THE GRASS BANK
_France, December 10th._
The connection of Tamar the Hammerhead, who cut the Grass Bank out of
the forest, with Timothy Gibbs, of Booligal, in New South Wales, may not
be clear at first sight. Tam's beech forest covered two or three green
hills in Gaul at the time when Caius Sulpicius, and his working party of
the Tenth Legion, were laying down new paving stones on the big road
from Amiens over the hill-tops. The wagon carrying the military
secretary to the Governor had bumped uncomfortably down that long slope
the week before; and as the Tenth Legion was resting, its commanding
officer received, two days later, an order to detail another fatigue
party. The big trees looked down on a string of private soldiers
shouldering big square paving stones from a neighbouring dump, where the
wagons stood, and fitting them carefully into the pavement, and--and
otherwise enjoying their rest. Caius Sulpicius and his orderly officer
stood watching them. The orderly officer leant on his stick. Caius had a
piece of bread in one hand and a wedge of cheese in the other. His
forearm was black with grubbing amongst the paving stones.
"When the Tenth Legion gets a rest without some old brass helmet helping
us to spend it," he said with his mouth full, "I'll begin to think the
end of the war is coming."
"Why didn't it strike old Brassribs to make the inhabitants do a job of
work occasionally?" he added presently. "Now, in the old general's
time--"
Far down on the edge of the forest, across two or three miles of rolling
hills, a patch of orange earth, newly turned, caught the orderly
officer's eye. One of the inhabitants was doing a job of work there,
anyway. Two days ago he had passed that way in a stroll after parade. A
mallet-headed man, his bare arm-muscles orange with mud, was piling up
an earthen embankment on the hill-side. A patch of the forest had been
allowed to him. In two years he had cut out the trees and undergrowth.
He was now trying to make his patch of hill-side level. The orange mud
bank of his terrace had been the labour of twelve months, and there was
a year's work in it yet. He had scarcely hoped to possess even a rood of
land, and now he had two acres. He was going to use every inch of it.
That was Tamar the Hammerhead's life's work.
The Tenth Legion did get its rest. Caius lay beneath a moss-covered,
tilted gravestone--long, long forgotten--not so far from the great road.
One of a much later generation of orderly officers, who had scraped part
of the inscription clean with his penknife, went back and told the mess
at dinner that he had come across the grave of an officer of their own
unit, who had died thereabouts in some camp a hundred and fifty years
before. He did not mention that, on his stroll, he had scrambled down a
steep grass bank which ran curiously across the hill-side. There was
green grass above it, and green grass below it; and green grass and
patches of ploughland all over the downs. The white frost still hung to
the blades, though it was midday. The remnant of a small wood stood from
the hill-side. "I must get a fatigue party on to that timber to-morrow,"
had said the orderly officer to himself.
And so it was that the forest passed away--the general service wagons
from the neighbouring Roman camp called there daily for sixty years for
fuel cut by generations of fatigue parties. The only trees left, over
miles of sloping downs, were the thickets around the villages and one
row of walnut trees growing along the top of that steep grass
embankment--the one remnant of Hammerhead's old orchard. Years later the
tow-haired Franks swept through the country. The walnut trees were cut
by a farmer for the uprights in his long barn. His children rolled down
the old bank in their games, and in bad baby Latin invited the
youngsters of the farm next door to charge up "the Grass Bank" while
they defended it. The generations, whose bad Latin gradually became
French, still spoke of Hammerhead's old landmark--now situated in a
large grass field--as "The Grass Bank."
On the military maps some way behind the arterial system of red lines
which stood for the German trenches--exactly as on a German map it
stands for ours--was a shaded mark shaped like an elongated pea pod.
There was no name to it--but a note in some pigeonhole of the local
Intelligence Officer stated that the inhabitants called the place "The
Grass Bank." Through it the map showed a lonely little red capillary,
wandering by itself for a quarter of an inch, and fading off into
nothing again. The stout German colonel of the local artillery
group--big guns which barked mostly of nights--having found his forward
observation post knocked in by a small field-gun shell, had come back
and growled like a bear all dinner-time, most inconsequentially, about
the lack of cover from heavy shells in the back areas. His real object
was to abuse the men at the table with him; but one junior Staff
Officer, hankering after promotion, looked round for the best dug-out
site; and caused to be burrowed downwards, from the bottom of a steep
grassy bank which ran half-way across a neighbouring field, four narrow
dark tunnels leading into low square rooms, held up with stout beams,
and all connected with each other. Two were lined with rough bunks on
wooden frames folding against the wall. Another held a table covered
with papers, a telephone switchboard, and four busy clerks. The fourth
was panelled carefully with deal, the ceiling neatly gridironed with
dark stained wood, a cupboard let into a recess with a looking-glass
panel above it, a comfortable bunk with an electric bulb above the
pillow and a telephone by the bedside. The group commander slept there
undisturbed, even when the British suddenly pushed their front forward,
and the Grass Bank began to shake with the thump of 9-inch shells. The
junior Staff Officer wonders why he is a junior Staff Officer still.
The great battle climbed like some slow, devouring monster up one green
slope, down the next, and up the green slopes beyond, clawing on to
green fields, and leaving them behind it a wilderness of pock-marked
slime. One of the many small obstacles, which held up its local progress
for a while, was some sort of nest of Germans behind a certain bank.
Several attacks had been made on it. The Intelligence Officer of an
Australian Brigade followed the Intelligence Officer of an Australian
Battalion on his stomach, for one night, up to the barbed wire; and gave
it as his opinion that the enemy kept his machine-guns in dug-outs at
the bottom of the bank. Later, a wild night of driving rain, and
flashes, and crashes, and black forms struggling in the mud against the
glint of flares on slimy white crater edges, left things still
uncertain.
It was there that Tim Gibbs came in--and Booligal. Tradition in New
South Wales puts the climate of Hay, Hell, and Booligal in that order.
Tim had driven starving, rickety sheep across his native plains when the
earth's surface had been powdered to red sand and driven by shrivelling
westerlies in travelling sandhills from mirage to summer mirage. Tim was
used to hot places. That is why he became a stretcher-bearer for his
company in Gallipoli, and transferred to the regimental bombers when
they reached France. When they came to a sea of brown mud waves, which
some cynic had misnamed the "Grass Bank," it was not Tim who volunteered
to take it. He had been in far too many hot corners to retain any of his
old hankering after them, and the Grass Bank was hotter than Booligal.
He went for the place because his colonel told him to--went cheerfully
to do a thing he horribly disliked, without letting anyone guess by word
or deed or the least little sign that he disliked it--which, if you
think of it, is more heroic by a long chalk.
It was after dark on a winter's night that he and his men--about sixteen
of them--crept out up a slimy trench deep to the knees in sloppy mud;
peered at the enemy's wire against the skyline; half crawled, half slid
through a gap in it, and disappeared, Tim leading. A white flash--a
shower of bombs--red and orange flares breaking like Roman candles in
the sky--the chatter of a machine-gun--the enemy's barrage presently
shrieking down the vault of heaven. A dozen wounded men came back
before dawn. And Tim--Tim lay with his face to the stars, dreaming for
ever and ever of red plains and travelling sheep, on the edge of Tamar
the Hammerhead's Grass Bank.
Slime Trench--Grass Bank--Gibbs' Corner--you will read of them all in
their chapter in the War's History. They were in every map for a
month--the newspapers made headings of them--they were household words
in London suburbs and Melbourne teashops. A month later the flood of
battle swept past them all in a great general attack without so much as
pausing to look. Two months--and a string of lorries pushed up a newly
made road until a policeman held them up, just as he would in London, to
let some cross stream of traffic through. One of the crossing lorries
bumped into a hole and impaled itself on a beam that had fallen off the
lorry ahead. The two drivers of a lorry far behind climbed up a steep,
shell-shattered neighbouring bank, and munched bread and bully beef
while the afternoon grew to dusk and gun flashes showed like lightning
on the angry low winter clouds ahead.
"What they want to get us stuck in this flaming mud-hole for?" said the
driver to the second driver. "The Huns must have had a dug-out down
there, Bill," he added, pointing to certain splintered, buried timber at
the foot of the bank.
Now there may be no such place as the Grass Bank; and there may have
been no Hammerhead nor Tim Gibbs; and he did not come from Booligal. But
the story is true to this extent--that it happens all the time upon this
battlefield.