The other incident is briefly told. On our last day in the line Harry's
platoon were working stealthily in the hot sun at a new section of
trench connecting two saps, and some one incautiously threw a little
new-turned earth over the parapet. The Turks, who seldom molested any of
the regular, established trenches with shell-fire, but hotly resented
the making of new ones, opened fire with a light high-velocity gun, of
the whizz-bang type. This was our first experience of the weapon, and
the first experience of a whizz-bang is very disturbing. The long shriek
of the ordinary shell encourages the usually futile hope that by ducking
one may avoid destruction. With the whizz-bang there is no hope, for
there is no warning; the sound and the shell arrive almost
simultaneously. Harry's platoon did not like these things. The first
three burst near but short of the trench, filling the air with fumes;
the fourth hit and removed most of the parapet of one bay. Harry,
hurrying along to the place, found the four men there considerably
surprised, crouching in the corners and gazing stupidly at the yawning
gap. It was undesirable, if not impossible, to rebuild the parapet
during daylight, so he moved them into the next bay. He then went along
the trench to see that all the men had ceased work. He heard two more
shells burst behind him as he went. On his way back two men rushing
round a corner--two men with white faces smeared with black and a little
blood--almost knocked him down; they were speechless. He went through
the bay which had been blown in; it was silent, empty; the bay beyond
was silent too, save for the buzzing of a thousand flies. In it he had
left eight men; six of them were lying dead. Two had marvellously
escaped. The first whizz-bang had blown away the parapet; the second,
following immediately after, had passed miraculously through the hole,
straight into the trench--a piece of astounding bad luck or good
gunnery. The men could not be buried till dusk, and we left them there.
Two hours later, as we sat under a waterproof sheet and talked quietly
of this thing, there came an engineer officer wandering along the
trench. He had come, crouching, through those two shattered and yawning
bays: he was hot and very angry. 'Why the hell don't you bury those
Turks?' he said, 'they must have been there for weeks!' This is the kind
of charge which infuriates the soldier at any time; and we did not like
the added suggestion that those six good men of the 14th Platoon were
dead Turks. We told him they were Englishmen, dead two hours. 'But, my
God, man,' he said, 'they're black!' We led him back, incredulous, to
the place.
When we got there we understood. Whether from the explosion or the
scorching sun in that airless place, I know not, but those six men were,
as he said, literally black--black and reeking and hideous--and the
flies...!
Harry and I crouched at the end of that bay, truly unable to believe our
eyes. I hope I may never again see such horror as was in Harry's face.
They were his platoon, and he knew them, as an officer should. After the
explosion, there had been only four whom he could definitely identify.
Now there was not one. In two hours...
* * * * *
I do not wish to labour this or any similar episode. I have seen many
worse things; every soldier has. In a man's history they are important
only in their effect upon him, and the effect they have is determined by
many things--by his experience, and his health, and his state of mind.
But if you are to understand what I may call the battle-psychology of a
man, as I want you to understand Harry's, you must not ignore particular
incidents. For in this respect the lives of soldiers are not uniform;
though many may live in the same regiment and fight in the same battles,
the experiences which matter come to them diversely--to some crowded and
overwhelming, to some by kind and delicate degrees. And so do their
spirits develop.
These two incidents following so closely upon each other had a most
unhappy cumulative effect on Harry. His night's scouting, in spite of
its miserable end, had not perceptibly dimmed his romantic outlook; it
had been an adventure, and from a military point of view a successful
adventure. The Colonel had been pleased with the reconnaissance, as
such. But the sight of his six poor men, lying black and beastly in that
sunlit hole, had killed the 'Romance of War' for him. Henceforth it must
be a necessary but disgusting business, to be endured like a dung-hill.
But this, in the end, was inevitable; with all soldiers it is only a
matter of time, though for a boy of Harry's temperament it was an ill
chance that it should come so soon.
What was more serious was this. The two incidents had revived, in a most
malignant form, his old distrust of his own competence. I found that he
was brooding over this--accusing himself, quite wrongly, I think, of
being responsible for the death of seven men. He had bungled the
scouting; he had recklessly attracted attention to the party, and
Trower, not he, had paid for it. He had moved four men into a bay where
four others already were, and six of them had been killed. I tried hard
to persuade him, not quite honestly, that he had done absolutely the
right thing. In scouting, of all things, I told him, a man _must_ take
chances; and the matter of the two whizz-bangs was sheer bad luck. It
was no good; he was a fool--a failure. Unconsciously, the Colonel
encouraged this attitude. For, thinking that Harry's nerve might well
have been shaken by his first experience, he would not let him go out on
patrol again on our next 'tour' in the line. I think he was quite
mistaken in this view, for the boy did not even seem to realize how
narrow his own escapes had been, so concerned was he about his lost men.
Nor did this explanation of the Colonel's veto even occur to him. Rather
it confirmed him in his distrust of himself, for it seemed to him that
the Colonel, too, must look upon him as a bungler, a waster of men's
lives....
All this was very bad, and I was much afraid of what the reaction might
be. But there was one bright spot. So far he only distrusted his
military capacity; there was no sign of his distrusting his own courage.
I prayed that that might not follow.
V
Mid-June came with all its plagues and fevers and irritable distresses.
Life in the rest-camp became daily more intolerable. There set in a
steady wind from the north-east which blew all day down the flayed
rest-areas of the Peninsula, raising great columns of blinding,
maddening dust. It was a hot, parching wind, which in no way mitigated
the scorch of the sun, and the dust it brought became a definite enemy
to human peace. It pervaded everything. It poured into every hole and
dug-out, and filtered into every man's belongings; it formed a gritty
sediment in water and tea, it passed into a man with every morsel of
food he ate, and scraped and tore at his inside. It covered his pipe so
that he could not even smoke with pleasure; it lay in a thick coating on
his face so that he looked like a wan ghost, paler than disease had made
him. It made the cleaning of his rifle a too, too frequent farce; it
worked under his breeches, and gathered at the back of his knees,
chafing and torturing him; and if he lay down to sleep in his hole it
swept in billows over his face, or men passing clumsily above kicked
great showers upon him. Sleep was not possible in the rest-camps while
that wind blew. But indeed there were many things which made rest in the
rest-camps impossible. Few more terrible plagues can have afflicted
British troops than the flies of Gallipoli. In May, by comparison, there
were none. In June they became unbearable; in July they were literally
inconceivable. Most Englishmen have lain down some gentle summer day to
doze on a shaded lawn and found that one or two persistent flies have
destroyed the repose of the afternoon; many women have turned sick at
the sight of a blowfly in their butcher's shop. Let them imagine a
semi-tropical sun in a place where there is little or no shade, where
sanitary arrangements are less than primitive, where, in spite of all
precautions, there are scraps of bacon and sugar and tea-leaves lying
everywhere in the dust, and every man has his little daily store of food
somewhere near him, where there are dead bodies and the carcasses of
mules easily accessible to the least venturesome fly--let them read for
'one' fly a hundred, a thousand, a million, and even then they will not
exaggerate the horror of that plague.
Under it the disadvantages of a sensitive nature and a delicate
upbringing were easy to see. An officer lies down in the afternoon to
sleep in his hole. The flies cluster on his face. Patiently, at first,
he brushes them away, with a drill-like mechanical movement of his hand;
by and by he does it angrily; his temper is going. He covers his face
with a handkerchief; it is distressingly hot, but at least he may have
some rest. The flies settle on his hand, on his neck, on the bare part
of his leg. Even there the feel of them is becoming a genuine torment.
They creep under the handkerchief; there is one on his lip, another
buzzing about his eye. Madly he tears off the handkerchief and lashes
out, waving it furiously till the air is free. The flies gather on the
walls of the dug-out, on the waterproof sheet, and watch; they are
waiting motionless till he lies down again. He throws his coat over his
bare knees and lies back. The torment begins again. It is unendurable.
He gets up, cursing, and goes out; better to walk in the hot sun or sit
under the olive-tree in the windy dust.
But look into the crowded ditches of the men. Some of them are fighting
the same fight, hands moving and faces twitching, like the flesh of
horses, automatically. But most of them lie still, not asleep, but in a
kind of dogged artificial insensibility. The flies crowd on their faces;
they swarm about their eyes, and crawl unmolested about their open
mouths. It is a horrible sight, but those men are lucky.
Then there was always a great noise in the camp, for men would be called
for from Headquarters at the end of it or orders passed down, and so
great was the wind and the noise of the French guns and the Turkish
shells, that these messages had to be bawled from man to man. The men
grew lazy from sheer weariness of these messages, so that they were
mutilated as they came and had to be repeated; and there was this babel
always. The men, too, like the officers, became irritable with each
other, and wrangled incessantly over little things; only the officers
argued quietly and bitterly, and the men shouted oaths at each other and
filthy epithets. There was only a yard between the holes of the officers
and the holes of the men, and their raucous quarrelling grated on nerves
already sensitive from the trials of the day, and the officer came near
to cursing his own men; and that is bad.
So there was no rest to be had in the camp during the day; and at night
we marched out in long columns to dig in the whispering gullies, or
unload ships on the beach. There were many of these parties, and we were
much overworked, as all infantry units invariably are; and only at long
intervals there came an evening when a man might lie down under the
perfect stars and sleep all night undisturbed. Then indeed he had rest;
and when he woke to a sudden burst of shell-fire, lay quiet in his hole,
too tired and dreamy to be afraid.
Dust and flies and the food and the water and our weakness joined forces
against us, and dysentery raged among us. There were many who had never
heard of the disease, and thought vaguely of the distemper of dogs.
Those who had heard of it thought of it as something rather romantically
Eastern, like the tsetse fly, and the first cases were invested with a
certain mysterious distinction--especially as most of them were sent
away. But it became universal; everybody had it, and everybody could not
be sent away. One man in a thousand went through that time untouched;
one in ten escaped with a slight attack. But the remainder lived
permanently or intermittently in a condition which in any normal
campaign would have long since sent them on stretchers to the base. The
men could not be spared; they stayed and endured and tottered at their
work. Thus there was every circumstance to encourage infection and
little to resist it. One by one the officers of D Company were stricken.
The first stages were mildly unpleasant, encouraging that comfortable
sense of martyrdom which belongs to a recognized but endurable
complaint. As it grew worse, men became querulous but were still
interested in themselves, and those not in the final stages discussed
their symptoms, emulously, disgustingly--still a little anxious to be
worse than their fellows.
In the worst stage there was no emulation, only a dull misery of
recurrent pain and lassitude and disgust. A man could not touch the
coarse food which was all we had; or, if from sheer emptiness he did,
his sufferings were immediately magnified. Yet always he had a wild
craving for delicate food, and as he turned from the sickening bacon in
the gritty lid of his mess-tin, conjured bright visions of lovely
dainties which might satisfy his longing and give him back his strength.
So men prayed for parcels. But when they came, or when some wanderer
came back from the Islands with a basket of Grecian eggs, too often it
was too late for the sickest men, and their agonies were only increased.
Scientific dieting was impossible. They could only struggle on, for ever
sick, yet for ever on duty: this was the awful thing. When a man reached
this stage, the army was lucky indeed if it did not lose him; he was
lucky himself if he did not die. But so strong is the human spirit and
so patient the human body, that most won through this phase to a
spasmodic existence of alternate sickness and precarious health; and
when they said to themselves 'I am well,' and ate heartily, and said to
their companions 'This and that is what you should do,' the disease
gripped them again, each time more violently. All this sapped the
strength of a man; and finally there came a terrible debility, a kind of
paralysing lassitude when it needed a genuine flogging of the will for
him to lift himself and walk across the camp, and his knees seemed
permanently feeble, as if a fever had just left him. Yet many endured
this condition for weeks and months till the fever definitely took them.
Some became so weak that while they still tottered up to the line and
about their duties, they could not gratuitously drag themselves to the
beach to bathe. Then indeed were they far gone, for the evening swims
were the few paradisial moments of that time. When the sun had but an
hour to live, and the wind and the dust and the flies were already
dwindling, we climbed down a cliff-path where the Indians kept their
sacred but odorous goats. There was a fringe of rocks under the cliffs
where we could dive. There we undressed, hot and grimy, lousy, thirsty,
and tired. Along the rocks solitary Indians were kneeling towards Mecca.
Some of the old battered boats of the first landing were still nosing
the shore, and at a safe distance was a dead mule. The troops did not
come here but waded noisily in the shallow water; so all was quiet, save
for an occasional lazy shell from Asia and the chunk-chunk of a
patrol-boat. The sea at this hour put on its most perfect blue, and the
foot-hills across the Straits were all warm and twinkling in the late
sun. So we sat and drank in the strengthening breeze, and felt the clean
air on our contaminated flesh; and plunging luxuriously into the lovely
water forgot for a magical moment all our weariness and disgust.
When a man could not do this, he was ill indeed.