and, generally speaking, festive, the sword of Damocles will descend
upon you, and you will be called to the Presence, and told you are to
be Adjutant. You will, perhaps, be rather inclined to think yourself a
deuce of a fellow on that account. You will acquire a pair of spurs,
and expect to be treated with respect. You will, in fact, feel that
you are a person of some importance, quite the latest model in good
little soldiers. You may--and this is the most cruel irony of all--be
complimented on your appointment by your brother officers.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher!
As soon as you become the “voice of the C.O.,” you lose every friend
you ever possessed. You are just about as popular as the proverbial
skunk at a garden-party. It takes only two days to find this out.
The evening of the second day you decide to have a drink, Orderly Room
or no Orderly Room. You make this rash decision, and you tell the
Orderly-Room Sergeant--only heaven knows when _he_ sleeps--that you are
going out.
“I will be back in half an hour,” you say.
Then you go forth to seek for George--George, your pal, your intimate,
your bosom friend. You find George in your old Coy. head-quarters, and
a pang of self-pity sweeps over you as you cross the threshold and see
the other fellows there: George, Henry, John, and the rest.
“Come and have a----” you begin cheerily. Suddenly, in the frosty
silence you hear a cool, passionless voice remark,
“Good evening, SIR!”
It is George, the man you loved and trusted, whom you looked on as a
friend and brother.
“George, come and have a----” again the words stick in your throat.
George answers, in tones from which all amity, peace, and goodwill
towards men have vanished:
“Thanks very much, sir”--oh baleful little word--“but I’ve just started
a game of poker.”
Dimly light dawns in your reeling brain; you realise the full extent
of your disabilities, and you know that all is over. You are the
Adjutant--the voice of the C.O.!
Sadly, with the last glimmer of Adjutant pride and pomp cast from out
your soul, you return to Orderly Room, drinkless, friendless, and alone.
“The Staff Captain has been ringing you up, sir. He wants to know if
the summary of evidence ...” and so on. In frenzied desperation you
seize the telephone. Incidentally you call the Staff Captain away
from his dinner. What he says, no self-respecting man--not even an
Adjutant--could reveal without laying bare the most lacerated portions
of his innermost feelings.
You go to bed, a sadder and a wiser man, wondering if you could go
back to the Company, even as the most junior sub., were you to make an
impassioned appeal to the C.O.
About 1 A.M. some one comes in and awakens you.
“Message from Brigade, sir.”
With an uncontrite heart you read it: “Forward to this office
immediately a complete nominal roll of all men of your unit who have
served continuously for nine months without leave.” That takes two
hours, and necessitates the awakening of all unit commanders, as the
last Adjutant kept no record. In psychic waves you feel curses raining
on you through the stilly night. Having made an application--in
writing--to the C.O., to be returned to duty, you go to bed.
At 3.30 A.M. you are awakened again. “Movement order from Brigade, sir!”
This time you say nothing. All power of speech is lost. The entire
regiment curses you, while by the light of a guttering candle you write
a movement order, “operation order number”--what the deuce _is_ the
number anyhow. The Colonel is--shall we say--indisposed as to temper,
and the companies get half an hour to fall in, ready to march off. One
Company loses the way, and does not arrive at the starting-point.
“Did you specify the starting-point quite clearly, Mr. Jones?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where did you say it was?”
“One hundred yards south of the ‘N’ in CANDIN, sir.”
“There are _two_ ‘N’s’ in CANDIN, Mr. Jones; _two_ ‘N’s’! How can you
expect a company commander to know _which_ ‘N’? Gross carelessness.
Gross carelessness. Go and find the Company, please.”
“Yessir.”
You find the Company only just out of billets, after scouring the
miserable country around the wrong ‘N’ for fifteen minutes, and falling
off your horse into one of those infernal ditches.
The battalion moves off half an hour later, and the C.O. has lots
to say about it. He also remarks that his late Adjutant was “a good
horseman”--a bitter reflection!
There is absolutely no hope for an Adjutant. If he is a good man at
the “job” everybody hates him. If he is feeble the C.O. hates him.
The Brigade staff hate him on principle. If he kow-tows to them they
trample on him with both feet, if he does _not_ they set snares for
him, and keep him up all night. He is expected to know everything: K.
R. and O. backwards and forwards, divisional drill, and the training of
a section. Routine for the cure of housemaid’s knee in mules, and the
whole compendium of Military Law. He is never off duty, and even his
soul is not his own. He is, in fact, The Adjutant.
Sometimes people try to be nice to him. They mean well. They will
come into the Orderly Room and say: “Oh, Mr. Jones, can you tell me
where the 119th Reserve Battery of the 83rd Reserve Stokes Gun Coy. is
situated?” Of course, Adjutants know _everything_.
And when you admit ignorance they look at you with pained surprise, and
go to Brigade.
“I asked the Adjutant of the --th Battalion, but he did not seem to
know.”
Adjutants die young.
HOME
There is one subject no man mentions at the Front unless it be very
casually, _en passant_. Even then it brings with it a sudden silence.
There is so much, so very much in that little word “Home.”
If a man were to get up at a sing-song and sing “Home, Sweet Home,” his
life would be imperilled. His audience would rise and annihilate him,
because they could not give vent to their feelings in any other way.
There are some things that strike directly at the heart, and this is
one of them.
You see the new officer, the men of the new draft, abstracted, with a
rather wistful look on their faces, as they gaze into the brazier, or
sit silently in billets when their work is done. You have felt like
that, and you know what is the matter. The symptoms are not to be
encouraged in the individual nor the mass. They lead to strong drink
and dissipation, for no man can preserve his inward calm for long, if
he dwells much on his dearest recollections of Home. There is but one
remedy: work, and lots of it, action, movement, anything to distract.
Many a man has committed some small “crime” that brought him to Orderly
Room because he allowed his mind to wander ... Home--and realised too
fully the percentage of his chances of ever seeing that home again. The
Front is not a garden of Allah, or a bed of roses, or even a tenth-rate
music-hall as some people would have us believe. It has to be made
bearable by the spirit of those who endure it.
There is enough that is grim and awe-inspiring--aye! and heart-rending,
without seeking it. That is why we do not like certain kinds of music
at the Front, why the one-time student of “intense” music develops
an uncontrollable predilection for wild and woolly rag-time strains,
and never winces at their execution however faulty. That is why the
Estaminets sell so much bad beer, and so much _vin mousseux_ under the
generic title of Champagne.
Men want to forget about Home, for they dare not think of it too much.
I have never heard a man speak of Home without a little hush in his
voice, as though he spoke of something sacred that was, and might not
be again.
How often one heard the remark, a kind of apologia: “One must do
something.” Yet, in spite of all they do to forget Home, they are
least happy who have none to forget. Fortunately they are few. It is
a strange provision of Providence that lends zest to the attempt at
oblivion, and induces a frame of mind that yearns through that attempt
for the very things it would fain forget!
After all, it is very much like the school-boy who longs for privacy
where he can blubber unseen, and is at the same time very glad that he
has not got it, and _can’t_ blubber, because his school-fellows would
see him!
A superficial observer might think that the men at the Front are purely
callous, intent on seizing lustily on every possible chance of doubtful
and other pleasures that they can obtain. He may think that war has
brutalised them, numbed their consciences, steeled their hearts. Or he
may class them as of low intellect. In all of which he is wrong, and
has utterly failed to grasp the morale of the man who lives to fight
to-day, never knowing of a certainty if he will see another dawn.
The soldier knows that he may not dwell in his heart on all he holds
most dear. It “takes the stuffing out of him.” So, according to
his lights, he works very hard indeed to keep up his spirits; to
forget. Not _really_ to forget, only to pretend to himself that he is
forgetting.
What good is it for the man whose sweetheart ran away with the other
fellow to think about it? Therefore, Tommy rises above his thoughts, he
puts them away from him--as best he can. And if that best is not all
that people at home might wish it to be, surely some allowance may be
made for what may be called the exigencies of the military situation!
Perhaps it is the last thing some people would imagine, but
homesickness is a very real disease at the Front, and he may count
himself lucky who escapes it.
“Wot price the Hedgeware Road?” says Bill, ruminatively, as he drinks
his glass of mild--very mild--beer.
And his pal sums up _his_ feelings in the one word “Blimey!”
If you have seen men go into action, not once, but many times; if you
have heard them sing, “Oh _my_, I _don’t_ want to die; _I_ want to
go Home,” “My Little Grey Home in the West,” and many other similar
ditties, then you will understand.
The very trenches shout it at you, these universal thoughts of Home.
Look at some of the names: Oxford Street, Petticoat Lane, The Empire,
Toronto Avenue, Bayou Italien--even the German trenches have their
Wilhelmstrasse! Each nation in arms is alike in this respect. Every
front-line soldier longs for Home.
A singer whose voice was chiefly remarkable for its sympathetic
quality, gave a concert within sound of the guns. A battalion, just
out of the trenches, went to hear her. She sang several bright little
songs, every one encored uproariously, and finally she sang one of
those beautiful Kashmir love songs which go straight to the depths.
There was a moment’s tense silence when she had finished, and then
the “house” rocked with applause, followed by a greater trumpeting of
handkerchiefed noses than was ever before indulged in by any regiment
_en masse_. She had awakened memories of Home.
There are many who rest beneath foreign skies for whom all earthly
homes are done with. _They_ have been gathered to the greatest Home of
all.
ACTION
“Message from Head-quarters, sir.” The runner was breathing hard,
and his eyes were strained and tense-looking. He had not shaved for
days. Fritz’s “thousand guns on the Somme,” that the papers talk of so
glibly, were tuning up for business.
Major Ogilvie took the message, read it, and handed it on to me. “Zero
hour will be at 6.30 P.M. AAA. Our artillery will bombard from 5.30
to 6.20 P.M., slow continuous, and from 6.20 to 6.29 P.M. hurricane
fire AAA. You will give all possible assistance, by means of rifle
and machine-gun fire to ULTRAMARINE, and arrange to reinforce, if
necessary, in case of heavy counter-attack AAA. ULTRAMARINE will
indicate that objective has been gained by firing two red rockets
simultaneously AAA. Please render situation reports every half-hour to
B.H.Q., A.21.d.1.4½.AAA.”
We looked at each other and smiled a little grimly. To be on the flank
of an attack is rather worse than to attack, for it means sitting
tight while Fritz pounds the life out of you.
“You stop here,” said Ogilvie, “in this glory-hole of ours, while I go
up and see Niven. He will have to put his men in those forward saps. If
you get any messages, deal with them, and make sure that Townley keeps
those bombers of his on both sides of the road. They _must_ stop there,
as long as there are any of them left, or the Hun might try to turn our
flank. So long.”
He set out towards the north, leaving me in “AK” Coy.’s
“head-quarters.” The latter consisted of a little niche, three feet
wide, ran back a foot, and was four feet high, cut in the parapet of
the front line. The runner, Thomson, one of our own company, was curled
up in a little cubby-hole at my feet, and had fallen asleep.
It was lonely in that trench, although there were invisible men, not
thirty feet away, on both sides of me.
The time was 5.25 P.M.
Our guns were still silent. Fritz was warming up more and more. He was
shelling our right most persistently, putting “the odd shell” around
head-quarters.
Punctually to the minute our artillery started in. Salvos of heavies,
way back, shrapnel all along the front line and supports.
A wickedly pretty sight along a thousands yard front: Fritz began to
get irritated, finally to be alarmed. Up went his red lights, one after
the other, as he called on his guns, called, and kept on calling.
They answered the call. Above us the air hissed unceasingly as shells
passed and exploded in rear. He was putting a barrage on our supports
and communication trenches. Then he opened up all along our trench.
High explosive shrapnel, and those thunder-crackling “woolly bears.” I
wondered where Ogilvie was, if he was all right, and I huddled in close
to the damp crumbling earth.
It was 5.50 P.M.
“Per-loph-UFF.” An acrid smell of burnt powder, a peculiar, weird
feeling that my head was bursting, and a dreadful realisation that
I was pinned in up to my neck, and could not stir. A small shell,
bursting on graze, had lit in the parapet, just above my head,
exploded, and buried me up to the neck, and the runner also. He called
out, but the din was too great for me to hear what he said. I struggled
until my hands were free, and then with the energy of pure fear tore
at the shattered sand-bags that weighed me down. Finally I was free to
bend over to Thomson.
“Are you hurt?”
“No, sir, but I can’t move. I thought you was dead.”
I clawed him out with feverish haste. The air reeked with smoke, and
the shelling was hellish. Without any cessation shells burst in front
of, above, and behind the trench; one could feel their hot breath on
one’s cheek, and once I heard above the din a cry of agony that wrung
my torn and tattered nerves to a state of anguish.
“Get out of here,” I yelled, and we crawled along the crumbling trench
to the right.
“Hrrumph!” A five-nine landed just beyond us. I stopped a second.
“Stretcher-bearer!” came weakly from a dim niche at my side. Huddled
there was one of my boys. He was wounded in the foot, the leg, the
chest, and very badly in the arm. It took five minutes to put on a
tourniquet, and while it was being done a scout lying by my side was
killed. He cried out once, turned, shivered, and died. I remember
wondering how his soul could go up to Heaven through that awful
concentration of fire and stinging smoke.
It was 6.15 P.M.
There were many wounded, many dead, one of those wonderfully brave
men, a stretcher-bearer, told me, when he came crawling along, with
blood-stained hands, and his little red-cross case. None of the wounded
could be moved then, it was impossible. I got a message, and read it
by the light of the star shells: “Please report at once if enemy are
shelling your area heavily AAA.” The answer was terse: “Yes AAA.”
Suddenly there was a lull. One of those inexplicable, almost terrifying
lulls that are almost more awesome than the noise preceding them. I
heard a voice ten yards away, coming from a vague, shadowy figure lying
on the ground:
“Are you all right, ‘P.’?” It was Ogilvie.
“Yes. Are you?”
We crawled together, and held a hurried conversation at the top of our
voices, for the bombardment had now started in with violent intensity
from our side, as well as from Fritz’s.
“We’ll have to move to the sap, with Niven ... bring ... runners ...
you ... make ... dash for it.”
“How ... ’bout Townley?”
“’S’all right.”
Then we pulled ourselves together and went for it, stumbling along the
trench, over heaped-up mounds of earth, past still forms that would
never move again. On, on, running literally for our lives. At last we
reached the saps. Two platoons were out there, crowded in a little
trench a foot and a half wide, nowhere more than four feet deep. Some
shrapnel burst above it, but it was the old front line, thirty yards in
rear, on which the Germans were concentrating a fire in which no man
could live long.
The runners, Major Ogilvie, Niven, and myself, and that amazing
Sergeant-Major of ours, who would crack a joke with Charon, were all
together in a few yards of trench.
Our fire ceased suddenly. It was zero hour. In defiance of danger
Ogilvie stood up, perfectly erect, and watched what was going on. Our
guns opened again, they had lifted to the enemy supports and lines of
communication.
“They’re over!” we cried all together.
Machine-guns were rattling in a crescendo of sound that was like the
noise of a rapid stream above the roar of a water-wheel. The enemy
sent up rocket upon rocket--three’s, four’s, green and red. Niven, as
plucky a boy as ever lived, watched eagerly. Then a perfect hail of
shells began to fall. One could almost see our old trench change its
form as one glanced at it. It was almost as light as day. Major Ogilvie
was writing reports. One after another he sent out the runners to
head-quarters, those runners every one of whom deserves the Victoria
Cross. Some went never to return.
All at once two red rockets burst away forward, on the right, falling
slowly, slowly to earth.
ULTRAMARINE had attained the objective.
It was then 6.42 P.M.
Curious, most curious, to see the strain pass momentarily from men’s
faces. Two runners took the message down. It proved to be the earliest
news received at H.Q. that the objective was reached.
But the bombardment did not cease, did not slacken. It developed more
and more furiously. Niven, one of the very best--the boy was killed
a few weeks after--lay with his body tucked close to the side of the
trench. I lay with my head very close to his, so that we could talk.
Major Ogilvie’s legs were curled up with mine. Every now and then he
sent in a report.
My conversation with Niven was curious. “Have another cigarette?”
“Thanks, Bertie.” “Fritz is real mad to-night.” “He’s got a reason!”
“Thank the Lord it isn’t raining.” “Yes.” Pause. “Did you get any
letters from home?” “Two.... Good thing they can’t see us now!”
“_Jolly_ good thing!” “Whee-ou, that was close!” “So’s that,” as a
large lump of earth fell on his steel hat. Pause. “I must get a new
pair of breeches.” “When?” “Oh, to go on leave with.” “So must I.” We
relapsed into silence, and from sheer fatigue both of us fell asleep
for twenty minutes.
I was awakened by Ogilvie, who kicked me gently. “I have had no
report from Townley or Johnson for nearly two hours”--it was past
eleven. “I want you to go up to the right and see if you can establish
communication with them. Can you make it?” “I’ll try, sir.” Our guns
had quieted down, but Fritz was still pounding as viciously as ever,
and with more heavy stuff than hitherto. My experience in travelling
perhaps a quarter of a mile of trench that night was the most awful
that has befallen me in nearly two years of war at the Front.
The trench was almost empty, for the men had been put in advance of
it, for the most part. In places it was higher than the level of the
ground, where great shells had hurled parapet on parados, leaving a
gaping crater on one side or the other. Fear, a real personal, loathly
fear, ran at my side. Just as I reached the trench an eight-five
exploded on the spot I had crossed a second before. The force of the
explosion threw me on my face, and earth rained down on me. I knelt,
crouching, by the parapet, my breath coming in long gasps. “Lord, have
mercy on my soul.” I rushed a few yards madly, up, down, over; another
pause, while the shells pounded the earth, and great splinters droned.
I dared not move, and I dared not stay. Every shadow of the trenches
loomed over me like the menacing memory of some past unforgettable
misdeed. Looking down I saw a blood-stained bandage in a pool of blood
at my side, and I could smell that indescribable, fœtid smell of blood,
bandages, and death. As I went round a traverse, speeding like a hunted
hare, I stumbled over a man. He groaned deeply as I fell on him. It was
one of my best N.C.O.’s, mortally wounded. An eternity passed before
I could find his water-bottle. His face was a yellow mask, his teeth
chattered against the lip of the water-bottle, his lips were swollen
and dreadful. He lay gasping. “Can I do anything for you, old man?”
With a tremendous effort he raised his head a little, and opened wide
his glazing eyes. “Write ... sir ... to my ... mother.” Then, his head
on my arm, he died.
On, on, on, the sweat streaming from me, the fear of death at my
heart. I prayed as I had never prayed before.
At last I found Johnson. He gave me his report, and that of Townley,
whom he had seen a few moments before. I went back, another awful trip,
but met Major Ogilvie half-way.
After nine and three-quarter hours, during which they threw all the
ammunition they possessed at us, the German gunners “let up.” And
Ogilvie and I went to sleep, along the trench, too weary to care what
might happen next, to wake at dawn, stiff with cold, chilled to the
bone, to face another day of “glorious war!”
[Illustration: THE TEMPLE PRESS LETCHWORTH ENGLAND]
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Superscripted text is preceded by a carat character: B^1.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.
The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber using
the original cover as the background and is entered into the
public domain.