'_. . . have maintained and consolidated our position in the captured
trench._'--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.
Number nine-two-ought-three-six, Sapper Duffy, J., 'A' Section,
Southland Company, Royal Engineers, had been before the War plain Jem
Duffy, labourer, and as such had been an ardent anti-militarist,
anti-conscriptionist, and anti-everything else his labour leaders and
agitators told him. His anti-militarist beliefs were sunk soon after
the beginning of the War, and there is almost a complete story itself
in the tale of their sinking, weighted first by a girl, who looked
ahead no further than the pleasure of walking out with a khaki uniform,
and finally plunged into the deeps of the Army by the gibe of a
stauncher anti-militarist during a heated argument that, 'if he
believed now in fighting, why didn't he go'n fight himself?' But even
after his enlistment he remained true to his beliefs in voluntary
service, and the account of his conversion to the principles of
Conscription--no half-and-half measures of 'military training' or rifle
clubs or hybrid arrangements of that sort, but out-and-out
Conscription--may be more interesting, as it certainly is more typical,
of the conversion of more thousands of members of the Serving Forces
than will ever be known--until those same thousands return to their
civilian lives and the holding of their civilian votes.
* * * * *
By nightfall the captured trench--well, it was only a courtesy title to
call it a trench. Previous to the assault, the British guns had
knocked it about a good deal, bombs and grenades had helped further to
disrupt it in the attacks and counter-attacks during the day, and
finally, after it was captured and held, the enemy had shelled and
high-explosived it out of any likeness to a real trench. But the
infantry had clung throughout the day to the ruins, had beaten off
several strong counter-attacks, and in the intervals had done what they
could to dig themselves more securely in and re-pile some heaps of
sandbags from the shattered parapet on the trench's new front. The
casualties had been heavy, and since there was no passage from the
front British trench to the captured portion of the German except
across the open of the 'neutral' ground, most of the wounded and all
the killed had had to remain under such cover as could be found in the
wrecked trench. The position of the unwounded was bad enough and
unpleasant enough, but it was a great deal worse for the wounded. A
bad wound damages mentally as well as physically. The 'casualty' is
out of the fight, has had a first field dressing placed on his wound,
has been set on one side to be removed at the first opportunity to the
dressing station and the rear. He can do nothing more to protect
himself or take such cover as offers. He is in the hands of the
stretcher-bearers and must submit to be moved when and where they think
fit. And in this case the casualties did not even have the
satisfaction of knowing that every minute that passed meant a minute
farther from the danger zone, a minute nearer to safety and to the
doctors, and the hospitals' hope of healing. Here they had to be
throughout the long day, hearing the shriek of each approaching shell,
waiting for the crash of its fall, wondering each time if _this_ one,
the rush of its approach rising louder and louder to an appalling
screech, was going to be the finish--a 'direct hit.' Many of the
wounded were wounded again, or killed as they lay; and from others the
strength and the life had drained slowly out before nightfall. But now
that darkness had come the casualties moved out and the supports moved
in. From what had been the German second trench, and on this portion
of front was now their forward one, lights were continually going up
and bursts of rifle and machine-gun fire were coming; and an occasional
shell still whooped up and burst over or behind the captured trench.
This meant that the men--supports, and food and water carriers, and
stretcher-bearers--were under a dangerous fire even at night in
crossing the old 'neutral' ground, and it meant that one of the first
jobs absolutely necessary to the holding of the captured trench was the
making of a connecting path more or less safe for moving men,
ammunition, and food by night or day.
This, then, was the position of affairs when 'A' section of the
Southland Company of Engineers came up to take a hand, and this
communication trench was the task that Sapper Duffy, J., found himself
set to work on. Personally Sapper Duffy knew nothing of, and cared
less for, the tactical situation. All he knew or cared about was that
he had done a longish march up from the rear the night before, that he
had put in a hard day's work carrying up bales of sandbags and rolls of
barbed wire from the carts to the trenches, and that here before him
was another night's hard labour, to say nothing of the prospect of
being drilled by a rifle bullet or mangled by a shell. All the
information given him and his section by their section officer was that
they were to dig a communication trench, that it must be completed
before morning, that as long as they were above-ground they would
probably be under a nasty fire, and that therefore the sooner they dug
themselves down under cover the better it would be for the job and for
all concerned. 'A' section removed its equipment and tunics and moved
out on to the 'neutral' ground in its shirt-sleeves, shivering at first
in the raw cold and at the touch of the drizzling rain, but knowing
that the work would very soon warm them beyond need of hampering
clothes. In the ordinary course, digging a trench under fire is done
more or less under cover by sapping--digging the first part in a
covered spot, standing in the deep hole, cutting down the 'face' and
gradually burrowing a way across the danger zone. The advantage of
this method is that the workers keep digging their way forward while
all the time they are below ground and in the safety of the sap they
dig. The disadvantage is that the narrow trench only allows one or two
men to get at its end or 'face' to dig, and the work consequently takes
time. Here it was urgent that the work be completed that night,
because it was very certain that as soon as its whereabouts was
disclosed by daylight it would be subjected to a fire too severe to
allow any party to work, even if the necessary passage of men to and
fro would leave any room for a working party. The digging therefore
had to be done down from the surface, and the diggers, until they had
sunk themselves into safety, had to stand and work fully exposed to the
bullets that whined and hissed across from the enemy trenches.
A zigzag line had been laid down to mark the track of the trench, and
Sapper Duffy was placed by his sergeant on this line and told briefly
to 'get on with it.' Sapper Duffy spat on his hands, placed his spade
on the exact spot indicated, drove it down, and began to dig at a rate
that was apparently leisurely but actually was methodical and nicely
calculated to a speed that could be long and unbrokenly sustained.
During the first minute many bullets whistled and sang past, and Sapper
Duffy took no notice. A couple went 'whutt' past his ear, and he swore
and slightly increased his working speed. When a bullet whistles or
sings past, it is a comfortable distance clear; when it goes 'hiss' or
'swish,' it is too close for safety; and when it says 'whutt' very
sharply and viciously, it is merely a matter of being a few inches out
either way. Sapper Duffy had learned all this by full experience, and
now the number of 'whutts' he heard gave him a very clear understanding
of the dangers of this particular job. He was the farthest out man of
the line. On his left hand he could just distinguish the dim figure of
another digger, stooping and straightening, stooping and straightening,
with the rhythm and regularity of a machine. On his right hand was
empty darkness, lit up every now and then by the glow of a flare-light
showing indistinctly through the drizzling rain. Out of the darkness,
or looming big against the misty light, figures came and went stumbling
and slipping in the mud--stretcher-bearers carrying or supporting the
wounded, a ration party staggering under boxes balanced on shoulders, a
strung-out line of supports stooped and trying to move quietly, men in
double files linked together by swinging ammunition boxes. All these
things Sapper Duffy saw out of the tail of his eye, and without
stopping or slacking the pace of his digging. He fell unconsciously to
timing his movements to those of the other man, and for a time the
machine became a twin-engine working beat for beat--thrust, stoop,
straighten, heave; thrust, stoop, straighten, heave. Then a bullet
said the indescribable word that means 'hit' and Duffy found that the
other half of the machine had stopped suddenly and collapsed in a
little heap. Somewhere along the line a voice called softly
'Stretcher-bearers,' and almost on the word two men and a stretcher
materialised out of the darkness and a third was stooping over the
broken machine. 'He's gone,' said the third man after a pause. 'Lift
him clear.' The two men dropped the stretcher, stooped and fumbled,
lifted the limp figure, laid it down a few yards away from the line,
and vanished in the direction of another call. Sapper Duffy was alone
with his spade and a foot-deep square hole--and the hissing bullets.
The thoughts of the dead man so close beside him disturbed him vaguely,
although he had never given a thought to the scores of dead he had seen
behind the trench and that he knew were scattered thick over the
'neutral' ground where they had fallen in the first charge. But this
man had been one of his own company and his own section--it was
different about him somehow. Yet of course Sapper Duffy knew that the
dead must at times lie where they fall, because the living must always
come before the dead, especially while there are many more wounded than
there are stretchers or stretcher-bearers. But all the same he didn't
like poor old 'Jigger' Adams being left there--didn't see how he could
go home and face old 'Jigger's' missus and tell her he'd come away and
left 'Jigger' lying in the mud of a mangel-wurzel field. Blest if he
wouldn't have a try when they were going to give Jigger a lift back. A
line of men, shirt-sleeved like himself and carrying spades in their
hands, moved out past him. An officer led them, and another with
Sapper Duffy's section officer brought up the rear, and passed along
the word to halt when he reached Daffy. 'Here's the outside man of my
lot,' he said, 'so you'll join on beyond him. You've just come in, I
hear, so I suppose your men are fresh?'
'Fresh!' said the other disgustedly. 'Not much. They've been digging
trenches all day about four miles back. It's too sickening. Pity we
don't do like the Boches--conscript all the able-bodied civilians and
make 'em do all this trench-digging in rear. Then we might be fresh
for the firing line.'
'Tut, tut--mustn't talk about conscripting 'em,' said Duffy's officer
reprovingly. 'One volunteer, y'know--worth ten pressed men.'
'Yes,' said the other, 'but when there isn't enough of the "one
volunteer" it's about time to collar the ten pressed.'
Two or three flares went up almost simultaneously from the enemy's
line, the crackle of fire rose to a brisk fusillade, and through it ran
the sharp 'rat-at-at-at' of a machine-gun. The rising sound of the
reports told plainly of the swinging muzzle, and officers and men
dropped flat in the mud and waited till the sweeping bullets had passed
over their heads. Men may work on and 'chance it' against rifle fire
alone, but the sweep of a machine-gun is beyond chance, and very near
to the certainty of sudden death to all in the circle of its swing.
The officers passed on and the new men began to dig. Sapper Duffy also
resumed work, and as he did so he noticed there was something familiar
about the bulky shape of the new digger next to him.
'What lot are you?' asked the new man, heaving out the first spadeful
rapidly and dexterously.
'We're 'A' Section, Southland Company,' said Duffy, 'an' I say--ain't
you Beefy Wilson?'
'That's me,' said the other without checking his spade. 'And blow me!
you must be Duffy--Jem Duffy.'
'That's right,' said Duffy. 'But I didn't know you'd joined, Beefy.'
'Just a week or two after you,' said Beefy.
'Didjer know boss's two sons had got commissions? Joined the Sappers
an' tried to raise a company out o' the works to join. Couldn't
though. I was the only one.'
'Look out--'ere's that blanky maxim again,' said Duffy, and they
dropped flat very hurriedly.
There was no more conversation at the moment. There were too many
bullets about to encourage any lingering there, and both men wanted all
their breath for their work. It was hard work too. Duffy's back and
shoulder and arm muscles began to ache dully, but he stuck doggedly to
it. He even made an attempt to speed up to Beefy's rate of shovelling,
although he knew by old experience alongside Beefy that he could never
keep up with him, the unchallenged champion of the old gang.
Whether it was that the lifting rain had made them more visible or that
the sound of their digging had been heard they never knew, but the
rifle fire for some reason became faster and closer, and again and
again the call passed for stretcher-bearers, and a constant stream of
wounded began to trickle back from the trench-diggers. Duffy's section
was not so badly off now because they had sunk themselves hip deep, and
the earth they threw out in a parapet gave extra protection. But it
was harder work for them now because they stood in soft mud and water
well above the ankles. The new company, being the more exposed,
suffered more from the fire; but each man of them had a smaller portion
of trench to dig, so they were catching up on the first workers. But
all spaded furiously and in haste to be done with the job, while the
officers and sergeants moved up and down the line and watched the
progress made.
More cold-bloodedly unpleasant work it would be hard to imagine. The
men had none of the thrill and heat of combat to help them; they had
not the hope that a man has in a charge across the open--that a minute
or two gets the worst of it over; they had not even the chance the
fighting man has where at least his hand may save his head. Their
business was to stand in the one spot, open and unprotected, and
without hope of cover or protection for a good hour or more on end.
They must pay no heed to the singing bullets, to the crash of a
bursting shell, to the rising and falling glow of the flares. Simply
they must give body and mind to the job in hand, and dig and dig and
keep on digging. There had been many brave deeds done by the fighting
men on that day: there had been bold leading and bold following in the
first rush across the open against a tornado of fire; there had been
forlorn-hope dashes for ammunition or to pick up wounded; there had
been dogged and desperate courage in clinging all day to the battered
trench under an earth-shaking tempest of high-explosive shells, bombs,
and bullets. But it is doubtful if the day or the night had seen more
nerve-trying, courage-testing work, more deliberate and long-drawn
bravery than was shown, as a matter of course and as a part of the job,
in the digging of that communication trench.
It was done at last, and although it might not be a Class One
Exhibition bit of work, it was, as Beefy Wilson remarked, 'a deal
better'n none.' And although the trench was already a foot deep in
water, Beefy stated no more than bald truth in saying, 'Come to-morrow
there's plenty will put up glad wi' their knees bein' below high-water
mark for the sake o' havin' their heads below low bullet-mark.'
But, if the trench was finished, the night's work for the Engineers was
not. They were moved up into the captured trench, and told that they
had to repair it and wire out in front of it before they were done.
They had half an hour's rest before recommencing work, and Beefy Wilson
and Jem Duffy hugged the shelter of some tumbled sandbags, lit their
pipes and turned the bowls down, and exchanged reminiscences.
'Let's see,' said Beefy. 'Isn't Jigger Adams in your lot?'
'Was,' corrected Jem, 'till an hour ago. 'E's out yon wi' a bullet in
'im--stiff by now.'
Beefy breathed blasphemous regrets. 'Rough on 'is missus an' the kids.
Six of 'em, weren't it?'
'Aw,' assented Jem. 'But she'll get suthin' from the Society funds.'
'Not a ha'porth,' said Beefy. 'You'll remem--no, it was just arter you
left. The trades unions decided no benefits would be paid out for them
as 'listed. It was Ben Shrillett engineered that. 'E was Secretary
an' Treasurer an' things o' other societies as well as ours. 'E fought
the War right along, an' 'e's still fightin' it. 'E's a anti-militant,
'e ses.'
'Anti-militarist,' Jem corrected. He had taken some pains himself in
the old days to get the word itself and some of its meaning right.
'Anti-military-ist then,' said Beefy. 'Any'ow, 'e stuck out agin all
sorts o' soldierin'. This stoppin' the Society benefits was a trump
card too. It blocked a whole crowd from listin' that I know myself
would ha' joined. Queered the boss's sons raisin' that Company too.
They 'ad Frickers an' the B.S.L. Co. an' the works to draw from. Could
ha' raised a couple hundred easy if Ben Shrillett 'adn't got at 'em.
You know 'ow 'e talks the fellers round.'
'I know,' agreed Jem, sucking hard at his pipe.
The Sergeant broke in on their talk. 'Now then,' he said briskly.
'Sooner we start, sooner we're done an' off 'ome to our downy couch.
'Ere, Duffy'--and he pointed out the work Duffy was to start.
For a good two hours the Engineers laboured like slaves again. The
trench was so badly wrecked that it practically had to be
reconstructed. It was dangerous work because it meant moving freely up
and down, both where cover was and was not. It was physically heavy
work because spade work in wet ground must always be that; and when the
spade constantly encounters a debris of broken beams, sandbags, rifles,
and other impediments, and the work has to be performed in
eye-confusing alternations of black darkness and dazzling flares, it
makes the whole thing doubly hard. When you add in the constant whisk
of passing bullets and the smack of their striking, the shriek and
shattering burst of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of
flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit
from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge
of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome
and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly
ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the
collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found
blocking the vigorous thrust of the spades.
Duffy was getting 'fair fed up,' although he still worked on
mechanically. He wondered vaguely what Ben Shrillett would have said
to any member of the trade union that had worked a night, a day, and a
night on end. He wondered, too, how Ben Shrillett would have shaped in
the Royal Engineers, and, for all his cracking muscles and the
back-breaking weight and unwieldiness of the wet sandbags, he had to
grin at the thought of Ben, with his podgy fat fingers and his visible
rotundity of waistcoat, sweating and straining there in the wetness and
darkness with Death whistling past his ear and crashing in shrapnel
bursts about him. The joke was too good to keep to himself, and he
passed it to Beefy next time he came near. Beefy saw the jest clearly
and guffawed aloud, to the amazement of a clay-daubed infantryman who
had had nothing in his mind but thoughts of death and loading and
firing his rifle for hours past.
'Don't wonder Ben's agin conscription,' said Beefy; 'they might
conscription 'im,' and passed on grinning.
Duffy had never looked at it in that light. He'd been
anti-conscription himself, though now--mebbe--he didn't know--he wasn't
so sure.
And after the trench was more or less repaired came the last and the
most desperate business of all--the 'wiring' out there in the open
under the eye of the soaring lights. In ones and twos during the
intervals of darkness the men tumbled over the parapet, dragging stakes
and coils of wire behind them. They managed to drive short stakes and
run trip-wires between them without the enemy suspecting them. When a
light flamed, every man dropped flat in the mud and lay still as the
dead beside them till the light died. In the brief intervals of
darkness they drove the stakes with muffled hammers, and ran the
lengths of barbed wire between them. Heart in mouth they worked, one
eye on the dimly seen hammer and stake-head, the other on the German
trench, watching for the first upward trailing sparks of the flare.
Plenty of men were hit of course, because, light or dark, the bullets
were kept flying, but there was no pause in the work, not even to help
the wounded in. If they were able to crawl they crawled, dropping flat
and still while the lights burned, hitching themselves painfully
towards the parapet under cover of the darkness. If they could not
crawl they lay still, dragging themselves perhaps behind the cover of a
dead body or lying quiet in the open till the time would come when
helpers would seek them. Their turn came when the low wires were
complete. The wounded were brought in cautiously to the trench then,
and hoisted over the parapet; the working party was carefully detailed
and each man's duty marked out before they crawled again into the open
with long stakes and strands of barbed wire. The party lay there
minute after minute, through periods of light and darkness, until the
officer in charge thought a favourable chance had come and gave the
arranged signal. Every man leaped to his feet, the stakes were
planted, and quick blow after blow drove them home. Another light
soared up and flared out, and every man dropped and held his breath,
waiting for the crash of fire that would tell they were discovered.
But the flare died out without a sign, and the working party hurriedly
renewed their task. This time the darkness held for an unusual length
of time, and the stakes were planted, the wires fastened, and
cross-pieces of wood with interlacings of barbed wire all ready were
rolled out and pegged down without another light showing. The word
passed down and the men scrambled back into safety.
'Better shoot a light up quick,' said the Engineer officer to the
infantry commander. 'They have a working party out now. I heard 'em
hammering. That's why they went so long without a light.'
A pistol light was fired and the two stared out into the open ground it
lit. 'Thought so,' said the Engineer, pointing. 'New stakes--see?
And those fellows lying beside 'em.'
'Get your tools together, sergeant,' he said, as several more lights
flamed and a burst of rapid fire rose from the British rifles, 'and
collect your party. Our job's done, and I'm not sorry for it.'
It was just breaking daylight when the remains of the Engineers' party
emerged from the communication trench and already the guns on both
sides were beginning to talk. Beefy Wilson and Jem Duffy between them
found Jigger's body and brought it as far as the dressing station.
Behind the trenches Beefy's company and Jem's section took different
roads, and the two old friends parted with a casual 'S' long' and 'See
you again sometime.'
Duffy had two hours' sleep in a sopping wet roofless house, about three
miles behind the firing line. Then the section was roused and marched
back to their billets in a shell-wrecked village, a good ten miles
farther back. They found what was left of the other three sections of
the Southland Company there, heard the tale of how the Company had been
cut up in advancing with the charging infantry, ate a meal, scraped
some of the mud off themselves, and sought their blankets and wet straw
beds.
Jem Duffy could not get the thought of Ben Shrillett, labour leader and
agitator, out of his mind, and mixed with his thoughts as he went to
sleep were that officer's remarks about pressed men. That perhaps
accounts for his waking thoughts running on the same groove when his
sergeant roused him at black midnight and informed him the section was
being turned out--to dig trenches.
'Trenches,' spluttered Sapper Duffy, '. . . us? How is it our turn
again?'
'Becos, my son,' said the Sergeant, 'there's nobody else about 'ere to
take a turn. Come on! Roll out! Show a leg!'
It was then that Sapper Duffy was finally converted, and renounced for
ever and ever his anti-conscription principles.
'Nobody else,' he said slowly, 'an' England fair stiff wi' men. . . .
The sooner we get Conscription, the better I'll like it. Conscription
solid for every bloomin' able-bodied man an' boy. An' I 'ope Ben
Shrillett an' 'is likes is the first to be took. Conscription,' he
said with the emphasis of finality as he fumbled in wet straw for a
wetter boot, 'out-an'-out, lock, stock, 'n barrel Conscription.'
* * * * *
That same night Ben Shrillett was presiding at a meeting of the Strike
Committee. He had read on the way to the meeting the communiqué that
told briefly of Sapper Duffy and his fellow Engineers' work of the
night before, and the descriptive phrase struck him as sounding neat
and effective. He worked it now into his speech to the Committee,
explaining how and where they and he benefited by this strike,
unpopular as it had proved.
'We've vindicated the rights of the workers,' he said. 'We've shown
that, war or no war, Labour means to be more than mere wage-slaves.
War can't last for ever, and we here, this Committee, proved ourselves
by this strike the true leaders and the Champions of Labour, the
Guardians of the Rights of Trade Unionism. We, gentlemen, have always
been that, and by the strike'--and he concluded with the phrase from
the despatch--'we have maintained and consolidated our position.'
The Committee said, 'Hear, hear.' It is a pity they could not have
heard what Sapper Duffy was saying as he sat up in his dirty wet straw,
listening to the rustle and patter of rain on the barn's leaky roof and
tugging on an icy-cold board-stiff boot.
'BUSINESS AS USUAL'
The remains of the Regiment were slowly working their way back out of
action. They had been in it for three days--three strenuous nights and
days of marching, of fighting, of suffering under heavy shell-fire, of
insufficient and broken sleep, of irregular and unpalatable rations, of
short commons of water, of nerve-stretching excitement and suspense,
all the inevitable discomforts and hardships that in the best organised
of armies must be the part of any hard-fought action. The Regiment had
suffered cruelly, and their casualties had totalled some sixty per
cent. of the strength. And now they were coming back, jaded and worn,
filthily grimed and dirty, unshaven, unwashed, footsore, and limping,
but still in good heart and able to see a subject for jests and
laughter in the sprawling fall of one of their number plunging hastily
to shelter from the unexpected rush and crash of a shell, in the sultry
stream of remarks from an exasperated private when he discovered a
bullet-pierced water-bottle and the loss of his last precious drops of
water.
The men were trickling out in slow, thin streams along communication
and support trenches, behind broken buildings and walls and barricades,
under any cover that screened them from the watchful eyes of the enemy
observers perched high in trees and buildings and everywhere they could
obtain a good look-out over our lines.
In the minds of the men the thoughts of almost all ran in the same
grooves--first and most strongly, because perhaps the oftenest framed
in speech, that it was hot--this hot and that hot, hot as so-and-so or
such-and-such, according to the annoyance or wit of the speaker;
second, and much less clearly defined, a dull satisfaction that they
had done their share, and done it well, and that now they were on their
way out to all the luxury of plenty of food and sleep, water to drink,
water and soap to wash with; third, and increasing in proportion as
they got farther from the forward line and the chance of being hit, a
great anxiety to reach the rear in safety. The fear of being hit by
shell or bullet was a hundred-fold greater than it had been during
their part in the action, when the risk was easily a hundred times
greater, and more sympathy was expended over one man 'casualtied'
coming out than over a score of those killed in the actual fight. It
seemed such hard lines, after going through all they had gone through
and escaping it scot free, that a man should be caught just when it was
all over and he was on the verge of a more or less prolonged spell
outside the urgent danger zone.
The engagement was not over yet. It had been raging with varying
intensity for almost a week, had resulted in a considerable advance of
the British line, and had now resolved itself into a spasmodic series
of struggles on the one side to 'make good' the captured ground and
steal a few more yards, if possible; on the other, to strengthen the
defence against further attacks and to make the captured trenches
untenable.
But the struggle now was to the Regiment coming out a matter of almost
outside interest, an interest reduced nearly to the level of the
newspaper readers' at home, something to read or hear and talk about in
the intervals of eating and drinking, of work and amusement and sleep
and the ordinary incidents of daily life. Except, of course, that the
Regiment always had at the back of this casual interest the more
personal one that if affairs went badly their routine existence 'in
reserve' might be rudely interrupted and they might be hurried back and
flung again into the fight.
But that was unlikely, and meantime there were still stray shells and
bullets to be dodged, the rifles and kits were blasphemously heavy, and
it was most blasphemously hot. The men were occupied enough in picking
their steps in the broken ground, in their plodding, laborious
progress, above all in paying heed to the order constantly passing back
to 'keep low,' but they were still able to note with a sort of
professional interest the damage done to the countryside. A
'small-holding' cottage between the trenches had been shelled and set
on fire, and was gutted to the four bare, blackened walls. The ground
about it still showed in the little squares and oblongs that had
divided the different cultivations, but the difference now was merely
of various weeds and rank growths, and the ground was thickly pitted
with shell-holes. A length of road was gridironed with deep and
laboriously dug trenches, and of the poplars that ran along its edge
some were broken off in jagged stumps, some stood with stems as
straight and bare as telegraph poles, or half cut through and collapsed
like a half-shut knife or an inverted V, with their heads in the dust;
others were left with heads snapped off and dangling in grey withered
leaves, or with branches glinting white splinters and stripped naked,
as in the dead of winter. In an orchard the fruit trees were smashed,
uprooted, heaped pell-mell in a tangle of broken branches, bare twisted
trunks, fragments of stump a foot or a yard high, here a tree slashed
off short, lifted, and flung a dozen yards, and left head down and
trunk in air; there a row of currant bushes with a yawning shell-crater
in the middle, a ragged remnant of bush at one end and the rest
vanished utterly, leaving only a line of torn stems from an inch to a
foot long to mark their place.
A farm of some size had been at one time a point in the advanced
trenches, and had been converted into a 'keep.' Its late owner would
never have recognised it in its new part. Such walls as were left had
been buttressed out of sight by sandbags; trenches twisted about the
outbuildings, burrowed under and into them, and wriggled out again
through holes in the walls; a market cart, turned upside down, and
earthed over to form a bomb-store, occupied a corner of the farmyard;
cover for snipers' loopholes had been constructed from ploughshares; a
remaining fragment of a grain loft had become an 'observing station';
the farm kitchen a doctor's dressing station; the cow-house a
machine-gun place; the cellar, with the stove transplanted from the
kitchen, a cooking, eating, and sleeping room. All the roofs had been
shelled out of existence. All the walls were notched by shells and
peppered thick with bullet marks. A support trench about shoulder deep
with a low parapet along its front was so damaged by shell fire that
the men for the most part had to move along it bent almost double to
keep out of sight and bullet reach. Every here and there--where a
shell had lobbed fairly in--there was a huge crater, its sides sealing
up the trench with a mass of tumbled earth over which the men scrambled
crouching. Behind the trench a stretch of open field was pitted and
pock-marked with shell-holes of all sizes from the shallow scoop a yard
across to the yawning crater, big and deep enough to bury the whole
field-gun that had made the smaller hole. The field looked exactly
like those pictures one sees in the magazines of a lunar landscape or
the extinct volcanoes of the moon.
The line of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication
trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and
close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and
breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a
neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other
path 'To the Duck Pond'--this last, the name of a trench, being a
reminder of the winter and the wet. The officer leading the party
turned into the trench for 'The Mole Heap,' walked up it, and emerged
into the sunlight of the grass-grown village street, skirted a house,
crossed the street by a trench, and passed through a hole chipped out
of the brick wall into a house, the men tramping at his heels. The
whole village was seamed with a maze of trenches, but these were only
for use when the shelling had been particularly heavy. At other times
people moved about the place by paths sufficiently well protected by
houses and walls against the rifle bullets that had practically never
ceased to smack into the village for many months past. These paths
wandered behind buildings, across gardens, into and out of houses
either by doors or by holes in the wall, over or round piles of rubble
or tumbled brick-work, burrowed at times below ground-level on patches
exposed to fire, ran frequently through a dozen cottages on end,
passage having been effected simply by hacking holes through the
connecting brick walls, in one place dived underground down some short
stairs and took its way through several cellars by the same simple
method of walking through the walls from one cellar to another. The
houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty
clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The
back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles,
biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a
rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and
strewn with graves.
The whole village was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a
charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one
building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles
clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and
bulged and broken.
In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient
traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station.
One might have been a labourer's cottage, with a rough deal table, a
red-rusted stove-fireplace, an oleograph in flaming crude colours of
the 'Virgin and Child' hanging on the plaster wall, the fragments of a
rough cradle overturned in a corner, a few coarse china crocks and
ornaments and figures chipped and broken and scattered about the
mantel, and the bare board floor. Another house had plainly been a
home of some refinement. The rooms were large, with lofty ceilings;
there were carpets on the floors, although so covered with dirt and
dried mud and the dust of fallen plaster that they were hardly
discernible as carpets. In one room a large polished table had a
broken leg replaced by an up-ended barrel, one big arm-chair had its
springs and padding showing through the burst upholstering. Another
was minus all its legs, and had the back wrenched off and laid flat
with the seat on the floor, evidently to make a bed. There were
several good engravings hanging askew on the walls or lying about the
floor, all soiled with rain and cut and torn by their splintered glass.
The large open-grate fireplace had an artistically carved overmantel
sadly chipped and smoke-blackened, a tiled hearth in fragments; the
wall-paper in a tasteful design of dark-green and gold was blotched and
discoloured, and hung in peeling strips and gigantic 'dog's-ears'; from
the poles and rings over the windows the tattered fragments of a lace
curtain dangled. There was plenty of evidence that the room had been
occupied by others since its lawful tenants had fled. It was strewn
with broken or cast-off military equipments, worn-out boots, frayed and
mud-caked putties, a burst haversack and pack-valise, a holed
water-bottle, broken webbing straps and belts, a bayonet with a snapped
blade, a torn grey shirt, and a goatskin coat. The windows had the
shutters closed, and were sandbagged up three parts their height, the
need for this being evident from the clean, round bullet-holes in the
shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the
upper part of the opposite wall. In an upper corner a gaping
shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to
screen the light from showing through at night. In a corner lay a heap
of mouldy straw and a bed-mattress; the table and fireplace were
littered with dirty pots and dishes, the floor with empty jam and
biscuit tins, opened and unopened bully-beef tins, more being full than
empty because the British soldier must be very near starving point
before he is driven to eat 'bully.' Over everything lay, like a white
winding-sheet, the cover of thick plaster-dust shaken down from the
ceiling by the hammer-blows of the shells. The room door opened into a
passage. At its end a wide staircase curved up into empty space, the
top banisters standing out against the open blue sky. The whole upper
storey had been blown off by shell fire and lay in the garden behind
the house, a jumble of brickwork, window-frames, tiles, beams, beds and
bedroom furniture, linen, and clothes.
These houses were inexpressibly sad and forlorn-looking, with all their
privacy and inner homeliness naked and exposed to the passer-by and the
staring sunlight. Some were no more than heaps of brick and stone and
mortar; but these gave not nearly such a sense of desolation and
desertion as those less damaged, as one, for instance, with its front
blown completely out, so that one could look into all its rooms, upper
and lower and the stairs between, exactly as one looks into those
dolls' houses where the front is hinged to swing open.
The village had been on the edge of the fighting zone for months, had
been casually shelled each day in normal times, bombarded furiously
during every attack or counter-attack. The church, with its spire or
tower, had probably been suspected as an artillery observing station by
the Germans, and so had drawn a full share of the fire. All that was
left of the church itself was one corner of shell-holed walls, and a
few roof-beams torn and splintered and stripped of cover. The tower
was a broken, jagged, stump--an empty shell, with one side blown almost
completely out; the others, or what remained of them, cracked and
tottering. The churchyard was a wild chaos of tumbled masonry, broken
slates, uprooted and overturned tombstones, jumbled wooden crosses,
crucifixes, black wooden cases with fronts of splintered glass, torn
wreaths, and crosses of imitation flowers. Amongst the graves yawned
huge shell craters; tossed hither and thither amongst the graves and
broken monuments and bricks and rubbish were bones and fragments of
coffins.
But all the graves were not in the churchyard. The whole village was
dotted from end to end with them, some alone in secluded corners,
others in rows in the backyards and vegetable gardens. Most of them
were marked with crosses, each made of two pieces of packing-case or
biscuit-box, with a number, rank, name, and regiment printed in
indelible pencil. On some of the graves were bead-work flowers, on
others a jam-pot or crock holding a handful of withered sun-dried
flower-stalks. Nearly all were huddled in close to house or garden
walls, one even in the narrow passage between two houses. There were,
in many cases, other and less ugly open spaces and gardens offering a
score of paces from these forlorn last resting-places apparently so
oddly selected and sadly misplaced; but a second look showed that in
each case the grave was dug where some wall or house afforded cover to
the burying-party from bullets. In the bright sunlight, half-hidden
under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant,
these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of
men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them,
hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a
leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth. But
the men's indifference meant no lack of feeling or respect for the
dead. The respect was there, subtle but unmistakable, instanced
slightly by the care every man took not to set foot on a grave, by the
straightening of that cross, by those withered flowers and dirty
wreaths, even as it has been shown scores of times by the men who crawl
at risk of their lives into the open between the forward trenches at
night to bring in their dead for decent burial.
Outside the shattered village stood the remains of a large factory, and
on this the outcoming files of the Regiment converged, and the first
arrivals halted to await the rest. What industry the factory had been
concerned with it was impossible to tell. It was full of machinery,
smashed, bent, twisted, and overturned, all red with rust, mixed up
with and in parts covered by stone and brickwork, beams and iron
girders, the whole sprinkled over with gleaming fragments of
window-glass The outside walls were almost completely knocked flat,
tossed helter-skelter outwards or on top of the machinery. The tall
chimney--another suspected 'observing post' probably--lay in a heap of
broken brickwork with the last yard or two of the base standing up out
of the heap, and even in its remaining stump were other ragged
shell-holes. A couple of huge boilers had been torn off their brick
furnaces by the force of some monster shell and tossed clear yards
away. One was poised across the broken outer wall, with one end in the
road. The thick rounded plates were bent and dented in like a kicked
biscuit-tin, were riddled and pierced through and through as if they
had been paper. The whole factory and its machinery must once have
represented a value of many thousands of francs. Now it was worth just
the value of its site--less the cost of clearing it of debris--and the
price of some tons of old iron.
Some of the men wandered about amongst the ruins, examining them
curiously, tracing the work of individual shells, speculating on the
number of hands the place had once employed, and where those hands were
now.
'Man, man,' said a Scottish private, 'sic an awfu' waste. Think o' the
siller it must ha' cost.'
''Ow would you like to be a shareholder in the company, Jock?' said his
companion. 'Ain't many divvydends due to 'em this Christmas.'
The Scot shook his head sadly. 'This place an' the hale toon laid
waste,' he said. 'It's awfu' tae think o' it.'
'An' this is one bloomin' pebble in a whole bloomin' beach,' said the
other. 'D'you remember Wipers an' all them other towns? An' that old
chap we saw sittin' on the roadside weepin' 'is eyes out 'cos the farm
an' the fruit-trees 'e'd spent 'is life fixin' up was blowed to glory
b' Jack Johnsons. We 'ave seed some rummy shows 'ere, 'aven't we? Not
but what this ain't a pretty fair sample o' wreck,' he continued
critically. 'There's plenty 'ud think they'd got their two-pennorth to
see this on the screen o' a picture-show at 'ome, Jock.'
'Huh! Picturs!' sniffed Jock. 'Picturs, and the-ayters, and racin',
and fitba'. Ah wanner folks hasna better use for their time and money,
at sic a time 's this.'
'Aw,' said the other, 'But y' forget, Jock. Out 'ere they 'ave their
'ouses blown up an' their business blown in. A thousan' a day o' the
like o' you an' me may be gettin' killed off for six months on end.
But at 'ome, Jock--aw!'
He stooped and picked up a lump of white, chalky earth from the
roadside, scrawled with it on the huge boiler-end that rested on the
broken wall, and left the written words to finish the spoken sentence.
Jock read, and later the remains of the Regiment read as they moved off
past the aching desolation of the silent factory, down the shell-torn
road, across the war-swept ruins of a whole country-side. A few
scowled at the thoughts the words raised, the most grinned and passed
rough jests; but to all those men in the thinned ranks, their dead
behind them, the scenes of ruin before them, the words bit, and bit
deep. They ran:
But it's
Bisness As Usual
--AT HOME.