“Then was seen with what majesty the British soldier
fights....”--NAPIER.
Once again our Ensign was in the midst of the Guards--Grenadiers,
Coldstream, Irish, ... remains of half a dozen battalions were there,
intermingled with a good sprinkling of men from all manner of line
regiments. They stood packed close as herrings in a barrel in the
deep and narrow trench, so that it was wellnigh impossible to force a
passage. Of officers, for the moment, there was no trace.
Our Ensign stood for a moment to regain his breath and to take in the
surroundings. The trench was in a hideous mess, showing abundant
traces of the appalling pounding it had received during three days’
incessant artillery fire. The British shells had blown whole segments
bodily out of it, so that here the parapet, there the parados, was
blasted clean away--sometimes both in the same place--leaving a broad
gap void of all protection.
In its time it had been a good specimen of a German fire-trench--in
point of fact it was the German main third line--with a neat fire-step,
solid traverses, and deep, timber-lined dug-outs with many steps
leading sheer down into the bowels of the earth. But now the fire-step
was broken and crumbling, the traverses were nearly all blown in, and
in many of the dug-outs part of the framework had collapsed, leaving
the entrance either sagging or completely blocked up by fallen earth.
The place was a shambles. There were shapeless masses of field-grey
trodden down fast into the soft mud bottom of the trench, and
sprawling forms, both khaki and grey, lay all over the place. In
a yawning rent in the trench, at our Ensign’s very elbow, was the
dead body of a lad wearing the black buttons and badges of a Rifle
regiment,--a mere boy, with a round bullet-hole in the temple. At his
side a figure was sitting, knees drawn up, head resting on the hand, in
an attitude of contemplation. Our Ensign recognised a sergeant of his
own Battalion ... an oldish, steady man whom he had known well.... So
tired and utterly weary was the look on his face, that for the moment
the young officer fancied that the man had fallen asleep. But the waxen
features told a different tale.... Our Ensign’s heart sank a little
within him as he gazed on the two listless figures: all the morning
they remained there, and every time he passed them he felt himself
shrinking with horror.
The trench was strewn with “souvenirs”--German helmets and caps and
rifles and greatcoats and ammunition pouches, boxes of cigars, loaves
of bread, tins of meat and sardines, empty bottles, letters, pay-books,
littered about among the prostrate forms. The men in the trench were
turning these over; many had rank German cigars in their mouths. But
our Ensign had no time to waste in poring over these things--as the
only officer present, he felt that it devolved upon him to try and
bring a little order into the chaos.
Presently he espied a familiar form, gaunt and tall,--it was Sergeant
Jackson, of our Ensign’s company. Briefly, the sergeant gave the
officer the news. All the officers of our Ensign’s company and the
acting company sergeant-major had been knocked out ... none of the
officers were killed, he thought ... he had seen “the captain” being
carried away in all his usual serenity. There were some officers
farther along the trench.
Our Ensign bade the sergeant get the men to work in consolidating
the position. Now that the trench was in British hands, it had to be
reversed, the parapet built up into a parados and a fire-step cut in
the parapet.
“The men will have to work like blazes,” added our young man; “in a few
minutes we shall have every German gun in the place opening on us, and
the men will want all the cover they can get.”
“And, for Heavens sake, Sergeant Jackson,” he went on, “get some of
these bodies put out of the trench!”
Then, with infinite difficulty, our young man started to force himself
along the crowded trench. There was no shelling as yet, but there was
a lot of machine-gun fire and the air was fairly humming with bullets.
He fought his way along desperately hard: the men were willing enough
to let him pass, but your Guardsman in full attacking order is a big
object that, even edgeways, almost blocks an ordinary trench, and our
Ensign had an exhausting time. As he dragged himself round a traverse,
he all but stepped on a German lying on the ground. As he passed him,
the man caught hold of the officer’s legs and shrieked in a broad
Bavarian accent--
“Ach! Herr Leutnant! Ich halt’es nicht aus ... schiessen Sie mich! Ach!
schiessen Sie mich! Ich bitt’ Sie!”
The taking of a man’s life in cold blood had never entered into our
novice’s philosophy, so he shook the man off and passed on, with a
horrid picture in his memory of a livid, grimacing mask.
Our Ensign next came to a broad gap blown clean through parados and
parapet. As he was about to pass, a young Coldstreamer at his elbow
pushed past him into the gap. The next moment the lad cried out “Oh!” a
loud, gasping exclamation of utter astonishment, spun round, and fell
prone at the officer’s feet with a great gush of blood that splashed
the other’s tunic.
“There’s a sniper laying on that gap, sir,” said an Irish Guardsman
standing by; “for the love of God, kape your head down!”
“This is a bloody business,” said our Ensign to himself. These ghastly
sights were beginning to get on his nerves. Then, ducking down, he
darted across the gap and in a minute or two found himself in the
presence of Headquarters. The Commanding Officer told him he was to
take command of No. 2 Company, as the only officer surviving, and asked
for news of the Second-in-command. Our Ensign told his tale.
A group of officers were there: Roderick, tall and quite cool; The Lad,
brimming over with excitement, who had drifted in from his battalion,
together with his Commanding Officer, a Brigade Machine-Gun Officer,
the Doctor, the Padre, a Forward Observation Officer.
Roderick gave our Ensign a brief budget of news. The Don had been shot
through the thigh, crossing the ridge; Apollo had got it through
the shoulder, and had last been seen volubly explaining to the
stretcher-bearers carrying him down the exact nature of his wound in
highly technical language; Duke was all right. Of the officers of the
other companies, two at least were known to be killed--Roderick had
heard the men talking about them.
One of these two officers was a friend of our Ensign’s, yet he heard
of his death quite unmoved. In the heat of battle everything appears
unreal--so much is rumour, so little is fact; and even towards the
concrete realities under his very eyes a man feels that he will wake up
and find it all a dream....
One of the group of officers, who was surveying through his glasses the
low brown horizon with its tangle of rusted wire, suddenly pointed to
the right.
“That communication trench is full of Huns,” he cried; “look! you can
see them in their helmets leaning on the parapet!”
Everybody put up their glasses. There, sure enough, was a long line of
heads in coal-scuttle helmets lining the trench indicated. They had a
machine-gun trained on the trench where the Guards were; they were also
busy sniping into all the gaps.
A Lewis gunner was haled forth from the crowded trench, and he lost no
time in laying his gun on the line of Germans. But the gun jammed at
the first burst of fire. While they were trying another, our Ensign
was ordered to take charge of the left of the line, post sentries, and
set every man to the task of consolidating the trench. He was briefly
told the situation. On the right, the attacking troops had been held
up by the strong position known as The Quadrilateral, bristling with
machine-guns, the same guns which had caught the Guards in enfilade as
they crossed the ridge; what had happened on the left was not clear.
Our Ensign set off back along the way he had come with a light heart.
He rejoiced at having a definite job which would keep him from
thinking about the horrors piling up on every side of him. With him
went the Brigade Machine-Gun Officer and a Grenadier Ensign, from whom
our young man had once taken over in the trenches in the salient. Of
the three officers, only our Ensign was destined to survive the day,
but, of course, he did not know that then.
The German, who had clutched at our Ensign’s leg on his passage, lay
dead in the bottom of the trench. Our Ensign wondered whether the man
had found some one to do the service that he refused him. The dead
Coldstreamer in the gap had now three companions prone on their faces
in the mud.
As they elbowed their way along, the three officers set every man in
the trench to the task of consolidation. The men obeyed willingly
enough, and the sergeants, at the officers’ bidding, posted sentries at
intervals along the trench, with strict injunctions to keep a sharp
look-out, right, left, and centre. Thus the three officers forced their
way down the trench, leaving a trail of busy diggers in their wake.
By mutual arrangement our Ensign pushed on alone to the extreme left,
where he found himself among troops of the line, until he met a very
youthful subaltern of a Rifle regiment, whom our Ensign informed of the
situation, and of the measures they were taking for their protection.
This done, our Ensign toiled his way back again along the trench.
And now the long-expected _strafe_ began. A German battery that had
been shelling over them shortened its range, and the shells, vicious,
black “whizz-bangs,” began dropping uncomfortably close to the
trench. Word had been coming along from the right, “All men of the
such-and-such battalion of the Coldstream to the right,” “All men of
the such-and-such battalion of the Irish Guards to the right,” so the
trench was a little clearer as the different battalions got sifted
out. Some kind of advance was going forward to the extreme right. Our
Ensign saw long lines of men advancing through a tornado of great,
black shell-bursts. Presently a flock of grey figures, hands above
their heads, bolted across the open. Shouts rang out all down the
trench.
“Shoot the dogs! Lend me your rifle, mate! Let them be! Shoot the
----! Ah, leave them alone!” But no shot fell, and the frightened herd
plunged across the broken ground among their own shells, a couple of
phlegmatic figures in khaki driving them before them.
The German shell fire was growing in intensity. A 5.9 battery had
joined in. The cry of “stretcher-bearER!” ran up and down the trench;
here and there men lagged at their digging. Our Ensign had to run up
and down, “speeding up” the laggards like a negro slave-driver. But he
noticed many more limp figures, many more ghastly wounds, and every
dug-out had its pale and blood-stained occupants....
In all his efforts our Ensign was loyally supported by his own
non-commissioned officers and men. The sergeants by word, the men by
deed, gave a splendid lead to the reluctant. It is in battle that
the sterling loyalty of British troops to their officers comes out
strongest.
On his knees at the bottom of the trench, scraping vigorously away with
his entrenching tool at the parapet to fashion a fire-step, our Ensign
found old Lawson, one of the battalion snipers, the sweat glistening
on his face, for by now the sun was shining hotly. By his side stood
Sergeant Jackson, as dispassionate as ever.
“We’re going to catch it hot here, sir,” said the sergeant, with a
shake of his head, to our Ensign, who sat down beside the couple and
wiped his damp brow. Then, with a shrill scream, a salvo of four shells
burst right over the group; some one yelled out loud, and a tangle
of men fell all over our Ensign as he squatted on the ground, driving
his helmet over his eyes. He fought himself clear, and found that all
the men about him had stopped working. Some had taken refuge in a low
dug-out, where three or four wounded men were sheltering.
Our Ensign rooted them out and set them again to their task. Then
he looked about him. Old Lawson, the sniper, lay on his face in the
trench, breathing stertorously. Our Ensign turned him over on his
back, and saw at a glance that the old soldier was hovering on the
brink of eternity. A few yards farther along the trench two men lay
dead; another, with a staring white face, was opening his jacket with
trembling, blood-stained hands. A little movement behind him caught our
Ensign’s ear. He turned and found Sergeant Jackson, his face running
with blood, rocking himself gently two and fro. On the ground beside
him was his helmet, with a great jagged rent in the crown.
Our Ensign tore out his last remaining field-dressing and bound up a
gaping wound in the sergeant’s head. Then he gave him a pull of the
famous tea-and-brandy mixture. The sergeant was conscious, but he spoke
in a curious, thick fashion.
“I’m all right, sir,” he said, “but I don’t quite feel up to duty
somehow; and I’ve got a bit of a brow-ache, too!” And then his head
fell forward, and with a sharp pang our Ensign thought he was dead.
But presently he spoke again, complained that he could not hear, that
his eyes were failing; so our Ensign gave him another pull at the
water-bottle, and offered him a cigarette, which he took and was able
to light alone. The officer left him seated in the trench contentedly
puffing, and set off again to keep the men to their task.
And now our Ensign felt the reaction of the morning’s excitement coming
over him. All the exhilaration he had experienced in the magnificent
opening act of the day seemed to have evaporated. He found himself
dwelling with loathing on the mere thought of war; his mind toyed with
crude pictures he had seen in German papers of Hindenburg, the German
Man of Destiny, striding over mounds of corpses--even such corpses as
those that lay strewn all around.
Our Ensign felt his gorge rising at the horrors besetting him. He found
himself longing fervently for a mad charge, a German attack,--anything
to get away from the shambles, the blood, the mud, the dank smell of
the earth, the hideous painted sky that mocked their sufferings. Of all
the manifold sensations of the day, the hours he spent in that trench
left the deepest impress on our Ensign’s memory, and ran their span
again and again, with horrors intensified, in the battle-dreams that
came to him in many nights subsequently.
In reality, they were not more than three or four hours in the third
German line. To our Ensign the delay seemed endless; the men, too, were
chafing to be away “after the Gers.,” anything rather than to sit there
and be shelled to atoms.
Down the trench our Ensign found the Brigade Machine-Gunner again.
The latter told him that apparently the attacking lines, misled by
the two trenches which had lain, all unsuspected, between them and
their first objective, had believed the trench they were in to be the
third objective, whereas it was in reality only the first objective,
as far as could be ascertained. In a country from which practically
every landmark has been razed, where one trench looks exactly like
another, such an error was easily made. Hence the delay. However, the
Machine-Gunner said, the first lines had gone on now, and probably the
rest would soon follow.
A charming fellow, this Machine-Gunner, practical, conscientious,
and fearless beyond all praise. He and our Ensign found themselves
cordially agreed that the sights in that trench were enough to sicken a
man of war for the rest of his life.
Then our Ensign suddenly saw his Commanding Officer on the parapet
above his head. He ordered our young man to collect all the men he
could and bring them forward. Our Ensign and the Machine-Gunner were
out of the trench in an instant, bawling to the men to follow them.
The men were delighted to get away, and the Machine-Gunner, surrounded
by a knot of his men with guns and tripods and ammunition boxes, led a
big batch forward, whilst our Ensign ran up and down the trench beating
up the rest. And so presently our young Ensign led the way over a wild
chaos of broken wire and shell-ploughed brown earth out into the blue,
turning his back for ever on that sinister place where, as it seemed
to him, years of his life had been spent. On they went, through a few
spasmodic shells, to the top of the low ridge, where an unforgettable
sight burst upon their vision.
A broad green valley lay unfolded before them, a beauteous panorama
as yet unspoiled by war. Mars had not laid a finger on the long green
slopes and smiling valleys. Neat little villages still snuggled intact
amid clumps of bosky trees, between them long white ribbons of roads
bordered by trim rows of poplars. Here was a pretty hamlet with the
glint of red roofs amid the verdant foliage, through which a slender
yellow church tower thrust itself up into the azure sky. As though
protruding right into the foreground--though in reality it was a mile
behind the hamlet--ran a broad white ribbon with a tall fringe of
trees,--one of the great national highways of France.
At the first view the whole countryside appeared to slumber in the
brilliant sunshine of the Indian summer. Birds were singing in the sky,
the trees rustled gently in the breeze, and the pleasant old church
towers dotting the horizon, seen through the shimmering heat haze that
arose off the green fields, seemed to nod drowsily as they kept their
ancient watch over their little villages.
But there, clearly discernible to the naked eye, along the white
patches of distant roads, was a flicker of moving dots which, seen
through the glasses, resolved themselves into long lines of men on
the march, guns, transport waggons, and the like. Then, in the nearer
foreground, where the yellow church tower emerged from the trees,
the eye caught a glimpse of figures--here a knot of men streaming
away across the fields, there a solitary form strained to an attitude
of watching. Over to the right, along a distant road running across
the slope of a hill, a limber came galloping; and our Ensign’s eyes,
following the moving vehicle through the glasses, rested upon a German
battery drawn up in the open, an officer (our Ensign could see his
tightly-waisted greatcoat) in the centre, peering through his glasses.
A voice just behind our Ensign exclaimed--
“By God! we’ve got them in the open at last!”
Another cried excitedly--
“Jasus, boys, look at Fritz running away!”
But for the most part the men were silent, standing erect in the
open, gazing spellbound at the Promised Land which it had taken two
years’ bitter fighting to attain. Thus Cortes and his little band of
adventurers may have stood on the Sierra and contemplated with a thrill
of mystery the wonder-city of the Aztecs which lay spread out at their
feet. There were many Guardsmen in that little band of men from half
a dozen Guards’ battalions who had suffered all the bitterness of the
retreat from Mons, who had thrilled to the pursuit of the fleeing
enemy from the Marne, and then had undergone the long vicissitudes of
trench warfare against a better equipped foe. And now they saw him
on the run! Those veterans must have felt that now they could die
content--and many died that day and the next.
That sight banished all thoughts save one from the minds of that
thin brown line. Hardly a man there but had his uniform torn and
bloody,--not a man but had lost a friend; since the start at dawn they
had had no word from the rear--just a handful of adventurers standing
on the fringe of an empty and forsaken stretch of ground. Yet no man
heeded any of these things. Operation Orders had said: “The attack will
be pushed with the utmost vigour,” and the thought dominating every
mind was the determination to drive home to its logical conclusion the
victory which that spectacle of rout proclaimed they had won. It was
a moment such as occurs in all great battles ... on which the memory
afterwards loves to linger in the spirit of “what might have been.”
The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the birds were singing, the
grass was firm and springy underfoot, and the men went forward
joyously, all unconcerned at the shells which fell spasmodically about
them. They waded through a field of long rank thistles and dried
cornstalks reaching up to their middles, and came out on the other
side to a low shallow trench, which had apparently been constructed to
provide a covered way between the guns of a German battery once posted
there. The place was littered with the long wicker-work cases in which
the Germans carry their shells, and with brass shell-cases innumerable.
One Irish Guardsman found on the ground a very delicate and beautiful
telescopic sight for use with a 77-millimetre field-gun in a brown
leathern case, and pounced upon it as a “souvenir.”
The Machine-Gunner and our Ensign had a brief council of war on the
edge of the root-field, and decided to put the men into the shallow
trench and set them digging themselves in pending further orders. While
the Machine-Gunner began to install his guns in convenient shell-holes,
our Ensign spread the men out along the trench until they came in touch
with another party of the Guards who were in the same trench. There
were one or two officers with them, a couple of Coldstreamers, and a
Grenadier captain.
By this time the shelling was growing distinctly unpleasant. Through
his glasses our Ensign could clearly see the German battery he had
already observed, in action, the men standing to the guns, two
officers in flat caps and greatcoats in the middle. The shells were
whizz-bangs--shrapnel and high explosive--and they were bursting with
unpleasant regularity and disconcerting accuracy up and down the trench
line. Everybody was horribly exposed, and now the disagreeable “swish
... swish” of some very active machine-guns on the right (in the
Quadrilateral, no doubt) blended with the whistle of the shells. Every
man in the trench was now working like a Trojan, scraping and hacking
away with his entrenching tool in the soft brown soil, and the narrow
trench was quite impassable. To get along one had simply to walk across
the open and pay no heed to the bullets snapping in the air.
But the excitement of being “in the open” made everybody amazingly
callous. The men never ceased working, though here and there hideously
mutilated bodies were gently lifted out of the trench and bedded in the
thistles, and in places men were shouting, unanswered, the familiar
battlefield cry, “Stretcher-bearER!” Officers were walking about in the
open, keeping the men to their task, and on the edge of the root-field
three Commanding Officers of the Guards were talking things over,
raising their glasses now and then to their eyes, like spectators at an
Army point-to-point. They were our Ensign’s Commanding Officer, that
Commanding Officer of the Coldstream who had that day rallied his men
to the note of the silver hunting-horn which our Ensign saw sticking
between the buttons of his jacket, and another. Presently, somebody
suggested the advisability of taking a little cover, and they adjourned
into an adjacent deep shell-hole, where the discussion was resumed.
Many days afterwards our Ensign read in a message from ‘The Times’
war correspondent in France how “at one point in the advance certain
Battalion Commanders of the Guards held a conference, which will be
historic, in a shell-hole to try and locate precisely where they were.”
Near the “historic shell-hole” our Ensign met Duke, an ensign of his
own Battalion, one of his own Mess, in a huge trench-coat. He informed
our Ensign that Roderick had been sniped in the trench and badly
wounded.
“You and I,” he said to our Ensign, “seem to be the only Company
Officers left. Everybody else has disappeared. My word! it was hot
getting up to that last trench!”
He told our Ensign that El Capitan (who had been left behind when the
Battalion went into action) had been sent for after Roderick was hit,
and was coming to take over the company.
And here was El Capitan himself, rubbing his hands, bristling with
fight.
“We’re going on,” he grinned; “there’s another mixed party of Guards
and people in shell-holes a bit down the slope, and we’re going to try
and join up with ’em!”
Our Ensign’s recollections of the rest of that afternoon are rather
hazy. He remembers sallying out again with a party of Irish Guardsmen
over the coarse yellow grass towards a long low slope running across
from left to right. There came a perfect tornado of German shells and
a steady incessant swish of bullets from the machine-guns enfilading
the slope from the Quadrilateral. Still the line went on, but strangely
thinned, as our Ensign noticed in wonder. He remembers seeing little
spurts of dust about his feet without understanding what they meant,
and asking himself whether the curious whistling noises followed by
a metallic whirr were rifle grenades. He caught a glimpse of the
Machine-Gun Officer coming out with his men, standing on the slope
behind him. When he looked once more he was gone, and our Ensign never
saw him again.
All the men were in shell-holes now. Our Ensign toppled breathlessly
into one, a shallow crater, where there were two men of the machine-gun
team with a gun. The German guns were searching the whole slope with
whizz-bangs and those rifle grenades, or whatever they were, that
made that whistling noise and that curious metallic whirr (our Ensign
afterwards knew them to be H.E. shrapnel). The shells were bursting
everywhere; one could _taste_ their sulphur reek, and the ears ached
with the perpetual detonations.
The machine-gunners scraped vigorously at the bottom of the hole. It
was obviously too small to shelter three, so our Ensign scrambled
out and, bending low, darted forward. Once more there was a whirr of
bullets. He realised that he must be in full view of some one watching
that slope. He dropped into another shell-hole, a much bigger one than
the last. A solitary Irish Guardsman was sitting there, phlegmatically
scooping himself a little trench with his entrenching tool.
Then our Ensign saw El Capitan striding across the open, his orderly by
his side. As our young man watched, he saw the orderly clap his hand to
his leg and drop. El Capitan disappeared into a shell-hole with him
and presently emerged alone. Our Ensign shouted to him: the other waved
to him to stay where he was, and went striding on calmly back to the
trench.
A man dropped heavily on our Ensign and his companion in the
shell-hole. He was an Irish Guardsman, too.
“I was in with two chaps in the hole beyant,” he panted, “and a shell
is after landing on the edge of the hole. It’s a wonder that meself’s
alive, for thim other two is dead!”
“Well, take a hould on your entrinchin’ tool,” said the other without
sympathy, “and dig this out a bit for th’ officer!”
While they scraped away our Ensign chatted to the two men. Their talk
was all of the “Gerboys harin’ off,” the number of prisoners they had
seen ... incidents of the day’s fighting; of their present position in
a shell-hole on a bullet-swept slope with shells bursting all around
them they said nothing.
The slope of the ground in front rather masked the view, so our young
man resolved to push on a shell-hole or two and try and discover what
was happening at the front of the slope. He crawled for a dozen yards,
then he heard a shell “coming at him,” as the saying is, and he flung
himself into the nearest hole. There he found Duke with an ashen face,
his jacket split up the back and drenched in blood. With him was his
orderly, a big man wearing the D.C.M. ribbon.
“I’m all right,” observed the wounded man; “I’ve got it in the
shoulder, I think. They put a shell--shrapnel, I believe it was--right
on top of us. Have you got a cigarette to spare?”
Our Ensign looked at his watch. It was four o’clock, a brilliant autumn
afternoon, full of light and colour. He found it quite impossible to
realise that it was on the cards that none of them would ever get out
of that hole alive. But the oddness of their situation tickled his
sense of humour, and he remarked upon it as he handed his fellow-ensign
his cigarette-case.
Thus they sat for fully an hour and a half. By that time our Ensign and
the orderly had dug the shell-hole into quite a respectable trench.
They had to work with great circumspection, for the least movement
attracted a shower of projectiles in their direction. Otherwise, the
enemy seemed loth to waste ammunition; when the surface of the slope
was unruffled the guns were silent.
No word came up from the trench behind them, meanwhile, and at
half-past five our Ensign thought he had better go back and find out
what was happening. He promised to send out the stretcher-bearers to
fetch in Duke as soon as darkness fell. Then he crawled cautiously
back, noticing on his way that the shell-hole in which he had first
taken shelter now held two corpses and a wrecked machine-gun.