HOW THE ROYALS HELD THE BLUFF: AN EPISODE OF TRENCH WARFARE
I
_Waiting_
The beginning of March found me with a battalion of The Royals in a
rather battered Belgian town. Its centre received a good deal of
attention from enemy artillery, but it offered two attractions which
brought in officers from divisions all around. After all, to men
accustomed to living in the trenches, the atmosphere was one of almost
Sabbath peace. The hall where 'The Fancies' made much of the humours of
trench life to uproariously delighted audiences was crowded out night
after night. You could not find anywhere greater zest and enjoyment. The
striking comradeship of soldiering, the common experience of audience
and actors, and the abandonment of all thought for the morrow, gave that
impression of cheerful carelessness the root of which is not happiness
but the conviction that the future is so uncertain and the possibilities
so dreadful that he is wise who lives for the hour only, even as the
hour may snatch life from him. I thought I knew the head in front of me,
and, leaning forward, saw it was my brother-in-law. It has always struck
me as quaint that he, who had been with his battery for a year and a
half, and I, who had been out for nine months, should have met again
under such circumstances. I had pictured a stricken field and much
coolness exhibited in an admittedly dramatic moment--something in line
with Stanley's 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' It was comforting to find
it otherwise, but, as Smee says in _Peter Pan_, it was 'galling too.'
First when looking into a shop window, and now in a concert hall, in all
these months of war! We said, 'Not a bad show, is it?' 'Not half bad.'
But there have been some strange meetings in this war. A private in our
battalion discovered his son, a boy of seventeen, in a new draft which
had just come up to the line. He had run away from home and been lost to
sight. The father set matters on a proper footing by thrashing his son
there and then in the front trench!
War was not very far off after all. Two days later we were having lunch
in the comfortable warm restaurant which is this tedious town's other
attraction. We drank our coffee to the accompaniment of the nasty sound
of arriving shells. Every time a shell screamed towards us the stout
lady behind the counter dropped on hands and knees, emerging flushed and
trembling after each had burst. We were rather amused; but when we went
out and round the corner of the street, the body of a man was being
swiftly carried away wrapped in a brown blanket. Forty soldiers, it was
said, had been killed and wounded. Distracted women stood in little
groups in the passages of the houses, and there was much blood in the
gutters.
Only a country invaded by the enemy drinks to its dregs the cup of war,
but the narrow belt a few miles behind the friendly army's trenches
enjoys great prosperity. The love of home or the love of money keeps the
population in many places where it would be better away. One beautiful
spring day I took shelter behind a farmhouse in the Hallebast-Vierstraat
area until some shelling on the path ahead had died down. The farmer's
wife came out and we got into conversation. A rise in the ground gave
some shelter from the German lines, but she told me that any movement on
horseback was immediately sniped with whizbangs. The day before all her
cows had been killed by shell-fire in the paddock behind the farmhouse,
but if she and her elderly husband let their land go out of cultivation,
how were they to live, and if they left, where could they go? When
high-explosives blew great holes in their sown land they just filled in
the holes and ploughed and sowed the place over again. The settled
sadness of her face and voice haunts me still. Others, however, stay in
danger because they are making so much money. Several shopkeepers in
this town admitted they had never known such prosperity. The estaminets
make enormous profits from the sale of very weak beer. A friend of mine,
having drawn battalion pay in notes of too large amounts, was told to
return to the paymaster and draw it in smaller sums. He found the office
closed, and turned into a little village shop to see if they could
change a part of it. To his amazement they changed the whole of it from
the till. The total amount was ten thousand francs. But how many
Belgians have lost their all?
Our billets were clean and very airy. For some reason, though all
furniture had been removed, the presses, which were all open, were full
of beautiful bed and table linen. It was very tempting, but fortunately
we resisted the temptation. The morning after we arrived, about seven
o'clock, a disturbance arose below. Angry women's voices were heard in
altercation with the servants, there were hurried footsteps on the
stair, and a moment later our door was thrust violently open. Two
strapping Belgian women strode in and demanded answers to many
questions. We adopted our friend the Major's plan, and feigned to know
even less French than we did. We were anxious to be very inoffensive as
we lay on the floor and watched these determined individuals throwing
open the presses and wardrobes. Inside the linen lay untouched, folded
neatly; we felt thankful we had left it so. They stamped out again, and
we heard the Colonel's voice raised in protest next door. The doctor and
I looked at one another. He seemed rather pale, and I noticed for the
first time that his head rested on an enormous soft pillow covered with
a spotless linen pillow-slip edged with beautiful lace.
But next morning we had a different awakening. Dawn was rising wanly
from the east to another day on the Salient. The broken windows were
rattling and the floor trembling under the dull continuous thudding of a
concentrated bombardment. We lay and listened, and for the thousandth
time hated war. We knew that men, some of whom we knew and loved, were
going over the parapet, many never to return.
That night, as dusk fell, the old steeple with its rent side looked down
on cobbled streets thronging with ordered ranks of men standing ready to
move. Here and there a few officers spoke together, or a man gave his
chum a light from his fag, or straps were tightened. A rifle butt rang
on the pavement, and the adjutant's horse moved his feet restlessly.
These men had no illusions as to what they would probably have to face;
but none guessed that there lay ahead the most dreadful test of physical
endurance which the old battalion, since the great retreat, had ever
known.
II
_The Bluff_
What had happened was this. Soon after our division had been moved back
to the rest area, part of the line which it had been holding was
strongly attacked and lost to the enemy. Several counter-attacks failed,
and finally our own Division was brought back from rest to recapture
the lost trenches. One brigade attacked with great dash and success. The
lost trenches were re-occupied, and our own brigade, which had been
lying in support, was ordered to take over and hold them against the
expected counter-attacks. The Bluff, which was the main feature of the
position and the worst part of which The Royals, as the senior
battalion, were given to hold, was a low hill jutting out at the
re-entrant to the Salient, south-east of Ypres. It was a strong tactical
position commanding the approaches to our trenches, as the enemy well
knew. Seen from our front line farther south it had the dead, bleak
appearance of all ground that is much shelled. Pitted by high explosive,
burned yellow by fumes of gas and shells, and stripped of every living
thing, with blackened stumps of trees sparsely scattered on its summit,
this muddy hillock dominated the flat lands, and, on the sunny morning
when I first saw it, seemed indescribably sinister and menacing. It said
to me, 'I am war, the antagonist of everything clean and comely, of
everything fresh and young: misery of mind and body, torment of kindly
earth and all its little growing things, lover of all that is foul and
dead.'
III
_'We've keepit up the reputation o' the auld mob, onyway'_
That night the weather suddenly changed. There had been a hint of spring
in the air, but in an hour that was wiped out by a bitter north wind
sweeping the bare fields with icy rain and snow. The transport, pitched
in the filthy morass known as 'Scottish Lines,' saw its labour of three
weeks thrown away in a couple of nights. For the human beings there were
a few tents and huts, but in face of the searching wind canvas seemed
quite porous, and the huts were badly built and had a hundred openings
to the bitter air. But up at the Bluff conditions were terrible. The
trenches had disappeared under repeated bombardments, and had become
mere chains of shell holes in which the men stood up to their thighs in
liquid mud. When the C.O. arrived to take over the headquarters' dug-out
he found it blown to pieces. Within lay the bodies of the previous
occupants--four officers. Another dug-out was finally found. It was deep
in a bank at the end of a narrow passage twenty feet long. Within was a
chamber six feet long, four broad and four high, and in this place, so
horribly like a grave, the C.O., second-in-command, and adjutant lived
for three days and four nights. A candle gave light, and whenever a
shell burst above the flame jerked out. The sergeant-major and the
orderlies and servants lived in the tunnel, squatting on their haunches
in the mud. Outside there were no other dug-outs at all. The shelling
was continuous, but the cold was far worse. Men sank in the mud and
remained motionless for hours. Many fell into shell holes and had to be
hauled out with twisted telephone wires. The wounded suffered horribly.
Owing to the mud and the German barrage no supplies could be brought up,
and it was impossible to light braziers. On the fourth night relief
came, but it was daylight before the last company sucked itself out of
its mudholes and waded back in full view of the enemy. Fortunately a
blinding snowstorm swept down from the north and hid all movement just
when it seemed certain that disaster would occur. Every available
vehicle was sent up to meet the battalion, but there was a long walk
before these could be reached. The men crept along on sodden, swollen
feet--no gumboots had been obtainable. They came along in groups, now of
two or three, now of six or seven, or one by one. They were bent like
old men, and staggered as they walked, their faces set and grey. The
most terrible thing of all was the utter silence. Snow muffled the fall
of the dragging feet; it lay thick on the masses of ruins in the
shattered empty villages; and when the brigade major's greeting rang
out men shrank and looked fearful at the sudden sound. Yet when I spoke
to any, as they staggered through the snow past the point whither I had
gone to meet them, life flickered up for a moment from the depths of
that final exhaustion. 'What price Charlie Chaplin now, sir!' said one
man whose wavering footsteps led him hither and thither. And another in
simple words summed up the heroic simple spirit of them all: 'Well,
we've keepit up the reputation o' the auld mob, onyway.' Indomitable
men! Who could ever vanquish you?
Rest meant tent boards under frozen canvas, but it was rest. On that
weary morning even the uninviting outline of Reninghelst village seemed
like home.
THE HISTORIC TRIANGLE