“But, by the Mass! our hearts are in the trim!”--_Henry V._
The noonday sun was high overhead. The long hand of the watch was
passing the half-hour mark after noon. The first wave of Guards was
waiting for the whistle-blast that would launch them to the attack,
rifle and bayonet in their hands, helmets strapped on tight, and one
foot in the little steps they had cut in the forward wall of the
trench. The men of the second wave stood, likewise ready, leaning with
their backs to the parados, to let the first wave get clear.
Peter and our Ensign were in the middle of the trench, girt about
with revolvers and lamps and compasses, helmets back to front so as
to hide their regimental crest that would proclaim them as officers,
coat collars turned up, and rifles by their sides. Peter was on the
fire-step, for he was to lead the first wave: a spin of the coin had
decided it: our Ensign leant against the back of the trench, and both
had their eyes glued to their left wrists, watching the long hand of
their watches crawling forward to the appointed hour.
“Now!” cried Peter.
“Now!” echoed the other, and even as the first wave scrambled out, the
roar of the guns increased to whirlwind intensity, and all the stretch
of No Man’s Land in front of them began to seethe yet more madly with
the bursting shells.
Away the solid brown line goes, a zig-zagging line of figures,
diminishing to right and left into mere dots, slowly, slowly, for
they must not walk into that creeping hurricane which is sweeping the
ground as they go forward. The noise is terrific, a vast cascade
of reverberating crashes blending with the swift, incessant, wingèd
scream of heavy metal hurtling through space, the only ingredient sound
distinguishable, the high-pitched whinny and spit of bullets in the air.
No whistle could be heard in such a din, and with the drill-book signal
for “Advance”--the right arm stretched forward and dropped--our Ensign
got his second wave out of the trench into the screaming, vibrating
atmosphere of No Man’s Land.
How the men responded to that signal! Never a laggard was there. Out
they scrambled and staggered and hopped,--it is no easy thing for a
big man, heavily laden, to get out of a narrow trench,--eager and
willing and determined, one helping the other, spreading out to the
proper extended distance, and dressing by the right as calmly as if
they were out on a company training day at home. Out they came with a
will, thankful to exchange their narrow quarters in the trench for the
freedom of the advance.
Over the top! Has any man’s life ever offered such a thrill, such a
sensation of freedom, such a bursting from incarceration into liberty,
from darkness into light, as that inspiriting leap into the open?
Gone the uneasiness, the doubtings of the eve--only the great moral
uplifting, which the din of battle brings, remains.
Slowly the line surged forward across the broken ground towards the
long ragged fringe of red-rusted wire running in front of the German
trench. The second wave soon caught up with and merged in the first,
and the whole line went on together, Peter and our Ensign and the
Company Sergeant-Major darting to and fro to restrain the eagerness of
the men, and prevent them from plunging into that maelstrom of fire
that crept forward yard by yard in front of them.
The advance was so leisurely that our Ensign had plenty of time to
look about him. He saw with some surprise--so slow is the mind to
take in the reality of death--how here a man and there a man would
suddenly stop and throw himself down with a deliberation that would
have excited the ire of a stage manager rehearsing a death scene.
He gazed with astonishment on the secrets which that serene and
silent stretch of ground, as viewed from their trench, now abruptly
revealed,--waxen and sorrowful corpses in clean field-grey overcoats
sprawling in shell-holes, the victims of that morning’s bombardment;
wounded Guardsmen waiting, with that dumb apathy which is such a fine
characteristic of our British wounded, for the stolid and dauntless
stretcher-bearers.
A brace of partridge suddenly whirred up from the broken and splintered
festoons of wire at their very feet. Our Ensign watched them fly off
to the left, and noted that they came unscathed through the torrent of
fire. The men laughed uproariously at the appearance of the birds,--it
takes but very little to set men laughing in battle.
Now they were at the wire which reached to the very lip of the German
trench, all battered and pounded. Already frightened faces appeared,
mouthing from under the ugly German coal-scuttle helmets their cry of
“Kamerad! Kamerad!” The whole line burst into a wild “whoroo”: the yell
echoed up and down the line, and even rang out above the din of the
fight. Then, like a torrent, the khaki flood poured into the trench.
From the top of the trench our Ensign surveyed its length. Germans
scuttled out of dug-outs, running this way and that uncertainly, like
trapped rats--then seeing the khaki surging down upon them, flung away
their rifles and threw up their hands, bleating “Kamerad! Kamerad!”
What a sight that trench was! The dead were lying everywhere--stamped
or blown into the soft mud bottom, sprawling at the mouths of the
dug-outs, prone upon the parapet; and amongst the flaccid forms others
yet alive, with ghastly wounds, shuddering, gibbering, slavering,
groaning, whimpering for mercy, for food, for water. There, in a tiny
unfinished shelter, cowered a youth with a shattered jaw, slobbering
blood; here, in the bottom of the trench, lay another field-grey with
one foot blown clean away--mud-stained, unshaven, filthy--sobbing in a
sing-song voice, “_Ach, bitte! ach, bitte!_” and all around the shells
screamed through the air or crashed with hideous reverberation and
clouds of dust and stifling reek into the crumbling ground.
Our Ensign took his orderly and a couple of men and pushed along to
the right into a bare and apparently unoccupied stretch of trench.
He wanted to link up with the Guards attacking on their right, so
as to form an unbroken front. The German barrage had begun, and the
shells were bursting freely about the newly captured position. Behind
them they could see the supports swarming out across the ground over
which they had just advanced. Our Ensign caught a glimpse of a gross
German, fat and unwieldy, sprawling dead on the parapet, his face to
the ground. Our young man found himself wondering fearfully if a shell
would come and hideously dissipate that mass of flesh. With a shudder
he hurried on.
They joined hands with the Guards on their right, and heard from the
hot and grimy men a hurried tale of uncut wire and heavy losses. Our
Ensign was told the story of the heroic death of a friend, an officer,
who had adventured forth alone to cut the wire that barred their
progress, and had met his death with his face to the enemy, the cutters
in his hand. Then a man came up to our Ensign,--there was a German
officer in a dug-out who demanded to speak to “th’ officer.”
Our Ensign followed the private, who led him back along the trench
to a dug-out, at the entrance of which an officer stood facing a
ring of Guardsmen. He was the old type of Prussian officer--none
of your upstart, counter-jumper, pot-bellied, bespectacled,
“I-surrender-and-let’s-call-it-a-draw” sort of special reservist,
such as we have all met on the Somme, but a tall well-groomed figure,
reticent and coldly hostile. He was wearing a Prussian military cap and
a well-fitting grey overcoat. In his hand he held his shrapnel helmet.
He introduced himself in good German fashion, with a little bow and
click of heels, as a Lieutenant of the 240th Infantry Regiment. He came
from the Rhine, where our Ensign had learnt his language.
“There are none but wounded men here with me,” he said in German, “and
we shall make no further resistance.”
“You’d better not,” observed the British officer.
“I myself am also wounded,” the German went on, protruding his leg
and showing his trouser ripped up to the thigh, which was wrapped in
blood-stained bandages, “and I will give you my word of honour that
there shall be no act of aggression on our part. Will you be good
enough to see that there is no killing?”
He used the German expression “_Totmachen_,” infinitely grimmer, our
Ensign thought, than the English equivalent.
“Nobody is going to touch you if you don’t get up to any tricks,” our
Ensign answered. In exchange for the German’s blunt expression he gave
him a blunter. “_Nur keine Schweinerei Ihrerseits!_” were the words he
used. A German best understands plain speaking. But our young man felt
himself strangely moved at the spectacle of this Prussian, who walked
surrounded by a halo in his own country, pleading so humbly for his
life and that of his men’s, with his besotted German conviction that
as they had done, so they would be done by.
Thus the pourparlers of surrender were conducted in a circle of big and
gentle British soldiers. The conditions were that all the wounded who
were able to walk should come out of the dug-out and be sent down to
the rear under escort, and that the rest should remain where they were
under guard until they could be removed by the stretcher-bearers. Our
Ensign posted a couple of sentries at the dug-out with instructions
to shoot anybody who tried to come out. He carefully explained these
orders to the officer.
“You’d better go too,” our Ensign added, “for this trench is going to
be very unhealthy presently, and you’ll be sorry you stayed!”
But the officer protested that he could not walk, so he stayed where he
was under guard. He offered our Ensign his helmet, but our young man
declined it.
“We’re too busy to go collecting souvenirs!” he said, and went off to
help his company commander get the men to work on the consolidation of
the position.
Presently, while the shells spouted on in front of them in a steady
stream, and German shells screamed back barraging all the slope behind,
the advance went forward again, the supports coming up to hold the
newly-won trench, and the attacking waves going forward to the next
objective, a sunken road skirting the village. Here they found a
rudimentary fire-position with several deep dug-outs and massively
constructed shelters, into which they dropped a few bombs to make all
safe within. But there was no living sign of the enemy.
A few hundred yards across to the right lay the centre of the village,
a wild wreck of crumbling ruins, bathed in the mellow afternoon
sunshine which gilded the smoke-clouds drifting in and out of the gaunt
roofs. The din of battle raged unabated, for in addition to the crash
of the mighty projectiles exploding in the village, German shells burst
noisily from time to time about their position on the road. But the
shooting was poor. The enemy, deprived of the high ground and driven
from the air, was shooting by the map and he was guessing badly.
It was very hot. The officers got the men strung out along the road
until they were in touch with both flanks. The men lay down and
wiped the sweat from their eyes and foreheads and drained their
water-bottles, and chatted eagerly about their experiences of the day.
Peter and our Ensign sat on a fallen tree-trunk and discussed the
exact location of their next objective, a slope on the far side of the
village, and debated the possibility of trouble in the forthcoming
assault on the village, which was known to be very strongly fortified.
All this time the hamlet showed no sign of life. Scan it as they
would, their glasses showed them nothing more than the scatter of
splintered roof-trees, the litter of red tiles, the torn white masonry
of the houses,--of the enemy no trace. The next advance would take the
Battalion right through the extreme left of the village--first through
the orchards behind some houses lining a road leading into the main
street; then across the road, through the houses on the other side
and through more orchards to a sunken road, and across that to the
slope beyond. Certainly the place had had an exemplary pounding from
the artillery; but German machine-guns have a way of surviving the
most ruthless artillery bombardment--especially in these villages of
the Somme, which are honeycombed with old quarries and subterranean
passages. It was quite on the cards, therefore, that the Battalion
might be blown off the map before it reached its final objective.
But they did not bother their heads much about that. The men were
in the best of spirits. The old hands were delighted with the stout
bearing of the young recruits, while the new-comers, if a trifle more
sober, were well buoyed up by the excitement of the advance. The
Company Sergeant-Major gave our Ensign a Gold Flake cigarette, and our
Ensign offered in return his water-bottle, which had again been filled
with the famous tea-and-brandy mixture.
It was time to move on again. The officers ran up and down the line
getting the men up. They needed no encouragement: they were frantic to
get on. So the line swept forward into the village.
They plunged into a tangle of long grass and shell-holes and broken
stumps of gnarled apple-trees, and through a great farmyard surrounded
by big barns and outhouses smashed and torn by the shells, showing
lines of bunks and blankets tossed aside as though the place had been
forsaken in a hurry. Somewhere on the right the loud tack-tack of
machine-guns resounded, and the swish of bullets brushed along their
front. The officers checked the line a moment. On the right they saw
a string of Guardsmen doubling into a house which spat fire from the
first storey and basement windows. Abruptly the swish of bullets
ceased, and the stream of figures tumbled out of the house again and
followed in the wake of the advance.
In its day the village must have been a charming spot, its comfortable
white houses with their red roofs embowered in ancient trees: in
the spring, when the fruit-trees, clustering so thickly round every
farmstead, were in blossom, it must have been rarely beautiful. Our
Ensign had seen it in its prime, for on September 15 he had taken a
compass-bearing on its yellow church tower, now battered to a blunt and
crumbling stump by the British bombardment.
They pressed on through the tangle of ruins, clambering over palings
and jumping ditches like a party of boys out for a day in the country,
past the ravaged houses and the broken trees, with the smell of
singeing cloth and charred beams in their nostrils. They burst from the
last orchard into the sunken road with a vision before their eyes of
field-grey figures darting away across the fields. Then the men yelled
their battle-cry and rifles rang out, and they all poured into the road
and up the bank on the other side, and so out upon a wide grassy slope
commanding a great green plain, where the British shells were bursting
in a long, white, fleecy line.
Our Ensign looked at his watch. It was a quarter to three in the
afternoon, and already the day was won. But he knew the hardest part
was coming. Now they had to hold what they had gained.
Men are always inclined to rest on their laurels, to sit down in the
final objective and light their fags and stretch their legs and talk
over their experiences with their pals. But Peter, radiating his
satisfaction at their success, chased up and down the line, setting
every man to dig the new trench.
They dug in on the fringe of a potato field. The men turned up potatoes
by the score, and laid them carefully on one side, saying they would
do for supper. The sun burnt down hotly upon them out of a clear blue
sky as they dug and burrowed and scraped. The German shells screamed
noisily over their heads, but none fell near the diggers. The British
barrage still seethed and danced all over the plain in front of them.
That steady rain of shells was too much for the Huns, who had fled
from the village to take refuge in shell-holes in the open. By twos or
threes, and by larger packets, they kept bursting into view, running
like men possessed, their hands above their heads, while the Guards,
looking up from their digging, cheered derisively. Several parties thus
broke cover and rushed hell-for-leather into the midst of our Ensign’s
Battalion, where they meekly, almost gratefully, submitted to be
searched, and were marched off at a good round pace to the rear through
the raging German barrage.
But now the Germans seemed to have located the new line. Their guns
shortened their range, and whizz-bangs and 5·9 shells began bursting
about the digging Guardsmen. The officers went to and fro encouraging
the men, sometimes lending a hand with pick or spade to give a good
example. The shell fire was getting hotter every minute, and there was
absolutely no cover save such as the shallow shell-holes afforded.
There were casualties, and the cry of “Stretcher-bearER!” echoed up and
down the line.
El Capitan sat on a corn-stook writing his report for the Commanding
Officer; Peter was in conference with the Company Sergeant-Major. The
men had buckled to their work with a will and were digging feverishly,
the sweat pouring down their faces. A British aeroplane soared, shrilly
tooting, above their heads.
Lord, how hot it was! Our Ensign doffed his heavy helmet and wiped
his brow. His rifle, which he had carried round with him all day, was
planted, bayonet downwards, in the ground beside him. In a shell-hole,
a few yards away, sat a brother officer whom he had not seen since
the previous evening. The latter called out to him to come over and
sit down. Our Ensign walked across and dropped on to the edge of
the shell-hole, at the bottom of which a man was scraping with his
entrenching tool.
He filled his pipe and got out his match-box to light it. Then, from
behind, something struck him a tremendous blow and lifted him high in
the air with a mighty force, against which he struggled in vain with
mind and body, desperately fighting to remain on the ground, striving
to retain the mastery over himself....
* * * * *
It was during his convalescence that this narrative came to be written.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
Obvious typos corrected. Periods printed after abbreviations (e.g.
Dubs., Coy., and notably gym.) have been left as-is.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.