Such was life in the line at that time. But I should make the soldier's
almost automatic reservation, that it might have been worse. There might
have been heavy shelling; but the shelling on the trenches was
negligible--then; there might have been mud, but there was not. And
eight such days might have left Harry Penrose quite unaffected in
spirit, in spite of his physical handicaps, by reason of his
extraordinary vitality and zest. But there were two incidents before we
went down which did affect him, and it is necessary that they should be
told.
On the fifth day in the line he did a very brave thing--brave, at least,
in the popular sense, which means that many another man would not have
done that thing. To my mind, a man is brave only in proportion to his
knowledge and his susceptibility to fear; the standard of the mob, the
standard of the official military mind, is absolute; there are no fine
shades--no account of circumstance and temperament is allowed--and
perhaps this is inevitable. Most men would say that Harry's deed was a
brave one. I have said so myself--but I am not sure.
Eighty to a hundred yards from one section of our line was a small
stretch of Turkish trench, considerably in advance of their main line.
From this trench a particularly harassing fire was kept up, night and
day, and the Brigade Staff considered that it should be captured. High
officers in shirt sleeves and red hats looked long and wisely at it
through periscopes; colonels and adjutants and subalterns and sergeants
stood silent and respectful while the great men pondered. The great men
then turned round with the air of those who make profound decisions, and
announced that 'You ought to be able to "enfilade" it from "over
there,"' or 'I suppose they "enfilade" you from there.' The term
'enfilade' invariably occurred somewhere in these dicta, and in the
listeners' minds there stirred the suspicion that the Great Ones had not
been looking at the right trench; if indeed they had focused the
unfamiliar instrument so as to see anything at all. But the decision was
made; and for the purposes of a night attack it was important to know
whether the trench was held strongly at night, or occupied only by a few
busy snipers. Harry was ordered to reconnoitre the trench with two
scouts.
The night was pitch black, with an unusual absence of stars. The worst
of the rapid fire was over, but there was a steady spit and crackle of
bullets from the Turks, and especially from the little trench opposite.
Long afterwards, in France, he told me that he would never again dream
of going out on patrol in the face of such a fire. But to-night it did
not occur to him to delay his expedition. The profession of scouting
made a special appeal to the romantic side of him; the prospect of some
real, practical scouting was exciting. According to the books much
scouting was done under heavy fire, but according to the books, and in
the absence of any experience to the contrary, it was probable that the
careful scout would not be killed. Then why waste time? (All this I
gathered indirectly from his account of the affair.) Two bullets smacked
into the parapet by his head as he climbed out of the dark sap and
wriggled forward into the scrub; but even these did not give him pause.
Only while he lay and waited for the two men to follow did he begin to
realize how many bullets were flying about. The fire was now really
heavy, and when I heard that Harry had gone out, I was afraid. But he as
yet was only faintly surprised. The Colonel had sent him out; the
Colonel had said the Turks fired high, and if you kept low you were
quite safe--and he ought to know. This was a regular thing in warfare,
and must be done. So on like reptiles into the darkness, dragging with
hands and pushing with knees. Progress in the orthodox scout fashion was
surprisingly slow and exhausting. The scrub tickled and scratched your
face, the revolver in your hands caught in the roots; the barrel must be
choked with dust. Moreover, it was impossible to see anything at all,
and the object of a reconnaissance being to see something, this was
perplexing. Even when the frequent flares went up and one lay pressed to
the earth, one's horizon was the edge of a tuft of scrub five yards
away. This always looked like the summit of some commanding height; but
labouring thither one saw by the next flare only another exactly similar
horizon beyond. So must the worm feel, wandering in the rugged spaces of
a well-kept lawn. It was long before Harry properly understood this
phenomenon; and by then his neck was stiff and aching from lying flat
and craning his head back to see in front. But after many hours of
crawling the ground sloped down a little, and now they could see the
sharp, stabbing flashes from the rifles of the snipers in the little
trench ahead of them. Clearly they were only snipers, for the flashes
came from only eight or nine particular spots, spaced out at intervals.
_Now_ the scouts glowed with the sense of achievement as they watched.
They had found out. Never again could Harry have lain like that, naked
in the face of those near rifles, coldly calculating and watching,
without an effort of real heroism. On this night he did it
easily--confident, unafraid. Elated with his little success, something
prompted him to go farther and confirm his deductions. He whispered to
his men to lie down in a fold of the ground, and crept forward to the
very trench itself, aiming at a point midway between two flashes. There
was no wire in front of the trench, but as he saw the parapet looming
like a mountain close ahead, he began to realize what a mad fool he was,
alone and helpless within a yard of the Turks, an easy mark in the light
of the next flare. But he would not go back, and squirming on worked his
head into a gap in the parapet, and gazed into a vast blackness. This he
did with a wild incautiousness, the patience of the true scout overcome
by his anxiety to do what he intended as soon as possible. The Turks'
own rifles had drowned the noise of his movements, and providentially no
flare went up till his body was against the parapet. When at length the
faint wavering light began and swelled into sudden brilliance, he could
see right into the trench, and when the shadows chased each other back
into its depths as the light fell, he lay marvelling at his own
audacity: so impressed was he by the wonder of his exploit that he was
incapable of making any intelligent observations, other than the bald
fact that there were no men in that part of the trench. He was still
waiting for another flare when there was a burst of rapid fire from our
own line a little to the right. Suddenly he realized that B Company _did
not know he was out_; C Company knew, but in his haste he had forgotten
to see that the others were informed before he left, as he had arranged
to do with the Colonel. He and his scouts would be shot by B Company.
Obsessed with this thought he turned and scrambled breathlessly back to
the two waiting men. God knows why he wasn't seen and sniped; and his
retirement must have been very noisy, for as he reached the others all
the snipers in the trench opened fire feverishly together. Harry and his
men, who were cold with waiting, wriggled blindly back; they no longer
pretended to any deliberation or cunning, but having come to no harm so
far were not seriously anxious about themselves; only it seemed good to
go back now. But after a few yards one of the men, Trower, gave a scream
of agony and cried out, 'I'm hit, I'm hit.'
In that moment, Harry told me, all the elation and pride of his exploit
ebbed out of him. A sick disgust with himself and everything came over
him. Williams, the other scout, lay between him and Trower, who was now
moaning horribly in the darkness. For a moment Harry was paralysed; he
lay there, saying feebly, 'Where are you hit? Where is he hit, Williams?
Where are you hit?' When at last he got to his side, the man was almost
unconscious with pain, but he had managed to screech out 'Both legs.' In
fact, he had been shot through the femoral artery, and one leg was
broken. In that blackness skilled hands would have had difficulty in
bandaging any wound; Harry and Williams could not even tell where his
wound was, for all his legs were wet and sticky with blood. But both of
them were fumbling and scratching at their field-dressings for some
moments before they realized this. Then they started to take the man in,
half dragging, half carrying him. At every movement the man shrieked in
agony. When they stood up to carry him bodily, he screamed so piercingly
that the storm of bullets was immediately doubled about them. When they
lay down and dragged him he screamed less, but progress was impossibly
slow. And now it seemed that there were Turks in the open scrub about
them, for there were flashes and loud reports at strangely close
quarters. The Turks could not see the miserable little party, but
Trower's screams were an easy guide. Then Harry bethought him of the
little medical case in his breast-pocket where, with needles and aspirin
and plaster and pills, was a small phial of morphine tablets. For
Trower's sake and their own, his screaming must be stilled. Tearing open
his pocket he fumbled at the elastic band round the case. The little
phial was smaller than the rest; he knew where it lay. But the case was
upside-down; all the phials seemed the same size. Trembling, he pulled
out the cork and shook out one of the tablets into his hand; a bullet
cracked like a whip over his head; the tablet fell in the scrub. He got
another out and passed it over to Williams. Williams's hand was shaking,
and he dropped it. Harry groaned. The next two were safely transferred
and pressed into Trower's mouth: he did not know how strong they were,
but he remembered vaguely seeing 'One or two' on the label, and at that
black moment the phrase came curiously into his head, 'As ordered by the
doctor.' Trower was quieter now, and this made the other two a little
calmer. Harry told me he was now so cool that he could put the phial
back carefully in the case and return them to his pocket; even, from
sheer force of habit, he buttoned up the pocket. But when they moved off
they realized with a new horror that they were lost. They had come out
originally from the head of a long sap; in the darkness and the
excitement they had lost all sense of direction, and had missed the sap.
Probably they were not more than fifty yards from friends, but they
might be moving parallel to the sap or parallel to the front line, and
that way they might go on indefinitely. They could not drag their
wretched burden with them indefinitely; so Harry sent Williams to find
the trench, and lay throbbing by the wounded man. No one who has not
been lost in the pitchy dark in No Man's Land can understand how easy it
is to arrive at that condition, and the intense feeling of helplessness
it produces. That solitary wait of Harry's must have been terrible; for
he had time now to ponder his position. Perhaps Williams would not find
the trench; perhaps he, too, would be hit; perhaps he would not be able
to find the scouts again. What should they do then? Anything was
possible in this awful darkness, with these bullets cracking and tearing
about him. Perhaps he would be killed himself. Straining his ears he
fancied he could hear the rustle of creeping men, any moment he expected
a rending blow on his own tender body. But his revolver had been dropped
in the dragging of Trower. He could do nothing--only try to bind up the
poor legs again. Poor Harry! as he lay there bandaging his scout, he
noticed that the lad had stopped moaning, and said to himself that his
morphine tablets had done their work. That was something, anyhow. But
the man was already dead. He could not have lived for ten minutes, the
doctor told me. And when Williams at last returned, trailing a long
string from the sap, it was a dead man they brought painfully into the
trench and handed over gently to the stretcher-bearers.
I was in the sap when they came, and dragged Harry away from it. And
when they told him he nearly cried.