A DIRECT HIT
The letter which the Marquis of Truckleford wrote to the general who
was a peg above "Duggy" gave Phil an early introduction to Flanders
mud. An upstanding man the major to whom he reported. Fresh from the
retreat of Mons and the fighting on the Aisne, he had been brought home
to mould human clay into gunners. Then there was Jaffers, the regular
sergeant, who regarded all recruits as children of his strict
parenthood. Treating fledgling young officers with the respect due to
their rank, he would whisper to them the right thing to do, the while
he stood stiff at the salute.
"They will learn fast under fire," said Jaffers. "It's the blooming
Boche shells that'll teach them to be quick about their lessons!"
By the hundred of thousands untrained men were drilling and waiting for
uniforms and rifles. Every time that a gun was finished or a shell
came out of the shops, a thousand hungry hands seemed to reach across
the Channel for it. Phil became one of a myriad of units in a tiny
orbit; a cog in one of the many little organisations which were to be
assembled into a whole. His technical training stood him in good
stead. At first, the battery drilled with heirlooms of the Victorian
epoch, which might be useful for home defence against a bow-and-arrow
invasion.
Then, one day somebody in the War Office signed a paper which meant
that four tubes of steel were to give all the horse-drill and men-drill
of Phil's battery a proud reality. New four-inch howitzers could not
be kept long away from France in those days. They were needed in the
Ypres salient, where the British were holding on by their teeth with
their faces to the Germans and their backs to Calais.
Phil's letters about his daily existence ought to have cured an old
pair in Longfield of any idea that he was fighting the whole war
himself according to the methods of the revolutionary ancestor; though
his mother to this day has never been convinced to the contrary.
"Mud--and shells at the Germans and from the Germans; and more mud, a
great deal more mud, and more shells at the Germans and more from the
Germans," was the way that he described it. "I know that I shall never
choose to spend a winter holiday in Flanders after the war is over," he
said.
The business of the gunners was to hide their "hows" from prying German
eyes by land and air and on telephone summons to pump destruction at
some unseen point on the map, according to tabular calculations. At
other times they might walk about in the mud or sit in the mud inside
their dug-outs. It was enough to make a bold knight of olden story,
who carried a Toledo or a Damascus blade, fall in a fit, as Phil
remarked. Should the Germans locate them, a tornado of "krumps"
descended on their position and they sat in the dug-outs considering
whether or not everybody there would be "done in," as the English say,
by a direct hit.
Then they moved to another place through the mud and built more
dug-outs in the mud and began the daily grind over again, the vacancies
caused by casualties being filled by recruits. But they had intervals
in billets, where they crowded together in peasants' houses out of the
zone of shell-fire, and smoked and read and waited for the mail, and
expatiated on how it would seem to have a real bath in a real tub in a
land where there was no mud.
Spring did come, though there were soldiers in the British army who
thought that it never would. They could not comprehend how anything so
pleasant could ever happen in war time in Flanders. It found Phil with
a bit of white and blue ribbon on his blouse, which had been given for
what other people, including a division commander, said was a gallant
deed showing exceptional initiative. He was willing to accept their
view as official, though he could not honestly agree with it. However,
it was the source of enormous happiness in Longfield and Truckleford.
Once he had been back at Truckleford on leave for a week; and, after
the mud, he did not mind if the vicar and Mrs. Sanford made as much
fuss over him as if he were a real hero. Madame Ribot had returned to
Paris. He had seen neither Henriette nor Helen, though Henriette wrote
to him regularly. She was at one of the hospital bases not more than
three hours' motor ride away; but if he had had ten motors he could not
have gone to see her. Each tiny cog of the machine must keep in its
place. None may go moving about at will.
He came to watch for Henriette's handwriting and the postmarks of
Longfield as the two links with the world; and Truckleford had also
become a part of his existence. Henriette seemed the adjutant of Lady
Truckleford, devoted to her work. Her letters ever revived the
thousand pictures of her from Truckleford to Mervaux and back again and
the spirit of them was expressed in the words: "The woman waits while
the man goes out to fight." Her references to Helen, who seemed to be
at the same base but with another unit, were the only news he had of
the other cousin except her drawings, which continued to appear in the
weeklies. Helen, Henriette said, was still trying to get used to the
sight of blood.
People were coming to know Helen's name. Phil wrote to her in
congratulation and the answer he received hardly invited further
correspondence. It was unlike her, uncousinly, and it troubled him.
She was very busy and very happy. She made a point of that--very
happy. New memories of Mervaux occurred to him with the peculiar
distinctness of details appearing, after what seemed a long lapse of
time, with the freshness of sudden discovery in some recess of the
mind. He was thinking that he should not mind sitting again for his
portrait on the terrace, with Henriette smiling at her easel and Helen
laughing over her cartoons of his proud career.
Spring not only came to Flanders, but the mud dried; the fields were
carpeted with the tender green of young grain, and the canopies of
foliage gave better cover for the "hows." Green, yes, but flat that
vista from the gun-positions, while the graceful slopes of the
Berkshires might be dripping and glistening as they had on the
afternoon that he returned from the Southwest. Bill Hurley was at his
accustomed place on the station platform, no doubt; Hanks, the
druggist, was still branching out, no doubt. But Truckleford had the
greater call of the two for him that day; for he had received a letter
that his father and mother had at last undertaken their pilgrimage and
had arrived at the vicarage, where they were waiting until he had
another week's leave.
Another bit of news, too. Peter Smithers, without any warning to the
War Lord, was about to visit Europe to see things for himself. Peter's
only expressed view of Phil's action in going to war had been:
"About what you would expect. I gave him up long ago. So Ledyard's
keeping the job for him--hm-m-m! Well, Ledyard's business isn't the
sport of a lot of jockeying politicians."
Sometimes Phil had thought what if a shell should take off an arm or a
leg, or otherwise maim him for life. Hundreds of thousands of others
had thought the same. The merciful bullet through the heart or the
wound that heals leaving one whole--these are a part of the game. But
that jagged, tearing piece of shell-fragment--this was the devil of the
new psychology of war.
It was a glorious morning that he went up to the trench to take his
turn at observation. The sun made the wings of the planes overhead
shimmer with silver and gold under a fleckless sky. The birds were
singing their song in the midst of the song of bullets. It hardly
seemed possible that death could lurk in the soft puffs of shrapnel
smoke playing around the planes. Death should have no part in such a
day. It was a day of life. Soft air to breathe, gentle breezes,
kindly sunshine, and youth. Phil enjoyed the fact of existence as some
superb privilege which deserved gratitude to earth and sky, and
particularly to the sky, which was all that he could see as he entered
the winding communication trench.
"Good-morning!"
The cheery greetings were exchanged between fellow-officers as if the
game were not with death, but with racquets on an English lawn.
"They are strafing a bit up there," said one; which meant that there
was some shelling in the front line, where little mirrors were set up
on parapets of sandbags. Through these bits of glass you could look
out on a field of weeds across to another line of sandbags, Britain
burrowing on one side and Germany on the other of No Man's Land. Phil
took the place of another lieutenant at the O.P., or Observation Post.
Here he was in touch by telephone with his battery. He watched black
bursts of smoke, which were the shells from its guns, and reported
their proximity to the target. It was a matter of eyesight and
judgment and speaking into a black disk--nothing dramatic about it.
Since he was at Mervaux he had learned much about those bursts of black
smoke. He had seen many men knocked over by them. One monster had
come even closer to him than the shell which had exploded between him
and Helen, and on that occasion he had been dug out from under a
tumbled parapet with a spade. When the Germans increased their
shell-fire on any section of the British trenches, the British
increased theirs on the Germans; then, in turn, the Germans increased
theirs and the British increased theirs. Thus it happened on this
particular morning, perhaps because the light was good for artillery
observation. He was not looking to see what the German shells did to
the British trench, but what his shells were doing to the German
trench! "Right on!" He had announced the result of a shot when he
heard the hurtling, growing scream of a nine-inch coming straight
toward him.
After that the end of all sensation; oblivion, which had come to many
another man from the burst of a nine-inch whether or not he ever awoke
to life in this world.
After he knew not how long Phil felt some one pulling at his body,
which seemed to rest under a great weight. This was all, and this only
for a fleeting moment; he was uncertain whether he was in this world or
the other. Then he was bumped against something and felt his hand
brush the hard earth. Vaguely he reasoned that stretcher-bearers were
carrying him around the traverse of a trench. A hot, moist sponge
seemed pressed into his throat and something besides air was coming
into his lungs and he was trying to cough it out. Utter darkness
encompassed him and there was no sound.
All volition, all muscular and nerve-initiative had been beaten out of
him. He could only try to breathe through that hot sponge and to keep
that other trickling thing out of his lungs. It was not his mind that
made this effort; only a body detached from his mind, acting
involuntarily like the flouncing of a fish out of water. He lost
consciousness again before he realised where he was hit; and the
litter-bearers bore him on to the casualty clearing station. They did
not know whether or not he was dead. Sometimes cases like that were
and sometimes they were not when they reached the station.
"Better be, though," said the one who had the rear handles of the
stretcher.
"Yes. I'd want to be," said the man in front.