold, sleeping in

uneasy snatches, smoking tobacco that ceased to taste, nibbling

ration biscuits until the night became filled with an eerie strained

silence. Jerky sentences stopped. Faint in the distance came the

crunch of wheels, a vague undercurrent of sound. The guns had

stopped. Now and again the chink of a horse mumbling his bit. The

tail end of the traffic on the road below us was silent, waiting, the

men huddled, asleep. And through it all one’s ear listened for a new

sound, the sound of marching feet, or trotting horses which might

mean an Uhlan patrol. Bussy was not far.

Suddenly one voice, far away, distinct, pierced the darkness like a

thin but blinding ray. “Les Boches!--Les Boches!”

A sort of shivering rustle ran over the whole brigade. Men stirred,

sat up, muttered. Horses raised their heads with a rattle of harness.

Hands crept to revolvers. Every breath was held and every head stared

in the direction of the voice.

For a moment the silence was spellbound.

Then the voice came again, “_A gauche! A gauche! Nom de Dieu!_” and

the crunch of wheels came again.

The brigade relaxed. There came a laugh or two, a mumbled remark, a

settling down, a muttered curse and then silence once more.

Eventually came a stir, an order. Voices were raised. Sleeping

figures rolled over stiffly, staggered up. Officers came forward. The

order “Get mounted!” galvanized everybody.

Wagon by wagon we pulled out of the field. My battery was the last.

No sooner on the road, with our noses against the tailboard of the

last vehicle of the battery in front, than we had to halt again and

wait endlessly, the drivers sleeping in their saddles until pulled

out by the N.C.O.’s, the gunners flinging themselves into the ditch.

At last on again, kicking the sleepers awake,--the only method of

rousing them. It was very cold. To halt was as great an agony as

to march, whether mounted or on foot. For five days and nights one

had had one’s boots on. The condition of feet was indescribable. In

places the road was blocked by abandoned motor lorries. We had to

extemporize bridges over the ditch with rocks and tins and whatever

was in the lorries with a tailboard placed on top, to unhook lead

horses from a four-horse gun team and hook them into a loaded wagon

to make a six-horse team, to rouse the drivers sufficiently to make

them drive properly and get the full team to work together, and at

last, having reached a good metalled road, to follow the battery in

front, limping and blind, hour after hour. From time to time the

gunners and drivers changed places. For the most part no word was

spoken. We halted when the teams bumped their noses on the wagon

in front, went on again when those in front did. At one halt I sat

on a gun seat, the unforgivable sin for a gunner on the line of

march,--and I was the Battery Commander. Sprawled over the breech

of the gun in a stupor I knew no more for an indefinite period when

I woke again to find us still marching. The sergeant-major confided

to me afterwards that he was so far my accomplice in that lack of

discipline that he posted a gunner on either side to see that I

didn’t fall off. We had started the march about five o’clock in the

afternoon.

We didn’t reach our destination till nine o’clock next morning.

The destination consisted of halting in the road outside a village

already full of troops, Chevrincourt. The horses were unhooked and

taken off the road, watered, and tied to lines run up between the

trees. Breakfast was cooked, and having ascertained that we were not

going to move for the rest of the day we spread our valises, and got

into pyjamas, not caring if it snowed ink.

We stayed there two days, doing nothing but water and feed the

horses and sleep. I succeeded in getting letters home the first

morning, having the luck to meet a junior Brass Hat who had done

the retreat in a motor-car. It was good to be able to put an end to

their anxiety. Considering all things we had been extraordinarily

lucky. The number of our dead, wounded and missing was comparatively

slight and the missing rolled up later, most of them. On the second

night at about two in the morning, Battery Commanders were summoned

urgently to Brigade Headquarters. The Colonel had gone, leaving

the bloodthirsty Major in command. It transpired that a Divisional

brigade plus one battery of ours was to go back into the line.

They would take our best guns, some of our best teams and our best

sergeants. The exchanges were to be carried out at once. They were.

We marched away that day, leaving one battery behind. As it happened,

it didn’t go into the line again but rejoined us a week later.

The third phase of the retreat, marching back to the British area--we

were far south into the French area at Chevrincourt, which is near

Compiègne, and all its signboards showed Paris so many kilometres

away--gave us an impression of the backwash of war. The roads

were full, not of troops, but of refugees, women, old men, girls

and children, with what possessions they could load into a farm

wagon piled sky high. They pulled their cattle along by chains or

ropes tied round their horns. Some of them pushed perambulators

full of packages and carried their babies. Others staggered under

bundles. Grief marked their faces. The hope of return kept them

going. The French have deeper roots in the soil than we. To them

their “_patelin_” is the world and all the beauty thereof. It was a

terrible sight to see those poor women trudging the endless roads,

void of a goal as long as they kept away from the pursuing death,

half starved, sleeping unwashed in leaky barns, regardless of sex,

begging milk from the inhabited villages they passed through to

satisfy their unhappy babies, managing somehow to help the aged

and infirm who mumbled bitter curses at the “_sale Boche_” and

“_soixante-dix_.” I heard one woman say “_Nous savons c’qu c’est que

la guerre! Nous avons tout fait excepté les tranchées._” “We know

what war is. We have done everything except the trenches.” Bombarded

with gas and long-range guns, bombed by aeroplanes, homeless, half

starved, the graves of their dead pillaged by ghoul-like Huns, their

sons, husbands, and lovers killed, indeed they knew the meaning of

war.

England has been left in merciful ignorance of this side of war,

but woe unto her if she ever forgets that these women of France are

her blood-sisters, these peasant women who later gave food to the

emaciated Tommies who staggered back starving after the armistice,

food of which they denied themselves and their children.

On the third day we reached Poix where only three months previously

we had spent a merry Christmas and drunk the New Year in, the third

day of ceaseless marching and finding billets in the middle of the

night in villages crowded with refugees. The whole area was full,

British and French elbowing each other, the unfortunate refugees

being compelled to move on.

Here we exchanged old guns for new, received reinforcements of men

and horses, drew new equipment in place of that which was destroyed

and lost, found time to ride over to Bergicourt to pay our respects

to the little Abbé, still unshaved, who was now billeting Moroccan

troops, and who kissed us on both cheeks before all the world, and in

three more days were on our way to their firing line again.

It was here that the runaway servants were dealt with; here, too,

that my brother came rolling up in his car to satisfy himself that I

was still this side of eternity or capture. And very good it was to

see him. He gave us the number of divisions engaged against us, and

we marvelled again that any of us were still alive.

We went north this time for the defence of Amiens, having been joined

by our fourth battery, and relieved a brigade in action behind the

village of Gentelles. The Anzacs were in the line from Villers

Brettoneux to Hangard where their flank touched the French. The spire

of Amiens cathedral peeped up behind us and all day long-range shells

whizzed over our heads into the stricken city.

Some one was dissatisfied with our positions behind the village.

The range was considered too long. Accordingly we were ordered to

go forward and relieve some other batteries down the slope in front

of Gentelles. The weather had broken. It rained ceaselessly. The

whole area was a mud patch broken by shell holes. The Major, who

had remained behind at Chevrincourt, and I went forward together

to locate the forward batteries. Dead horses everywhere, and fresh

graves of men marked our path. Never have I seen such joy on any

faces as on those of the officers whom we were coming to relieve.

On our return we reported unfavourably, urging strongly that we

should remain where we were. The order was inexorable. That night we

went in.

We stayed there three days, at the end of which time we were

withdrawn behind the village again. Our dead were three officers--one

of whom was the Babe--half the gunners, and several drivers. Our

wounded were one officer and half the remaining gunners. Of the guns

themselves about six in the brigade were knocked out by direct hits.

Who was that dissatisfied “some one” who, having looked at a map

from the safety of a back area, would not listen to the report of

two Majors, one a regular, who had visited the ground and spoke from

their bitterly-earned experience? Do the ghosts of those officers

and men, unnecessarily dead, disturb his rest o’ nights, or is he

proudly wearing another ribbon for distinguished service? Even from

the map he ought to have known better. It was the only place where a

fool would have put guns. The German artillery judged him well.

Poor Babe, to be thrown away at the beginning of his manhood at the

dictate of some ignorant and cowardly Brass Hat!

“Young, unmarried men, your King and country need you!”

So we crawled out of the valley of death. With what remained of us

in men and guns we formed three batteries, two of which went back to

their original positions behind the village and in disproof of their

uselessness fired four thousand rounds a day per battery, fifty-six

wagon-loads of ammunition. The third battery tucked itself into a

corner of the village and remained there till its last gun had been

knocked out. One S.O.S. lasted thirty-six hours. One lived with a

telephone and a map. Sleep was unknown. Food was just food, eaten

when the servants chose to bring it. The brain reeled under the

stupendousness of the strain and the firing. For cover we lived in a

hole in the ground, some four feet deep with a tarpaulin to keep the

rain out. It was just big enough to hold us all. The wings of the

angel of death brushed our faces continuously. Letters from home were

read without being understood. One watched men burned to death in the

battery in front, as the result of a direct hit, without any emotion.

If there be a hell such as the Church talks about, then indeed we had

reached it.

We got a new Colonel here, and the bloodthirsty Major returned to his

battery, the Scots Captain having been one of the wounded. My own

Captain rolled up again too, having been doing all sorts of weird

fighting up and down the line. It was only now that we learned the

full extent of the retreat and received an order of the day from

the Commander in Chief to the effect that England had its back up

against the wall. In other words the Hun was only to pass over our

dead bodies. He attempted it at every hour of the day and night. The

Anzacs lost and retook Villers Brettoneux. The enemy got to Cachy,

five hundred yards in front of the guns, and was driven back again.

The French Colonials filled Hangard Wood with their own and German

dead, the wounded leaving a trail of blood day and night past our

hole in the ground. The Anzacs revelled in it. They had never killed

so many men in their lives. Their General, a great tall man of mighty

few words, was round the outpost line every day. He was much loved.

Every officer and man would gladly have stopped a shell for him.

At last we were pulled out of the line, at half an hour’s notice.

Just before hooking in--the teams were on the position--there was

a small S.O.S. lasting five minutes. My battery fired four hundred

rounds in that time,--pretty good going for men who had come through

such an inferno practically without sleep for fifteen days.

We sat under a haystack in the rain for forty-eight hours and the

Colonel gave us lectures on calibration. Most interesting!

I confess to having been done in completely. The Babe’s death

had been a frightful shock. His shoulder was touching mine as he

got it and I had carried him spouting blood to the shelter of a

bank. I wanted to get away and hide. I was afraid, not of death,

but of going on in that living hell. I was unable to concentrate

sufficiently to dictate the battery orders. I was unable to face the

nine o’clock parade and left it to the Orderly Officer. The day’s

routine made me so jumpy that I couldn’t go near the lines or the

horses. The sight of a gun filled me with physical sickness. The

effort of giving a definite order left me trembling all over.

The greatest comfort I knew was to lie on my valise in the wet straw

with closed eyes and listen to “Caprice Viennois” on the gramophone.

It lifted one’s soul with gentle hands and bore it away into infinite

space where all was quiet and full of eternal rest and beauty. It

summed up the youth of the world, the springtime of love in all its

fresh cleanness, like the sun after an April shower transforms the

universe into magic colours.

I think the subalterns guessed something of my trouble for they went

out of their way to help me in little things.

We marched north and went into the line again behind Albert, a

murdered city whose skeleton melted before one’s eyes under the

ceaseless rain of shells from our heavy artillery.

During and since the retreat the cry on all sides was “Where the

devil are the Americans?”--those mysterious Americans who were

reported to be landing at the rate of seven a minute. What became

of them after landing? They seemed to disappear. Some had seen them

buying up Marseilles, and then painting Paris all colours of the

rainbow, but no one had yet heard of them doing any fighting. The

attitude was not very bright, until Pershing’s offer to Foch. Then

everybody said, “Ah! _Now_ we shall see something.” Our own recruits

seemed to be the dregs of England, untrained, weedy specimens who had

never seen a gun and were incapable of learning. Yet we held the Hun

all right. One looked for the huskies from U.S.A., however, with

some anxiety.

At Albert we found them, specimens of them, wedged in the line with

our infantry, learning the game. Their one desire was to go out into

No Man’s Land and get to close quarters. They brought Brother Boche

or bits of him every time. One overheard talk on one’s way along the

trenches to the O.P. “Danger?” queried one sarcastically, “Say, I

ain’t bin shot at yet.” And another time when two officers and I had

been shelled out of the O.P. by a pip-squeak battery to our extreme

discomfort and danger, we came upon a great beefy American standing

on the fire step watching the shells burst on the place we had just

succeeded in leaving. “If that guy don’t quit foolin’ around with

that gun,” he said thoughtfully, “some one’ll likely get hurt in a

minute.”

Which was all to the good. They shaped well. The trouble apparently

was that they had no guns and no rifles.

Our own positions were another instance of the criminal folly of

ignorance,--great obvious white gashes in a green field, badly

camouflaged, photographed and registered by the Hun, so placed that

the lowest range to clear the crest was 3,500 and the S.O.S. was

3,550. It meant that if the Germans advanced only fifty yards we

could not bring fire to bear on them.

The dawn of our getting in was enlivened by an hour’s bombardment

with gas and four-twos. Every succeeding dawn was the same.

Fortunately it proved to be a peace sector, comparatively speaking,

and I moved out of that unsavoury spot with no more delay than was

required in getting the Colonel’s consent. It only took the death

of one man to prove my point. He was a mere gunner, not even on

proficiency pay, so presumably it was cheap knowledge. We buried him

at midnight in pouring rain, the padre reading the service by the

light of my electric torch. But the Colonel wasn’t there.

From the new position so reluctantly agreed to, we fired many

hundreds of rounds, as did our successors, and not a single man

became a casualty.

What is the psychology of this system of insisting on going into

childishly unsuitable positions? Do they think the Battery Commander

a coward who balks at a strafed emplacement? Isn’t the idea of field

gunners to put their guns in such a place as will permit them to

remain in action effectively for the longest possible time in a show?

Why, therefore, occupy a position already accurately registered by

the enemy, which he can silence at any given moment? Do they think

that a Major of two years’ experience in command of a battery in the

line has not learned at least the rudiments of choosing positions for

his guns? Do they think it is an attempt to resent authority, or to

assert their own importance? Do they think that the difference of one

pip and a foot of braid is the boundary between omniscience and crass

stupidity?

In civil life if the senior partner insists on doing the junior’s job

and bungles it, the junior can resign,--and say things.

While we were outside Albert we got our first leave allotment and

the ranks were permitted to return to their wives and families for

fourteen days, provided always that they had been duly vaccinated,

inoculated, and declared free from vermin and venereal disease by the

medical officer.

A delightful game, the inoculation business. Army orders are careful

not to make it compulsory, but if any man refuses to be done his

commanding officer is expected to argue with him politely, and, if

that fails, to hound him to the needle. If he shies at the needle’s

point then his leave is stopped,--although he has sweated blood for

King and country for eighteen months or so, on a weekly pay with

which a munitioneer daily tips the waiter at the “Carlton.” If he has

been unlucky enough to get venereal disease then his leave is stopped

for a year.

In the next war every Tommy will be a munition maker.

The desire to get out of it, to hide, refused to leave me.

I wrote to my brother and asked him if he could help me to become an

R.T.O. or an M.L.O.; failing that, a cushy liaison job miles away

from shambles and responsibility and spit and polish. He knew of the

very thing, and I was duly nominated for liaison. The weeks went by

and the nomination papers became a mass of illegible recommendations

and signatures up to the highest Generals of the English Army and a

Maréchal of France. But the ultimate reply was that I was a Battery

Commander and therefore far too important to be allowed to go.

Considering that I was half dead and not even allowed an opinion in

the choosing of a position for my own battery, Gilbert and Sullivan

could have conceived no more priceless paradox.

Somewhere about the end of May we were relieved and went to a rest

camp outside Abbeville which was being bombed every night. A special

week’s leave to England was granted to “war-weary officers.” I sent

a subaltern and, prepared to pawn my own soul to see England again,

asked if I might go too.

The reply is worthy of quotation. “You don’t seem to understand that

this is a rest camp, the time when you are supposed to train your

battery. You’ll get your leave in the line.”

The camp was on turf at the edge of a deep lake. All day the horses

roamed free grazing, and the men splashed about in the water whenever

they felt inclined. The sun shone and footballs appeared from nowhere

and there were shops in the village where they could spend money,

and Abbeville was only about a mile and a half away. In the morning

we did a little gun drill and cleaned vehicles and harness. Concerts

took place in the evenings. Leslie Henson came with a theatrical

company and gave an excellent show. The battery enjoyed its time of

training.

Most of those officers who weren’t sufficiently war-weary for the

week in England, went for a couple of days to Tréport or Paris-Plage.

For myself I got forty-eight hours in Etaples with my best pal,

who was giving shows to troops about to go up the line, feeding

train-loads of refugees and helping to bandage wounded; and somehow

or other keeping out of the way of the bombs which wrecked the

hospital and drove the reinforcement camps to sleep in the woods on

the other side of the river. We drove out to Paris-Plage and lunched

and dined and watched the golden sea sparkling and walked back in a

moonlight filled with the droning of Gothas, the crashing of bombs

and the impotent rage of an Archie barrage.

Not only were there no horses to look after nor men to handle but

there was a kindred spirit to talk with when one felt like it, or

with whom to remain silent when one didn’t. Blessed be pals, for they

are few and far between, and their value is above rubies.

Our rest camp came to an end with an inspection from Field-Marshal

Sir Douglas Haig and once more we took the trail. The battery’s

adventures from then until the first day of the attack which was to

end the war can be briefly summed up, as we saw hardly any fighting.

We went back to Albert and checked calibrations, then entrained and

went off to Flanders where we remained in reserve near St. Omer for a

fortnight or so. Then we entrained once more and returned to Albert,

but this time south of it, behind Morlancourt.

There was an unusual excitement in the air and a touch of optimism.

Foch was said to have something up his sleeve. The Hun was reported

to be evacuating Albert. The Americans had been blooded and had come

up to expectations. There was a different atmosphere about the whole

thing. On our own sector the Hun was offensive. The night we came in

he made a raid, took two thousand yards of front line on our right,

and plastered us with gas and four-twos for several hours. No one was

hurt or gassed except myself. I got a dose of gas. The doctor advised

me to go down to the wagon line for a couple of days, but the barrage

was already in for our attack and the Captain was in England on the

Overseas Course. The show started about 4 p.m. right along the front.

It was like the 21st of March with the positions reversed. South of

us the whole line broke through and moved forward. At Morlancourt the

Hun fought to the death. It was a sort of pivot, and for a couple of

days we pounded him. By that time the line had ceased to bulge and

was practically north and south. Then our infantry took Morlancourt

and pushed the Hun back on to the Fricourt ridge and in wild

excitement we got the order to advance. It was about seven o’clock

at night. All Battery Commanders and the Colonel dashed up in a car

to the old front line to reconnoitre positions. The car was missed

by about twelve yards with high explosive and we advanced in the

dark, falling over barbed wire, tumbling into shell holes, jumping

trenches and treading on corpses through a most unpleasant barrage.

The Hun had a distinct sting in his tail.

We came into position about three hundred yards north-west of

Morlancourt. The village and all the country round stank of festering

corpses, mostly German, though now and again one came upon a British

pair of boots and puttees with legs in them,--or a whole soldier

with a pack on his back, who looked as if he were sleeping until

one saw that half his face was blown away. It made one sick, sick

with horror, whether it was our own Tommies or a long trench chaotic

with rifles, equipment, machine guns and yellow, staring and swollen

Germans.

The excitement of advancing died away. The “glory of victory” was

just one long butchery, one awful smell, an orgy of appalling

destruction unequalled by the barbarians of pre-civilization.

Here was all the brain, energy and science of nineteen hundred years

of “progress,” concentrated on lust and slaughter, and we called it

glorious bravery and rang church bells! Soldier poets sang their swan

songs in praise of dying for their country, their country which gave

them a period of hell, and agonizing death, then wept crocodile tears

over the Roll of Honour, and finally returned with an easy conscience

to its money-grubbing. The gladiators did it better. At least they

were permitted a final sarcasm, “_Morituri, te salutant!_”

Even gentle women at home, who are properly frightened of mice and

spank small boys caught ill-treating an animal, even they read the

flaming headlines of the papers with a light in their eyes, and said,

“How glorious! We are winning!” Would they have said the same if they

could have been set down on that reeking battlefield where riddled

tanks splashed with blood heaved drunkenly, ambulances continuously

drove away with the smashed wrecks of what once were men, leaving a

trail of screams in the dust of the road, and always the guns crashed

out their pæan of hate by day and night, ceaselessly, remorselessly,

with a terrible trained hunger to kill, and maim and wipe out?

There was no stopping. I was an insignificant cog in that vast

machine, but no man could stop the wheels in their mighty

revolutions. Fate stepped in, however.

We advanced again to Mametz, and there, mercifully, I got another

dose of gas. The effects of the first one, seven days previously, had

not worked off. This was the last straw. Three days later it toppled

me over. The doctors labelled me and sent me home.

Bergicourt was a picturesque little place that had sprung up in