WINTER WARFARE
I
_The Shell Area_
The shell area is all the land behind the trenches which is under fire
from the enemy's guns as a matter of course. It is not a pleasant place,
for that reason, to walk about in, and our own artillery, cleverly
concealed, is apt to open fire unexpectedly within a few yards of the
passer-by in a way that is very disturbing. It is a dreary land; a dank
air broods over it, an atmosphere of destruction and death, of humanity
gone awry and desolate. I remember the almost ecstasy with which one
April afternoon some of us found ourselves among the purple hyacinths
on Kemmel hill. Poor Kemmel, once a pleasure resort whither happy
Belgians went for the benefit of their health, now far from that--and
not particularly healthy! These battered villages are now merely sordid;
only Ypres maintains a personality, an air of undefeat all its own. It
too is a ruin, but unlike the others it is a splendid ruin. At every
cross-roads the brooding crucifixes hang. The British mind does not like
this constant reiteration of mishandling and defeat in the death of
Christ. It does not seem to it to be the final message of the Cross.
Indeed, it is the product of the mediaeval, monkish mind. It was not
until the tenth century that the representations of the Crucifixion
showed Our Lord as dead; it was much later before the emphasis was laid
on agony and despair. Once from among the debris of the convent in
Voormezeele I rescued such a representation of the Body of Christ, limbs
gone, broken arms outstretched, and it seemed a symbol. But that is not
the final truth, defeat and despair. The cross-road shrines would not
look down on those groups of tramping Islanders if it were so. And as
you look back over the parados of the firing trench, across the bleached
and scarred countryside, you remember that _that_, like the scenes of
agony in the clearing station after Loos, is the plain, visible proof
that His Spirit lives in the world of men. But what a Via Dolorosa it
is, that grim ditch dug across Europe, with its crouching men behind the
snipers' plates. Strange path for the twentieth century to have to walk
in, to prove that compassion and righteousness still live.
In all this area the British soldier walks with a singular
_insouciance_. It is not simply that he is brave. He is that, supremely
so, and not least when he is very much afraid and will not show it and
carries on with his job. But there is more in it than that. There is a
kind of warlike genius in him which makes him do the right thing in the
right way, so that he appeals to humour and comradeship as well as to
gallantry. It was one of our sergeant-majors who before a battalion
attack offered £5 to the man of his company who was first in the enemy's
trench. Think of it for a moment. He appealed to their sporting
instinct; he turned their thoughts from death and wounds and introduced
a jest into every dug-out that night; and he indicated, without
boasting, that he was going to be first over the parapet. He made it
certain that every sportsman in the company--and what British regular is
not--would strain every nerve to be first across. And the cream of the
jest was that, stalwart athlete that he was, he was first across
himself! The same may be said of the officer; he wins more than
obedience from his men. I have seen senior N.C.O.'s crying like children
because their young officer was dead.
Along with this courage and comradeship and humour there is often a
great deal of fatalism. It expresses itself in many ways, in the reading
of Omar Khayyam--'The Ball no Question makes of Ayes and Noes'--for
example, in the indifference so often shown by men if they lose through
their own fault some 'cushy job' and have to go back to the line, or in
the doing of really foolish things, foolish because dangerous, but
useless. I remember sitting outside the dug-out of Captain Chree (who
afterwards laid down his life on the Somme) at battalion headquarters,
and watching the shelling of one of our batteries of 18-pounders some
five hundred yards back. The Germans had searched for it repeatedly with
lavish expenditure of ammunition, and that afternoon they got it
repeatedly, with very unpleasant results. But of course there were many
misses. Whenever the German shells fell short they burst in the field,
in front of the battery, which was bounded on two sides by a road. In
the midst of the bombardment a soldier came down the road facing us and,
instead of walking round by the cross-roads, cut across the field in
which shells were bursting. He deliberately left comparative safety for
real danger simply in order to save himself five minutes' walk. On
another occasion, when I was at dusk one evening in Vierstraat, a Tommy
came along carrying some burden. At this point he got tired and planted
it down right in the middle of the cross-roads. Another man told him he
could not have chosen a worse place for a rest, that the Boche was
always firing rifles and machine-guns up the road, but he was prevailed
upon to move only with the greatest difficulty. Perhaps in another class
was the soldier the doctor and I came upon suddenly in a ruined house in
Ypres kicking with all the strength of an iron-shod boot at the fuse of
an unexploded German shell. A friend with his hands in his pockets was
watching the proceedings with much interest. He said he was only
wanting the fuse as a souvenir, but he would soon have got that to keep
and a good deal more. The doctor was quite peevish about it, as the
saying is!
When an attack is being made or repelled, the concentration of batteries
in action turns the country in front of them into a nightmare of
noise--'a terrific and intolerable noise' in Froissart's phrase. The
incessant slamming of the guns makes it impossible to hear enemy shells
coming. The first intimation is their arrival. But the orderlies go
backwards and forwards through it all with superb courage. Wounded
trickle down the trolley line to the dressing station, and an occasional
group of prisoners come through. It was on a day like this that I saw
Davidson and Rainie for the last time. When The Royals were moved up
from the support trenches to take over from the battalion which had
delivered the attack at St. Eloi, some one said to Captain Davidson, who
was going up at the head of his company through a terrible barrage,
'This is going to be a risky affair.' 'Yes,' he replied, 'but it's not
our business whether it's risky or not. My orders are to go through.'
Soon after he fell. He was barely twenty years of age.
II
_'I hate war: that is why I am fighting'_
There is a garden in Vlamertynghe with a marble seat overturned beside a
smashed tree, a corner just made for lovers, once. An enormous crump
hole fills the greater part of the garden, and the wall has fallen
outwards in one mass leaving the fruit trees standing in a line, their
arms outstretched. Across on the other side of the road Captain Norman
Stewart lies buried. But his memory lives in the hearts of men, and
wherever the 2nd battalion gathers round its braziers and in the glow of
them the stories of the heroes of the regiment are passed on from the
veterans to the younger men, Stewart will be remembered with reverence
as one who not only upheld but created regimental tradition.
It was a bombing affair in which he died, detachments of Suffolks,
Middlesex, and Royal Scots, under his leadership, being ordered to drive
the enemy out of the tip of the salient. Barricades made progress almost
impossible in face of a murderous machine-gun fire. Owing to the
confused nature of the fighting no quarter could be given, and
desperate fighting ensued with bombs, bayonets and hand to hand. Finally
ten yards were gained and the ground consolidated.
At one point of the fight, finding progress otherwise impossible,
Captain Stewart mounted to the top of the barricade in full view of the
enemy, with shells and bombs bursting all round and under machine-gun
and rifle fire. Though wounded he remained there in face of certain
death for over ten minutes. From bucket after bucket handed up to him he
still hurled bombs at the thronging enemy beneath, until a sniper crept
round to his flank, and this heroic Scotsman fell.
'They pass, they pass, but cannot pass away,
For _Scotland_ feels them in her blood like wine.'
The night before he died Stewart said to a friend, 'I hate war: that is
why I am fighting.'
III
_Billets and Camps_
The camps to which the battalion returned after each tour of the
trenches were for the most part out of danger except for an occasional
shell, but it was only when we were withdrawn to the 'rest area' that we
felt any sense of freedom to settle down and take stock of ourselves.
Both Colonel Duncan and Colonel Dyson, to whom I owe countless
kindnesses, were keen disciplinarians, and Major Everingham, the
Quartermaster, imperturbable, efficient, could really perform almost
superhuman feats. A man can only know his own department, and in mine
the standard of a battalion is shown by its attitude to religious
observances. A bad battalion finds too many engagements to turn out in
any strength on Sunday. I used to feel so proud as the old Royals, every
available man on parade, would march up behind their pipes and drums,
alert, well-groomed, punctilious in all the minor forms that are so
important an evidence of a battalion's condition. In rest billets we all
got to work; there were marches and manoeuvres, cinematographs and
cross-country runs, football matches and boxing competitions. These men
when stripped were so much more beautiful than in their clothes. Of how
many in civilian occupations could that be said? The battalion would be
refitted; a brewer's great vat was commandeered for a bathing-place;
the village school was turned, every evening, into a recreation room;
and a communicants' class was started. Not for the first time I longed
for a brief, clear statement of our Church's faith. The cumbrous
complicated Catechisms and Confessions are magnificent monuments, but
they are worse than useless under such conditions. A _Credo_ which could
be written on a blackboard and pointed to as the Church member's
essential Confession of Faith, to be developed and expanded according to
the need and circumstances, would be a real power in a chaplain's hands.
The men's behaviour in billets--ramshackle barns for the most part--was
almost exemplary. Only once or twice small episodes occurred in
connection with hen-roosts, and on one occasion a sucking-pig was
slaughtered amid its brethren at the dead of night. It must have been a
temporary madness that possessed the author of this escapade, for he had
no possible chance of escape. It was pleaded on his behalf, on his
appearance before the Colonel, that he had recently done a gallant deed,
but as some one said, 'If every man who did a gallant deed was allowed
to kill a pig there would not be a pig left in Flanders.'
It was the cleanness of the air and of the soil that made a rest back
among the far-stretching forests of the Pas de Calais so different from
one nearer the line. To get on bridle-paths and roads free from lorry
traffic and let your horse out at full stretch over the fallen leaves
down some long grey-purple vista of bare trees, and feel the clean wind
whistling past your ears and smell the fresh odours of the great woods,
to see the blue smoke drifting up from some forester's cottage, or for a
moment in passing catch a glimpse of a fairy-story scene of charcoal
burners grouped together in a glade, was to ride into another world of
thought and feeling. My little horse John, one of the five horses left
of those who crossed with the battalion, felt it too--thought perhaps he
was in old England again. But the British soldier hates manoeuvres and
marches and drills and inspections. He would rather be left in peace in
his trenches, in a 'quiet' part of the line at least, than bothered
about those things. Movement, too, has an exhilarating effect on him,
and so when orders come to go back into action he tramps off with
remarkable goodwill. I remember one battalion of Royal Welsh Fusiliers,
suddenly rushed up from rest, pulled out of the station singing a song
of which the refrain is something like 'Ai, ai! Vot a game it is!' at
the top of their voices. And it really is by no means a game. As the
Colonel used to say (very moderately), 'Life out here is not all joy!'
One November evening I was picking my way cautiously through the mud
camp near Reninghelst, and hearing the tune of a famous hymn, drew near
to listen, for Jock sometimes sings to hymn tunes words that certainly
never appeared in any hymn-book, and I wanted to make sure that it _was_
the greatest hymn in the English language which was being sung. It was a
quiet night. Now and again a heavy gun fired a round, and infrequently,
on a gentle wind blowing from the trenches, was borne the rattle of a
machine-gun. From all the camp arose the subdued confused noise of an
army settling to rest for the night. Some tents were in darkness, in
others a candle burned, and here and there braziers still glowed redly.
It was from one of the lighted tents that the singing came, each part
being taken, and a sweet clear tenor voice leading. The tune was old
'Communion,' and they had just come to this verse:
'Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ, my God:
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.'
How often have we sung that, perhaps thoughtlessly, in comfort at home,
but these lads had in truth sacrificed the 'vain things.' With a lump in
my throat I waited for the last verse:
'Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my life, my soul, my all.'
HOW THE ROYALS HELD THE BLUFF: AN EPISODE OF TRENCH WARFARE