Then, as the year deepened towards winter, the rains came, torrential
rains such as we thought we had never known the like of before. We
heard that the trenches were flooded, and that our soldiers were eating,
sleeping, and fighting ankle-deep (sometimes knee-deep) in water. At
night, on going to our white beds at home, we had remorseful visions of
those slimy red ruts in Flanders where our boys were lying out in the
drenching rain under the heavy darkness of the sky. It was hard to
believe that human strength could sustain itself against such cruel
conditions, and indeed it often failed.
Towards Christmas tens of thousands of our men had to be brought home
to our hospitals, many of them wounded, but not a few suffering from
maladies which made them unfit for military service. The accident of
being asked to distribute presents enabled me to see and talk
with hundreds of them. It was a sweet and exhilarating yet rather
nerve-racking experience. These young fellows, who had looked on death
in its most horrible aspects, having had it for their duty to kill as
many Germans as possible, and then to eat and sleep as if nothing had
occurred--had they been degraded, brutalized, lowered in the scale of
human creatures by their awful ordeal?
The sequel surprised me. The veil of mist with which a London winter
enshrouds the beginnings of night and day had only just risen when on
Christmas morning I reached the wounded soldiers’ ward in the first of
the hospitals I visited. The sweet place was decked out with holly
and mistletoe. Forty or fifty men were lying there in their beds, some
bandaged about the head, a few about the face, more about the body,
arms, and legs. None of them seemed to be in serious pain, and nearly
all were cheerful, even bright, boyish, and almost childlike. What
stories they had to tell of the inferno they had come from! It was hell,
infernal hell. They would go back, of course, when they were better, and
had to do so, but if anybody said he _wanted_ to go back he was telling
a damn’d lie.
One boy, scarcely out of his teens, with soft, womanly eyes, light hair,
and a face that made me sure he must be the living image of his mother,
had had a narrow escape. After being wounded he had been taken prisoner
to a farmhouse. Nobody there had done anything for him, and at length,
after many hours, watching his opportunity, he had crept into the
darkness and got back to the British trenches by crawling for nearly a
quarter of a mile on hands and knees.
Another young soldier, an Irishman, told me a brave story, such as might
have been allowed, I thought, to scratch and scrape its way through the
thorn hedge of the strictest censorship. It was a story of the great
days before the armies had dug themselves into the earth like rabbits.
Perhaps I had heard something about it? I had. Eight hundred of his
cavalry regiment had ridden full gallop into a solid block of the enemy,
making a way through them as wide as Sackville Street. At length the
Germans in front had dropped their rifles and held up their hands,
whereupon our men had ceased to slay. But, being unable to rein in their
frantic horses, they had been compelled to gallop on. Then, while their
backs were turned, the treacherous Huns had picked up their rifles and
fired on them from behind, killing many of our best men.
“And what did you do then?” I asked.
“Turned back and----”
“And what?”
“Took one man alive, sor.”
“And the rest?”
“Left them there, sor.”
“And how many of you got back?”
“Less than two hundred, sor.”