II

We were ordered to relieve the ----'s at midnight on the fourth day, and

once again we braced ourselves for the last desperate battle of our

lives. All soldiers go through this process during their first weeks of

active service every time they 'move' anywhere. Immense expectations,

vows, fears, prayers, fill their minds; and nothing particular happens.

Only the really experienced soldier knows that it is the exception and

not the rule for anything particular to happen; and the heroes of

romance and history who do not move a muscle when told that they are to

attack at dawn are generally quite undeserving of praise, since long

experience has taught them that the attack is many times more likely to

be cancelled than to occur. Until it actually does happen they will not

believe in it; they make all proper preparations, but quite rightly do

not move a muscle. We, however, were now to have our first illustration

of this great military truth. For, indeed, we were to have no battle.

Yet that night's march to the trenches was an experience that made full

compensation. It was already dusk when we moved out of the rest-camp,

and the moon was not up. As usual in new units, the leading platoons

went off at a reckless canter, and stumbling after them in the gathering

shadows over rocky, precipitous slopes, and in and out of the clumps of

bush, falling in dark holes on to indignant sleepers, or maddeningly

entangled in hidden strands of wire, the rear companies were speedily

out of touch. To a heavily laden infantryman there are few things more

exasperating than a night march into the line conducted too fast. If the

country be broken and strewn with obstacles, at which each man must wait

while another climbs or drops or wrestles or wades in front of him, and

must then laboriously scamper after him in the shadows lest he, and

thereby all those behind him, be lost; if the country be unknown to him,

so that, apart from purely military considerations, the fear of being

lost is no small thing, for a man knows that he may wander all night

alone in the dark, surrounded by unknown dangers, cut off from sleep,

and rations, and the friendly voices of companions, a jest among them

when he discovers them: then such a march becomes a nightmare.

On this night it dawned gradually on those in front that they were

unaccompanied save by the 1st platoon, and a long halt, and much

shouting and searching, gathered most of the regiment together, hot,

cursing, and already exhausted. And now we passed the five white Water

Towers, standing mysteriously in a swamp, and came out of the open

country into the beginning of a gully. These 'gullies' were deep,

steep-sided ravines, driven through all the lower slopes of Achi Baba,

and carrying in the spring a thin stream of water, peopled by many

frogs, down to the Straits or the sea. It was easier going here, for

there was a rough track beside the stream to follow; yet, though those

in front were marching, as they thought, with inconceivable

deliberation, the rear men of each platoon were doubling round the

corners among the trees, and cursing as they ran. There was then a wild

hail of bullets in all those gullies, since for many hours of each night

the Turk kept up a sustained and terrible rapid fire from his trenches

far up the hill, and, whether by design or bad shooting, the majority of

these bullets passed high over our trenches, and fell hissing in the

gully-bed.

So now all the air seemed full of the humming, whistling things, and all

round in the gully-banks and the bushes by the stream there were vicious

spurts as they fell. It was always a marvel how few casualties were

caused by this stray fire, and to-night we were chiefly impressed with

this wonder. In the stream the frogs croaked incessantly with a note of

weary indifference to the medley of competing noises. At one point there

was a kind of pot-hole in the stream where the water squeezing through

made a kind of high-toned wail, delivered with stabbing emphasis at

regular intervals. So weird was this sound, which could be heard many

hundred yards away, and gradually asserted itself above all other

contributions to that terrible din, that many of the men, already

mystified and excited, said to themselves that this was the noise of the

hideous explosive bullets of which they had heard.

Soon we were compelled to climb out of the gully-path to make way for

some descending troops, and stumbled forward with a curious feeling of

nakedness high up in open ground. Here the bullets were many times

multiplied, and many of us said that we could feel them passing between

us. Indeed, one or two men were hit, but though we did not know it, most

of these near-sounding bullets flew high above us. After a little we

were halted, and lay down, wondering, in the sibilant dark; then we

moved on and halted again, and realized suddenly that we were very

tired. At the head of the column the guide had lost his way, and could

not find the entrance to the communication trench; and here in the most

exposed area of all that Peninsula we must wait until he did. The march

was an avoidable piece of mismanagement; the whole regiment was being

unnecessarily endangered. But none of this we knew; so very few men were

afraid. For we were still in the bliss of ignorance. It seemed to us

that these strange proceedings must be a part of the everyday life of

the soldier. If they were not, we raw creatures should not have been

asked to endure them. We had no standard of safety or danger by which to

estimate our position; and so the miraculous immunity we were enjoying

was taken as a matter of course, and we were blissfully unafraid. At the

same time we were extremely bored and tired, and the sweat cooled on us

in the chill night air. And when at last we came into the deep

communication trench we felt that the end of this weariness must surely

be near. But the worst exasperations of relieving an unknown line were

still before us. It was a two-mile trudge in the narrow ditches to the

front line. No war correspondent has ever described such a march; it is

not included in the official 'horrors of war'; but this is the kind of

thing which, more than battle and blood, harasses the spirit of the

infantryman, and composes his life. The communication trenches that

night were good and deep and dry, and free from the awfulness of mud;

but they were very few, and unintelligently used. There had been an

attack that day, and coming by the same trench was a long stream of

stretchers and wounded men, and odd parties coming to fetch water from

the well, and whole battalions relieved from other parts of the line.

Our men had been sent up insanely with full packs; for a man so equipped

to pass another naked in the narrow ditch would have been difficult;

when all those that he meets have also straps and hooks and excrescences

about them, each separate encounter means heartbreaking entanglements

and squeezes and sudden paroxysms of rage. That night we stood a total

of hours hopelessly jammed in the suffocating trench, with other troops

trying to get down. A man stood in those crushes, unable to sit down,

unable to lean comfortably against the wall because of his pack, unable

even to get his hand to his water-bottle and quench his intolerable

thirst, unable almost to breathe for the hot smell of herded humanity.

Only a thin ribbon of stars overhead, remotely roofing his prison,

reminded him that indeed he was still in the living world and not

pursuing some hideous nightmare. At long last some one would take charge

of the situation, and by sheer muscular fighting for space the two

masses would be extricated. Then one moved on again. And now each man

has become a mere lifeless automaton. Every few yards there is a wire

hanging across the trench at the height of a man's eyes, and he runs

blindly into it, or it catches in the piling-swivel of his rifle;

painfully he removes it, or in a fit of fury tears the wire away with

him. Or there is a man lying in a corner with a wounded leg crying out

to each passer-by not to tread on him, or a stretcher party slowly

struggling against the tide. Mechanically each man grapples with these

obstacles, mechanically repeats the ceaseless messages that are passed

up and down, and the warning 'Wire,' 'Stretcher party', 'Step up,' to

those behind, and stumbles on. He is only conscious of the dead weight

of his load, and the braces of his pack biting into his shoulders, of

his thirst, and the sweat of his body, and the longing to lie down and

sleep. When we halt men fall into a doze as they stand, and curse

pitifully when they are urged on from behind.

We reach the inhabited part of the line, and the obstacles become more

frequent, for there are traverses every ten yards and men sleeping on

the floor, and a litter of rifles, water-cans, and scattered equipment.

For ever we wind round the endless traverses, and squeeze past the

endless host we are relieving; and sometimes the parapet is low or

broken or thin, or there is a dangerous gap, and we are told to keep our

heads down, and dully pass back the message so that it reaches men

meaninglessly when they have passed the danger-point, or are still far

from it. All the time there is a wild rattle of rapid fire from the

Turks, and bullets hammer irritably on the parapet, or fly singing

overhead. When a man reached his destined part of the trench that night

there were still long minutes of exasperation before him; for we were

inexperienced troops, and first of all the men crowded in too far

together, and must turn about, and press back so as to cover the whole

ground to be garrisoned; then they would flock like sad sheep too far in

the opposite direction. This was the subaltern's bad time; for the

officer must squeeze backwards and forwards, struggling to dispose

properly his own sullen platoon, and it was hard for him to be patient

with their stupidity, for, like them, he only longed to fling off his

cursed equipment and lie down and sleep for ever. He, like them, had but

one thought, that if there were to be no release from the hateful burden

that clung to his back, and cut into his shoulders and ceaselessly

impeded him, if there were to be no relief for his thirst and the urgent

aching of all his body--he must soon sink down and scream....