ANGELS' WORK
_France, August 28th._
It had been a wild night. Not a first-rate full-dress attack on a big
front, but one of those fierce struggles on a small front which have
been so frequent in the stubborn fight northwards, up the Pozières Ridge
towards Mouquet Farm. Along a good part of the line the troops were back
in the trenches they had left, or had dug themselves a new trench only
slightly in advance of it. At other points they were in the trenches
they had gone out for.
The bombardment, which had been turned on as though somebody held the
key to the thunderstorm, and which had crashed and flashed into the
hill-side nearly all the night, had gradually died down. The artillery
Staff officers on both sides had long since read the last pink signal
form, and had given instructions to cover any possible trouble, and had
turned into bed. The normal early morning gun was sending its normal
shell at intervals ranging up the long valley--_rattle, rattle, rattle_,
until the echo died away up the slopes, like that of a vanishing railway
train, or the long-drawn bark of a dog. As it died another gun would
bark, and another, until for a few seconds the noise dwindled and died
altogether, and there was a silence; as if somebody, just for a second
or two, had stopped the battle. The German artillery Staff had left its
gun barking too--every now and again the little shell came and spat over
the hill-side.
The morning broke very pale and white through the mist--as though the
earth were tired to death after that wild nightmare. The soft white hand
of the fog covered the red land, so that your sight ranged no more than
three hundred yards at most, and often not a hundred. We were stumbling
over ground smashed in by the last night's fire--red earth new turned.
Only a few hundred yards away another fold of the land loomed out of the
mist--you could see the crest rising dull grey out of the white vapour
in the dip between. That hill-crest was in German territory--not ours.
For which good reason we hurried to the shelter of a trench.
It was while we did so that I noticed a little grey procession coming
towards us from the ground out beyond the trench in front of the German
lines. It came very slowly--the steady, even pace of a funeral. The
leader was a man--a weatherbeaten, square-jawed, rugged old bushman--who
marched solemnly, holding a stick in front of him, from which hung a
flag. Behind him came two men carrying, very tenderly and slowly, a
stretcher. By them walked a fourth man with a water-bottle.
They were the stretcher-bearers bringing in from out there some of the
wreckage of the night before. We went along the trench farther, and at a
later stage we could see men in the mist in ones and twos out in front
of the line. A rifle or two from somewhere behind the mist were pecking
regularly--sniping from some German outpost; and it seemed not wise to
show yourself too freely--the mist was lifting, and you never knew
whether the Germans were this side of it or not. But though those
bullets pecked constantly at the small parties or at stragglers of the
night's attack hopping back from advanced shell-holes, the little
procession with the flag passed through unharmed. If the sniper saw it
he must have turned his rifle for the moment somewhere else.
We made our way back, when we went, across a hill-side literally flayed
of all its covering. The barrage of the night before, and of other days,
had fallen there, and the slope was simply a ploughed field. I could not
get rid of that impression at the time, and it is the only one that I
have of it still--that we were hurrying up a ploughed countryside along
a little, irregular, newly-made footpath. We had come out upon a road
and crossed it at one point. After a second or two's thought one
recognised that it _was_ a road, because the banks of it ran straight.
It had been like coming on the body of a man without his skin--it took
you some time to realise that this flayed thing was a road at all.
There was a shrapnel shell regularly spitting across that country. We
knew we should have to pass it, and one was naturally anxious to be
under cover at the moment. At this time I noticed on our left a little
group of figures, faintly seen in the mist, attending to some job in the
open. We came in sight of the trench we were making for, and they hailed
us asking the way. We told them, and they came slowly across the open
towards us. They were standing above the trench intent on some business
which needed care when the expected shell whizzed over the hill and
burst. I ducked.
The men, standing on the brink above the trench there, did not even turn
a head to look at it. Five or six angry pieces hissed by, but they no
more heeded them than if it were a schoolboy pelting mud. They were
intent on their business and nothing else. They did not ask for a trench
to get into, but only to be shown the way. Their burden was carried
easier over the open. They were stretcher-bearers.
We started home a good deal later from another part of the line by a
short cut. Five minutes after we had set out, the Germans happened to
turn their barrage across a patch whither our aged trench seemed certain
to lead. There may not have been more than fifteen shells in the minute,
but it seemed, looking along that path, more like thirty. They were of
all sorts mixed--ugly, black, high-explosive shrapnel bursting with the
crash of a big shell; little, spiteful whizzbang field gun tearing into
the brown earth; 5.9 shells flinging up fountains of it. We pushed on
until the shelter petered out and the shorter shells were already
bursting behind us, and the trench was little more than a crater to nip
into when you heard them singing towards you--and then we decided to
give it up. At one time, as we dodged back, a visitor came singing so
straight that we dived headlong into a crater just as you would dive
into the sea.
A few minutes later we were back in the comfort of a fair trench,
perfectly snug, watching the storm. As we reached that trench and turned
into it, two men were clambering up on to the bank to join a party of
five others who were standing up there already, in the open. They were
stooping down to arrange with others the lifting of something up to
them.
They were stretcher-bearers--Australian stretcher-bearers. The two pair
on the bank already had their load, and the others were lifting theirs
up thither. They were just setting out to carry their burden overland on
a track which led straight to the barrage which had turned us back.
I learned more about Australian stretcher-bearers that morning than I
had known since the first week in Gallipoli. I cursed my fate that I was
not permitted to have a camera there, to prove to Australians that these
things are true. As luck would have it, the next time I saw that same
scene the British official photographer was beside me. We saw the smoke
of a barrage on the skyline. And coming straight from it were two
little parties each headed by a flag.
We hurried to the place--and there it is on record, in the photograph
for every man to see some day just as we saw it, the little party coming
down the open with the angry shells behind them.
I asked those stretcher-bearers as I looked up at the shell-bursts how
the Germans treated them.
"They don't snipe us so long as we have this flag," one of them said.
"You see, we started it by not firing on theirs when they came out to
their wounded. Of course, we can't help the artillery," he added,
looking over his shoulder at the place from which he had come, where a
line of black shell-bursts was fringing the hill. "That's not meant for
us."
That understanding, if you can maintain it honourably and trust the
enemy to do the same, means everything--everything--to the wounded of
both sides. The commander who, sitting safely at his table, condemns his
wounded and the enemy's in No Man's Land to death by slow torture
without grounds for suspecting trickery, would incur a responsibility
such as few men would face the thought of.
Load after load, day and night, mile upon mile in and out of craters
across the open and back again--assuredly the Australian
stretcher-bearer has not degenerated since he made his name glorious
amongst his fellow soldiers at Gallipoli. Hear them speak of him.