of fresh duties which appealed to Peter. Conway, with his usual luck,
had tossed for—and of course won—the only comfortable habitation in
the valley: a still intact though slightly battered farm-house, in
which—equally of course—he had re-established his “poker-school.”
Lodden disapproved—but came nightly. Bromley, still in touch with his
old Brigade, was learning—an expensive process. They played in a room
reduced to cabin-size by pit-props, sandbags and nine-by-two’s (the
Army’s designation for its standard plank): constantly interrupted by
the buzz of Conway’s telephone, and once by a misconceived S.O.S. call
which sent every one scurrying back through intermittent shell-fire to
their spurting cannons.
Altogether, not an unpleasant existence! Indeed, during that first easy
fortnight only one thing troubled Peter: his health. Somehow or other,
since the gas-attack, he had developed a little spitty cough, usually
painless, but occasionally stabbing—the tiniest pin-prick—just below
the heart.
“You ought to see the Doc. about that bark of yours, P.J.,” said
Sandiland one evening, as they sat smoking in the Armstrong hut of
batten and canvas which Q.M.S. Murgatroyd had snaffled for the Mess.
“Can’t stand Laurillard,” growled Peter—the pain had stabbed twice.
“Besides, he’ll only tell me to leave off smoking cigars. Let’s go and
get those five hundred francs back from Conway.”
§ 4
But the easy time did not endure.
The first of July, nineteen hundred and sixteen, which turned the
British front opposite Albert from a picnic-ground to a cemetery,
reacted promptly on the hitherto quiescent valleys below Messines. The
words “maximum activity,” scribbled by a thousand telephonists, thumped
on a thousand typewriters, stripped tarpaulin from the 12-inch naval gun
on the railway by the cross-roads, unroofed its sister in the canvas
house opposite Divisional Baths, woke howitzer and eighteen-pounder in
their pits beneath the trees, mortar and machine-gun in their
hiding-places among the trenches. To these, the Boche replied with his
eight-inch at Oostaverne, his 77’s behind the ridge, and a peculiarly
deadly Minenwerfer which ran on rails and changed position whenever
fired at.
Gone were the unstrenuous days, the scarcely disturbed nights. Conway’s
“poker-school” vanished like a raided gambling-house.
For a week, “demonstrations” continued; and on the eighth night, a
handful of infantry, faces blackened, dirks at their belts, revolvers in
hand, slipped over their parapet under cover of the shrapnel-barrage,
crawled along the Steenbeek, dropped down into the nine-foot
duck-boarded trenches of “Bon Fermier”. . . and returned, dirks bloody,
revolvers reeking, with the four dazed and cowered prisoners—(four they
were asked to bring and four only they _brought_)—which Brigade orders
had demanded. . . .
Came rumours of the battle, “down south”: it went well, it went badly,
we made progress, we did not make enough progress. Followed amazing
manœuvres: Australian gunners, six-foot men who handled their leaping
pieces like toys, arrived to “take over” from the Southdowns: “Beer”
Battery moved back to a farm behind Bailleul, were ordered to dig
gun-pits along the Stuiverbeek, laboured three days hauling beams and
sand, were ordered back into action, “took over” from the Australians
(who were “going to the Somme, by cripes”), were relieved by wrathy
Ulstermen who cursed a place called Beaumont Hamel . . . and marched
quietly westwards through Bailleul and Meteren and Fletre and Caestre to
their old rest area in the farms about Eecke!
“I’m g-getting a bit fed-up with this,” stuttered Straker, “where the
d-devil are we going to?”
“Oh, we’re going to the Somme all right, don’t you worry about that,”
said Peter, wise in Staff mysteries. “This is just a preliminary
canter.”
§ 5
And to the Somme they went.
They entrained at dawn, loading and lashing vehicles, coaxing horses
into trucks, shepherding men, supervising equipment; slid off to the
south; travelled endlessly through endless fields, past endless
villages; till after three days they made Amiens.
“Now we shan’t be long,” said Gunner Mucksweat, as the last waggon came,
groaning to ground, the last team backed into the swingle-trees.
“Dinna believe it, Muckie, we’ll no go into action yet,” warned his
“Number Two.”
And Mucksweat’s “Number Two,” the canny Macnab, proved right. Back they
marched, and back; through the broad tree-girt avenues of Amiens, where
French munitionettes whirling homewards on rickety motor-lorries kissed
greetings; over a vast canal below whose embankment silent _poilus_,
blue-cloaked and blue-helmeted, sat glued to enormous fishing-rods;
back, along the white and dusty road, to Hangest. . . .
“Told you we’d put you through it, P.J.,” chaffed Pettigrew late that
night as—waggons unlimbered, horses tethered, men bivouacked at
last—they flung themselves to bed in the lath-and-plaster room of a
midden-courted farm.
“Dunno what’s the matter with me,” groused Peter. “Little Willie isn’t
used to being anywhere except at the head of the column. He’s been
pulling my arms out all this evening. Given me a stitch or
something”—he coughed acridly in the darkness—“wonder how long we
shall stop here?”
“Oh, about a week, I expect. . . . Good-night,” snored his companion.
§ 6
It took three days to concentrate the four brigades of Southdown
Artillery at Hangest.
Concentration concluded, there followed a period of desultory
“training”—taken with immense and harassing seriousness by Lt.-Colonel
Revelsworth, a dapper arrogant-looking man of forty-five, very different
from the Weasel; slightly less seriously by his subordinates.
Fortunately, the Anglo-Saxon is not imaginative. Neither officers nor
men of “Beer” Battery bothered as they went about their lawful (or
unlawful) business, to consider the near future. To be out of action,
away from the sound of guns, sufficed them.
Thus they waited—five days—six days—a week and a week-end; till there
came, one warm summer’s evening while they sat at poker, a very
_affairé_ Purves, second star newly on his sleeve, with orders that,
“The Colonel would like to see all available officers at Headquarters
immediately.”
“Confound it,” said Lodden. “I’ve never been in such amazing luck.”
“Never bring messages like that yourself,” whispered Peter to Purves as
they strolled across the cobbled courtyard to Headquarters. “What’s it
all about?”
“Only a pi-jaw. We’re going into action tomorrow.”
And a “pi-jaw,” as Purves irreverently described it, they got.
Listening to it, Peter began to think of the Brigade in its Brighton
days. So many of the faces about him were new since then: yet the
Brigade, the Fourth Southdown Brigade, R.F.A.—the “Virgin-bosom”
Brigade as Stark used to call them every time his meticulous
recommendations for honours were struck out by the bemedalled
Staff—still lived. The thing he, Peter, had helped to make, went on
. . . went on, and would go on, right to the finish. . . . “A long wai
ter get ter Berlin!” He seemed to hear his Cockneys again,—singing.
“So you see, when we begin moving up into action tomorrow,” interrupted
Revelsworth’s voice. . . .
Peter looked round him at the mute expressionless faces above the khaki
collars. There were a few of the “old gang” still. Lodden, Conway,
Purves, Pettigrew and Straker, “Brat” Archdale, (acting orderly officer,
grown from blushing boy to hollow-cheeked young man), Merrilees, solemn
as an owl, unaltered. . . . Eight, including himself, nine. Nine out of
twenty six!
How many of those nine would be left after this new show? Eight at most!
One of them was done for already; couldn’t hope to last more than a
month. And that one of them was himself. . . . Still, nobody need know
about that till he came out of action. . . . _If_ he came out of
action. . . .
For Peter’s cough, the cough that drove him, hacking and spitting, night
after night—gum-booted, “British Warm” over his pyjamas—out of the
stifling room he shared with Pettigrew into the moonlight, was not the
result of over-smoking. . . . Rolleston, the kindly diffident “general
practitioner” who doctored Colonel Brasenose’s Brigade, had told Peter
that much; told it him unconsciously.
They had met quite by accident, that very afternoon; gone to Rolleston’s
“surgery.” Peter, accepting a drink, choked over it; put his
handkerchief to his mouth.
“None of my business of course,” the doctor had ventured, “but if I were
you I’d consult Laurillard about that wheeze of yours. Never been
gassed, have you? Slightly, I mean.”
Peter kept silence.
“Funny stuff, gas,” went on the doctor. “I had a case of it before I
came out, while I was still in civilian practice. A young Canadian came
to me with a frightful cough—rather like that cough of yours, by the
way. I tested for tubercle, of course. Not a trace. Then he began
talking about the first gas-attack; said he’d been in it. That put me on
the track. . . .”
“But surely,” interrupted Peter, “after all that time. . . .”
“Oh, he wasn’t gassed, in the Army sense of the word; but there’s no
doubt in my mind that a tiny molecule of chlorine must have lodged in
his left lung, and started the irritation. . . .”
“Did you cure him?”
“Oh, yes. But it took rather a long time. Fresh air and no exercise.
Lucky he came to me when he did. Lungs are ticklish organs. If you once
start ’em downhill, they take a lot of pulling back. Besides, you never
know when that sort of thing won’t turn to consumption: the tubercle
bacillus doesn’t take long to find a weak spot. . . . Still, if you’ve
never been actually in the gas-cloud. . . .”
“No, I’ve never been actually in the gas-cloud.” Peter had lied
mechanically. His was not the breed which “goes sick” on the eve of an
action. . . .
Revelsworth’s voice interrupted musing. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he was
saying, “I don’t think there’s anything else—except that I should like
officers to wear full equipment for tomorrow’s march.”
§ 5
At ten o’clock of a gorgeous late-summer morning the Fourth Brigade
marched out from Hangest, and at high nooning of the third sun-scorched
day, they dropped down a swell of that bitter plain which is Picardy
into the Bois de Tailles—straggling cleft of sand and trees which
strides the naked chalk and the Bray-Corbie Road. Here again—officers
and men bivouacked under ground-sheets among uncleanly bushes on the
slopes,—horses tethered between limbers on the red-sand floor of the
valley below—they waited, waited endlessly. . . .
For this battle was no action of sure attack, of reserves moving forward
punctual to clock-time, of orderly pursuit and retreat. In that vast
crucible of fire which bulged northwards astride the river from French
Dompierre to English Ovilliers, Infantry Divisions of twelve thousand
men shrivelled as paper shrivels in flame; brigades melted to
battalions; battalions to companies: between a moonrise and a
sun-setting they were and they were not. But always as Infantry
Divisions shrivelled, fresh Infantry Divisions flung themselves into the
crucible; and always, behind the shrivelling melting infantry, stayed
the guns—stayed till human sinews could serve them no longer. . . .
Vague echoes of those guns, hints of their flashes, were borne o’ nights
to Peter Jameson as he lay sleepless among sleeping men; as he twisted
over and over between the ruggled blankets on his creaking camp-bed; as
he sweated away the darkness and shivered through the dawn-chill; to
Peter with the spitting cough fouling his mouth and the pin-prick pain
stabbing below his heart,—to Peter Jameson, one tiny glorious fool
among the millions whose folly saved our world.
PART TWENTY-FOUR
IN THE NIGHT
§ 1
The “Somme Offensive” of 1916 is ancient history now: a thing of Staff
maps and war-diaries, of barren paper and profitless arguments, flat as
the faked film of it men once sold for profit in the market-place. The
very ground over which it raged has been obliterated by the shells of
vastier battles.
Yet the “Somme Offensive,” bloodiest experiment ever undertaken in the
laboratory of war, marked the beginning of the ending—of War’s ending,
as softies dream today. Compared to this holocaust, Loos was a skirmish.
Day after day, night after night, week after week, men flung themselves
upon the Beast; drove him wave by wave across the barren swells of
Picardy: till, at last, burning and ravaging, defiling the very beds in
which he had slept, wreaking vengeance on the very trees whose fruit he
had eaten, the Beast withdrew for a while—withdrew, and came on again,
and was overthrown. . . . There died and were wounded in those drivings
of the Beast more than two million English-speaking men.
The “Somme Offensive”! What remains of it today? Only memories, bitter
memories that waken men o’ nights: so that they see once more the golden
Virgin of Albert, poised miraculously on her red and riven tower; Carnoy
shattered in its hollow, a giant-baby’s toy-village, dropped from
careless hand and smashed in the falling; the ruins that were Mametz and
the ruins that were Contalmaison and the ruins that were Fricourt and
the ruins that were Pozières: see once more the crowded horselines
blackening Happy Valley, the balloons strung like sausages across the
sky, the thousand planes circling like hawks above them! So that they
hear once more the staccato of machine-gun fire high in the air, the
dull thump of the huge and hidden naval guns at Etinehem, the roar of
squat nine-point-two’s on their wheel-less mountings, the roar of the
railway-gun at Becordel, the thunder of eight-inch and six-inch
Howitzers in Caterpillar Valley, the ear-splitting crash of Six-Inch
Mark VII’s from the road by the Craters, the manifold clamour of the
Archies at Montauban, the constant bark of the field-guns beyond: so
that they walk once more, naked and alone, among the careless ghosts of
men they knew, through that horror which was Trônes Wood. . . .
§ 2
“God, P.J., this is too damned awful.”
Sandiland stretched grimed fingers across the bacon-box which served for
table; jerked a Gold-flake from its tin; lit it shakily at the guttering
candle.
“Pretty bad,” admitted Peter: but his hand too shook as he tilted the
whisky-bottle into his tin mug. “Better have some of this.”
A shell whistled over the dripping corrugated-iron above their heads,
burst hollowly on the twisted railway behind.
“Blast that gun,” said Sandiland. . . .
They had been in action for eighteen days; and not once during that time
had “B” battery’s guns been wholly silent. Of the men who had served
those guns so blithely under the trees of Neuve Eglise barely one-third
remained. Sergeant Ackroyd was dead, breast riven by direct hit of a
gas-shell; Sergeant Duncan was dead, blown to bits as he ran for
shelter; Corporal Haviland’s body lay drilled with machine-gun bullets
in the No Man’s Land beyond Arrowhead Copse; seven signallers were dead,
five they had watched hobble, one by one, up the sodden path to the
dressing-station in Montauban. Now this ultimate horror had screamed
down upon them out of the night, tearing the last veils between them and
Hell. . . .
They had laboured three hours to cleanse that Hell, laboured calmly and
cheerfully among their men, snatching only this brief respite for food
and drink. But the Hell they had cleansed from the ground still
remained, desperately and damnably clear, in their brains.
For the moment, the reticences of civilized life were in abeyance. Each
of these two knew, as he crouched over the bacon-box in the sodden
broken chalk-trench, that he was hanging on by the eye-teeth to his last
remnant of sanity.
Each still saw the same bestial vision: smashed pit, half-buried gun,
slithering soil, mangled men writhing and groaning, mangled men lying
deadly still, Charlie Straker’s face white and drawn in the light of the
hurricane-lamp—and the Head that watched him, the Head that still
grinned under its shrapnel-helmet, the Head which had been
Pettigrew. . . .
“That leaves only you and me, P.J.” Sandiland’s fingers plucked at one
of the rents in his tunic sleeve. “Only you and me.” His voice quivered
up into his head, and he began singing—“You and me together, love;
never mind the weather, love.”
“Shut up, you bloody fool”—Peter’s haggard eyes stared across the
candle-flame. “Shut up, I tell you. Why the hell don’t you drink that
whisky?”
“Sorry, P.J.”—Sandiland crammed the mug against his teeth, sucked down
the raw spirit. “By God, that’s good. Pour me out another, there’s a
good chap”—he drank again—“I suppose we ought to telephone H.Q.”
“I did that while you were getting them away.”
“Thanks, dear boy. Purves say anything?”
“I spoke to the Colonel”—Peter started to cough—“and he said—damn
this cough of mine—he said, ‘should he come up himself?’ I told him the
gun would be in action again by midnight, and we could carry on all
right if he’d get us another subaltern. He’s sending one up at
once”—Peter’s voice too, quivered up into his head. “Poor old Lindsay.
Do you remember?”
Once again, sanity trembled in the balance. Their haggard eyes met
across the candle-flame; and from behind those eyes naked soul looked at
naked soul.
“God”—Sandiland’s voice was low, but tense as a scream—“God, I never
knew I was a coward. . . . I’m not a coward. . . . It’s sending the
others into it I can’t stick. . . . I’d go myself. . . . You know I’d go
myself, P.J. . . . But I can’t stand sending these chaps to their death,
day after day, one after the other. . . . I killed Lindsay. . . . It
wasn’t his turn for F.O.O. . . . I killed Haviland. . . .” The monologue
went on. . . . “Seven of them—the best signallers a battery ever
had—and I detailed them for duty. . . . One by one I detailed them,
didn’t I? . . . I chose this battery position, didn’t I?” He began to
laugh. “And it’s your turn tomorrow, P.J. . . . Your turn! . . . Bloody
funny if I killed our old Adjutant, too. . . . God, I wish I could go
instead of you. . . . I’ve got to be here, P.J. Do you understand that?
. . . Here, waiting by these blasted cannons for some poor devil to come
crawling back and tell me you’ve been killed. . . .”
But Peter, listening speechless, felt himself the greater coward of the
two: for he would have given everything he possessed—everything except
that last scrap of gold which is a man’s self-respect—not to go down on
the morrow to those trenches whence he had brought back Lindsay’s body.
There came the scrabble of feet above their heads; some one called down
out of the darkness:
“Say, is this Beer Battery, Fourth Southdown Brigade? Is this Captain
Sandiland’s battery?”
“It is,”—Sandiland’s voice had lost all trace of hysteria. “Who are
you?”
“My name’s Henry. Colonel Revelsworth told me to report to you for
duty.”
“Stout fellow. Come down if you can find your way. Have you got a
torch?”
“Yes. Is it safe to use it?”
“Quite. Mind the wire.”
Followed the sound of falling earth, and a huge man, long gloves and
revolver at belt, long torch in brown hand. The newcomer flicked out his
torch; saluted with a curious courteous bend of his head; stood blinking
at the light of the candle. He was well over six-foot, blue-eyed and
broad-shouldered, firm of chin and clean-shaven. He wore the usual cap,
collar, belt and tunic of a British second lieutenant; but his breeches
bagged curiously at the knee, had the appearance of being tucked loosely
into his soft field-boots, at heels of which showed a pair of swan-neck
spurs, loosely strapped and formidable of rowel. Boots and spurs were
both caked with white chalk. He carried no cane.
“Sit down, won’t you?” said Sandiland. “There’s a box kicking about
somewhere. This is Jameson.”
“Glad to know you.” Henry made a movement as if to shake hands; thought
better of it; found the box Sandiland indicated; and sat down with that
peculiar straddle which denotes a horseman the world over.
There was the usual awkward Anglo-Saxon silence during which men try to
sum up fresh acquaintances. To the newcomer, his two hosts seemed two
very ordinary British officers; they looked terribly tired, he thought,
but their controlled features gave no hint of any other emotion. (For it
is only to tried friends that men in battle voice the secret fears of
true courage.)
“Have a drink?” asked Sandiland.
“Thanks, no.” The man extracted a small looped bag from one pocket, a
packet of cigarette papers from the other; flicked off a thin leaf of
paper, moistened it at his lips. Then, holding the paper between fingers
and thumb of his right hand, he opened the bag with his left; poured a
little heap of tobacco onto the paper, began to roll a cigarette.
“You’re a Canadian, aren’t you?” asked the battery-commander.
“Yes, sir. I’m a Canadian.”
“Been out long?”
“No, sir. About three months. I’ve been with the Ammunition Column most
of that time.”
The newcomer spoke slowly, not nasally but with a curious deliberate
drawl—a drawl somehow reminiscent to Peter Jameson of five men sitting
round a poker-table under the awning of a zinc-decked ship in the
Caribbean. One of those five men had drawled his words with just that
identical deliberation—and would have been very insulted if he had been
referred to as a “Canadian.”
“How did you manage to get here so quickly?” asked Sandiland.
“Well, sir, I happened to be reporting for duty at Headquarters just
when your ’phone message got through. The Colonel told me to send my
horses back, and come right along with the guide. He said you’d fix me
somehow till my blankets arrived.”
Now a Canadian does not talk about his “blankets,” he uses the English
word “kit.” Nor does he—as a general rule—smoke granulated tobacco
from those looped bags which are referred to as “sacks” in the
display-ads of the various firms whose communal address is 111 Fifth
Avenue, New York. Also, he strongly objects to walking half-a-mile of
sodden ground, trenched and littered with remnants of barbed wire, in
his spurs.
These details flashed subconsciously through the mind of Peter Jameson,
as the three of them sat together in the crumbling trench: but he was
very tired, his cough troubled him—and anyway it was none of his
business. There were, he knew from experience, many such “Canadians”
among the men who originally joined Kitchener’s Army.
“But how in the devil,” thought Peter, “did he manage to get a
commission?” . . .
“Number two gun ready for action, sorr,” called Sergeant Abernethy’s
voice from above them.
Sandiland called back: “Splendid, Sergeant. We’ll come and have a look
at it.”
The three officers scrambled up out of the trench into the noise of the
night; picked their way across to the battery. It was pitch-dark with a
drizzle of rain; so that the newcomer could see nothing except the
occasional crimson of gun-flashes, and the circle of Sandiland’s torch
as it danced over yellow pock-marked ground. They jumped a deep
crumbling trench; skirted the lip of a huge shell-crater; came suddenly
upon the resurrected gun.
By the vague glimmer of a hurricane lamp, men were still at work,
disinterring the buried ammunition, wiping the brass cases, stacking
them beside the gun-wheels. An improvised tent of tarpaulin, slung
between four posts, provided the only overhead cover; a few sandbags had
been piled in front of the shield.
Sergeant-Major Cresswell, a stout melancholy man with watery brown eyes
and a waxed moustache, whom the death of Lindsay had summoned from the
waggon-lines, saluted Sandiland, and said:
“I’m afraid that’s the best we can do for tonight, sir.”
“Very well, Sergeant Major. Have the men had their rum ration?”
“Yes, sir.” He added _sotto voce_, “They needed it, sir.”
“Right. You’d better let ’em turn in then.”
Number four gun spat its tongue of crimson flame, subsided into silence
for another five minutes. “You chaps can knock off now,” called
Cresswell’s voice.
Except for the two signallers in the telephone pit and Sergeant Duncan
with his two “numbers” at the duty-gun, the whole
battery-personnel—officers’ servants included—had been toiling with
pick and shovel and dragropes since half-past eight. Now they
disappeared into the darkness. Sergeant Abernethy and his six men—two
of his own sub-section, the remainder told off from the other
detachments—lay down to sleep under their piece.
A figure approached Peter, said, “Should I light the candles in your
dug-out, sir?”
“You’d better turn in, I think, P.J.” interrupted Sandiland; “or you
won’t get any sleep at all.”
“What about telephoning H.Q., and checking the night-lines of that
cannon?”
“Never you mind about H.Q., or the cannon. Just do as you’re told and
turn in, there’s a good chap.”