“The present day has no value for me except as the eve of to-morrow:
it is with to-morrow that my spirit wrestles.”--METTERNICH.
The day was already three hours old by the time that our Ensign reached
the Wood with his weary fatigue party. The trenches were wrapped in
slumber, and from Bryan, upon whose recumbent form our Ensign trampled
as he groped his way into the company dug-out, he learnt that the two
companies which had been in the line had already gone back to the
bivouac on the downs, and that the two companies in the Wood were
expecting momentarily to be relieved. There was no news of future
movements: none of the officers, Bryan said, knew when the Guards were
going to “pop the parapet.”
Two hours later, effectively, the relief turned up, and the two
companies plodded out into the chilly morning back to their bivouac. It
was not until 8 A.M. that the officers got into their sleeping-bags in
the tents.
At noon the faithful Johnson aroused our Ensign with the news that a
conference of officers had been called by the Commanding Officer, and
that they were waiting for him. He splashed some water over himself,
tore into his clothes, crammed his cap on over his tousled hair, and
dashed off with a silent prayer that his unshaven chin might escape
observation. But everybody was too deep in maps and plans to notice
him. He and his brother officers left the conference knowing all there
was for them to know about the impending attack, save only the detail
that interested them all most keenly--the date!
The Battalion was to strike bivouac that evening, and march to a wood
on the fringe of that corpse-strewn plain across which our Ensign
had led his fatigue party the night before. Two companies were to
be quartered in one corner of the wood, the remainder--Nos. 1 and 2
Companies--in a little copse on the eastward edge,--nearest the enemy,
as our Ensign, with the shells of the previous evening in his mind,
reflected sombrely. It was generally expected that the four companies
would not meet again until they assembled for the attack.
There was a little pang of parting in that dirty bivouac among the
rolling downs. As a measure of precaution, such experienced officers
and non-commissioned officers as could be spared were not to accompany
the Battalion into action, so as to leave an executive nucleus to carry
on with, in the event of heavy casualties. Of our Ensign’s mess, Peter
and The Don were of this number. Sadder and more dismal faces never
were seen than the countenances of these two (and of their comrades in
exile also, be it said) as they bade the departing companies God-speed
and prepared to join the Transport.
At dusk that evening, in a drenching downpour of cold rain, the
Battalion moved off into the unknown, our Ensign’s company bringing
up the rear. Truly it is a dismal thing, this marching into action!
One hears an iron curtain clang down behind one, shutting off the
past--and there were fragrant memories in our Ensign’s mind of the
pleasant _cameraderie_ of the vanished summer--while the present glides
imperceptibly away before the doubts and uncertainties of the future.
The rain splashed dismally down, the road was heavy and slippery with
glutinous mud, and all around them the guns crashed out into the
night with a roar that seemed to crack the very tympanum. The men
hunched their waterproof sheets over their packs, and trudged along
in mournful silence; and our Ensign let his mind toy despondently with
the difference between his situation and that of men he knew, spick and
span and spurred and polished these last, holding decorative positions
on the Staff at home.
They plodded along the same old highway of the battlefield, as crowded
as ever, thronged with the same old mass of tired men, and straining,
plunging horses and mules. Plenty of bad language, especially in the
blocks of traffic, which were frequent, came back at them from the
night, while the rain plopped sadly into the puddles of the roadside;
and, with green flash and reek and roar, the shells screamed their way
through the night towards the soaring horizon lights. As they drew
nearer to the front they heard the whistle and crash of German shells
ahead of them in the darkness.
At last they left the road and followed a guide in single file along a
muddy footpath, which brought them into the wet tangle of a devastated
wood. As the men filed off into some crumbling trenches, our Ensign
noticed three forms on the ground covered by waterproof sheets beside
the wreck of a Lewis gun hand-cart.
“It was hard luck,” somebody was saying; “they caught us coming in ...
shrapnel, it was ... got these three at the very end of the line.”
Then there was much groping and slipping about in the dark, as the
officers got the two companies into such accommodation as the broken
trenches and gaping shell-holes afforded--a rum issue, at which our
Ensign found himself compelled to swallow, according to immemorial
usage, nearly a mugful of the spirit, poured out of the stone jars by
the dim light of a carefully-shaded candle; and then the men began
to contrive for themselves all sorts of wonderful shelters for the
night with riddled fragments of corrugated iron sheeting, beams of
wood, splintered branches and withered leaves. The officers left them
to their task, and made their way to the dug-out which the Billeting
Officer had designated to them as their quarters.
It was a great big shelter, as large as a small shed--and a shell-hole
in the roof, which was the only damage, had been stuffed up with those
wicker cases which the German gunners used to carry their live shells
in. The place was constructed rather like a log-cabin, dug half a
dozen feet deep in the ground, with solid timber sides and a roof of
iron girders wattled over. The floor was covered with those wood or
paper shavings which, under the influence of the British blockade, the
Germans use in preference to straw. These shavings furnish bedding that
is fully as clean and comfortable as straw, and certainly far more
economical.
There was a very simple military funeral that night under the drenching
rain, in the shell-ravaged copse. In a shell-hole the three victims
of the night were laid to rest, and covered in. Two of the men were
Catholics, the third Protestant, and both the R.C. and the C. of E.
padres came up through the rain and mud that night to conduct the
obsequies. And the next evening a plain wooden cross, well carpentered
and neat, inscribed in black paint with the names and numbers of the
fallen Guardsmen, arrived with the rations, and was set up over the
little grave, a landmark in that devastated countryside, the place of
the unburied dead.
Like the wood which our Ensign had already explored on a former
occasion, the copse and the wood beyond had been the scene of one of
the Homeric fights of the battle of the Somme. This wood, too, was full
of corpses, both British and German, and strewn with rain-soaked and
rusting relics of the fray, lying amid battered trenches and wrecked
dug-outs. During the days they spent in the copse, the men of the two
companies spent their whole time in clearing the wood, stacking up the
rifles, the bayonets, the equipment, collecting such identity discs as
still remained on the dead before burying them, and bringing in to the
officers’ dug-out German shoulder-straps and letters and papers of all
kinds. These were in due course sent down to the Brigade to be handed
over to the Army Intelligence.
In the copse itself a German battery had been posted. There were
indications that it had had its home there for many months. The
dug-outs had been very well made, deep and comfortable, though the
British heavy shells had played havoc with them now. In one a provision
store was found, with tier upon tier of very mouldy black bread
stacked up to the roof, many tins of canned meat (one ingenious Ensign
introduced a tin of German brawn into the mess and opened it for lunch,
professing to find it delicious), and some tins of sardines. Another
was stored with cordite charges. It was beneath the covered entrance
leading down to this particular dug-out that our Ensign found the mess
cook installed over a large fire, with burst bags of cordite lying all
around. He was sternly bidden to shift his quarters elsewhere--which he
did with an injured air.
Rooting about in the wood with MacFinnigan, our Ensign came upon a
dug-out which had all but collapsed, a dead German, buried, save for
his boots, at the entrance. MacFinnigan, who had no squeamishness about
such matters, wormed his way into the dug-out, and presently began
to hand up newspapers and letters and labels off parcels, brought by
the _Feldpost_ for the two bombardiers who, as the addresses on the
various articles showed, must have lodged there. One was a Jew from
Frankfurt-on-Main, who had a large correspondence with innumerable
Cohns and Abrahams and Levys, mostly of the feminine persuasion; the
other appeared to have been a Bavarian. Among the latter’s letters
was one from his wife, which gave a brief but tragic glimpse of the
misery of everyday life in Germany in war-time--a side of the question
which is rarely illumined in the newspapers. The letter was angry and
bitter. After a long complaint about the growing food difficulties and
appalling price of everything, the woman, who wrote from a Bavarian
village, told of some hitch in the payment of her separation allowance,
and narrated how she had been to the Mayor to get redress, and had
been “flung out” (_hinausgeschmissen_). In a torrent of unpunctuated,
ungrammatical German, with many appeals to the “dear husband,” she
asked if that was the way the wives of brave German “warriors” should
be treated, if “they” expected the people to make the enormous
sacrifices demanded of them, when “they” unjustly deprived the women of
their due.
The husband’s answer was there too ... begun on a field post-card (in
the German army these are issued blank to the men) from the dug-out
in the wood and never finished ... interrupted, maybe, by the shell
that smashed the dug-out and killed the man lying outside--who perhaps
was the writer himself. It began in a torrent of abuse--the language
of a man of the people defending his woman, setting forth the wife’s
complaint, asking how men who skulked at home dared so to treat the
wife of a German “warrior.”... And there the scrawling writing broke
off short. The guns of the Somme had prevented a Bavarian Mayor from
getting a post-card which would probably have momentarily soured the
taste of his dinner beer.
Our Ensign had been given a definite job in the impending attack.
He was told he was not to “go over” with his company, but would
act as Intelligence Officer, and in this capacity accompany the
Second-in-command with a select party. The duties entrusted to him
necessitated a good knowledge of the ground over which the attack was
to be made; so one afternoon, whilst they were waiting in the copse,
our Ensign got leave from The Beak, and, taking MacFinnigan, carrying
a telescope, along with him, he set out to find out some eminence from
which he might survey the scene.
Side by side, officer and orderly traversed the long brown slope which
our Ensign had hitherto only crossed on a famous occasion at night.
Then the darkness had mercifully hidden from their eyes the full horror
of the battlefield which now lay in all its ghastliness before them,
bare and brutal, in the soft light of a mild autumn day. Our Ensign
blessed the name of John Cotton of Edinburgh as he marched along
puffing at his briar. Truly tobacco is the sovereign herb in war: not
only does it calm the nerves--it also dulls the sense of smell.
As they went up the ridge, our Ensign chatted with his orderly.
MacFinnigan had a great thirst for knowledge: a secret was in the air
which he would fain penetrate....
“Is it a fact, sir?... Some of the men in the company were saying,
sir.... They do tell me, sir....”
What was the secret?
Hush, hush!
Wait and see! Whatever it was, it so engrossed our Ensign that it
carried him right over the ridge and to the banks of a sunken road that
ran transversely to his line of advance, where he was brought up short
in his tracks.
Our Ensign had heard of the Germans being mowed down in swathes as
they rushed hurrahing in dense formation to the attack of the forts of
Liège; he had been told of the bridge at Landrecies piled high with
German corpses after the Coldstream had given the Hun a taste of the
Guards’ rapid fire; he had had described to him how the British naval
guns cleaved great furrows in the ranks of Germany’s youthful legions
on the Yser as they went forward hand in hand, singing their soldier
songs, to break through to Calais. He had heard of these things, I say,
and had read of them in the papers like everybody else, but he had yet
to realise what a shock one can get when the mental picture evoked by a
newspaper paragraph comes in contact with the reality.
For he found himself on the high banks of that sunken road looking
down upon piles of German dead, two, three, four, and even five layers
deep. The road had been put into a rough state of defence, and every
embrasure cut out of the bank nearest the British had its ghastly mound
of corpses. Their numbers he could not estimate, what their regiment he
would not venture close enough to determine; he only knew that these
men had died obeying their army order that Ginchy must be held to the
last man ... and the road was full of these gallant dead. By every
embrasure one or two dead British soldiers were lying--probably, our
Ensign thought, the first men to adventure into the trench of that
forlorn German hope: one such khaki-clad figure still had his hands at
the throat of the German across whose body he was lying with another
German on top of him.
Even the unsqueamish MacFinnigan was overcome at the sight.
“How horrible, sir,” he said; and then added, as an afterthought, “but
they were brave men!”
Our Ensign lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then he gave one to the
orderly, and they passed on up the slope.