Just at first--though not for long--there was a touch of hostility
against us among divisional and brigade staffs, of the Regulars, but
not of the New Army. They, too, suspected our motive in going to their
quarters, wondered why we should come “spying around,” trying to “see
things.” I was faintly conscious of this one day in those very early
times, when with the officer who had been a ruler in India I went to a
brigade headquarters of the 1st Division near Vermelles. It was not easy
nor pleasant to get there, though it was a summer day with fleecy clouds
in a blue sky. There was a long straight road leading to the village of
Vermelles, with a crisscross of communication trenches on one side,
and, on the other, fields where corn and grass grew rankly in abandoned
fields. Some lean sheep were browsing there as though this were Arcady
in days of peace. It was not. The red ruins of Vermelles, a mile or
so away, were sharply defined, as through stereoscopic lenses, in the
quiver of sunlight, and had the sinister look of a death-haunted place.
It was where the French had fought their way through gardens, walls,
and houses in murderous battle, before leaving it for British troops to
hold. Across it now came the whine of shells, and I saw that shrapnel
bullets were kicking up the dust of a thousand yards down the straight
road, following a small body of brown men whose tramp of feet raised
another cloud of dust, like smoke. They were the only representatives of
human life--besides ourselves--in this loneliness, though many men must
have been in hiding somewhere. Then heavy “crumps” burst in the fields
where the sheep were browsing, across the way we had to go to the
brigade headquarters.
“How about it?” asked the captain with me. “I don't like crossing that
field, in spite of the buttercups and daisies and the little frisky
lambs.”
“I hate the idea of it,” I said.
Then we looked down the road at the little body of brown men. They were
nearer now, and I could see the face of the officer leading them--a boy
subaltern, rather pale though the sun was hot. He halted and saluted my
companion.
“The enemy seems to have sighted our dust, sir. His shrapnel is
following up pretty closely. Would you advise me to put my men under
cover, or carry on?”
The captain hesitated. This was rather outside his sphere of influence.
But the boyishness of the other officer asked for help.
“My advice is to put your men into that ditch and keep them there until
the strafe is over.” Some shrapnel bullets whipped the sun-baked road as
he spoke.
“Very good, sir.”
The men sat in the ditch, with their packs against the bank, and wiped
the sweat off their faces. They looked tired and dispirited, but not
alarmed.
In the fields behind them--our way--the 4.2's (four--point-twos) were
busy plugging holes in the grass and flowers, rather deep holes, from
which white smoke-clouds rose after explosive noises.
“With a little careful strategy we might get through,” said the captain.
“There's a general waiting for us, and I have noticed that generals are
impatient fellows. Let's try our luck.”
We walked across the wild flowers, past the sheep, who only raised their
heads in meek surprise when shells came with a shrill, intensifying
snarl and burrowed up the earth about them. I noticed how loudly and
sweetly the larks were singing up in the blue. Several horses lay dead,
newly killed, with blood oozing about them, and their entrails smoking.
We made a half-loop around them and then struck straight for the chateau
which was the brigade headquarters. Neither of us spoke now. We were
thoughtful, calculating the chance of getting to that red-brick house
between the shells. It was just dependent on the coincidence of time and
place.
Three men jumped up from a ditch below a brown wall round the chateau
garden and ran hard for the gateway. A shell had pitched quite close
to them. One man laughed as though at a grotesque joke, and fell as he
reached the courtyard. Smoke was rising from the outhouses, and there
was a clatter of tiles and timbers, after an explosive crash.
“It rather looks,” said my companion, “as though the Germans knew there
is a party on in that charming house.”
It was as good to go on as to go back, and it was never good to go back
before reaching one's objective. That was bad for the discipline of the
courage that is just beyond fear.
Two gunners were killed in the back yard of the chateau, and as we went
in through the gateway a sergeant made a quick jump for a barn as a
shell burst somewhere close. As visitors we hesitated between two ways
into the chateau, and chose the easier; and it was then that I became
dimly aware of hostility against me on the part of a number of officers
in the front hall. The brigade staff was there, grouped under the
banisters. I wondered why, and guessed (rightly, as I found) that the
center of the house might have a better chance of escape than the
rooms on either side, in case of direct hits from those things falling
outside.
It was the brigade major who asked our business. He was a tall, handsome
young man of something over thirty, with the arrogance of a Christ
Church blood.
“Oh, he has come out to see something in Vermelles? A pleasant place for
sightseeing! Meanwhile the Hun is ranging on this house, so he may see
more than he wants.”
He turned on his heel and rejoined his group. They all stared in my
direction as though at a curious animal. A very young gentleman--the
general's A. D. C.--made a funny remark at my expense and the others
laughed. Then they ignored me, and I was glad, and made a little study
in the psychology of men awaiting a close call of death. I was perfectly
conscious myself that in a moment or two some of us, perhaps all of us,
might be in a pulp of mangled flesh beneath the ruins of a red-brick
villa--the shells were crashing among the outhouses and in the
courtyard, and the enemy was making good shooting--and the idea did not
please me at all. At the back of my brain was Fear, and there was a
cold sweat in the palms of my hands; but I was master of myself, and
I remember having a sense of satisfaction because I had answered the
brigade major in a level voice, with a touch of his own arrogance. I saw
that these officers were afraid; that they, too, had Fear at the back of
the brain, and that their conversation and laughter were the camouflage
of the soul. The face of the young A. D. C. was flushed and he laughed
too much at his own jokes, and his laughter was just a tone too shrill.
An officer came into the hall, carrying two Mills bombs--new toys in
those days--and the others fell back from him, and one said:
“For Christ's sake don't bring them here--in the middle of a
bombardment!”
“Where's the general?” asked the newcomer.
“Down in the cellar with the other brigadier. They don't ask us down to
tea, I notice.”
Those last words caused all the officers to laugh--almost excessively.
But their laughter ended sharply, and they listened intently as there
was a heavy crash outside.
Another officer came up the steps and made a rapid entry into the hall.
“I understand there is to be a conference of battalion commanders,”
he said, with a queer catch in his breath. “In view of
this--er--bombardment, I had better come in later, perhaps?”
“You had better wait,” said the brigade major, rather grimly.
“Oh, certainly.”
A sergeant-major was pacing up and down the passage by the back door.
He was calm and stolid. I liked the look of him and found something
comforting in his presence, so that I went to have a few words with him.
“How long is this likely to last, Sergeant-major”
“There's no saying, sir. They may be searching for the chateau to pass
the time, so to speak, or they may go on till they get it. I'm sorry
they caught those gunners. Nice lads, both of them.”
He did not seem to be worrying about his own chance.
Then suddenly there was silence. The German guns had switched off. I
heard the larks singing through the open doorway, and all the little
sounds of a summer day. The group of officers in the hall started
chatting more quietly. There was no more need of finding jokes and
laughter. They had been reprieved, and could be serious.
“We'd better get forward to Vermelles,” said my companion.
As we walked away from the chateau, the brigade major passed us on his
horse. He leaned over his saddle toward me and said, “Good day to you,
and I hope you'll like Vermelles.”
The words were civil, but there was an underlying meaning in them.
“I hope to do so, sir.”
We walked down the long straight road toward the ruins of Vermelles with
a young soldier-guide who on the outskirts of the village remarked in a
casual way:
“No one is allowed along this road in daylight, as a rule. It's under
hobservation of the henemy.”
“Then why the devil did you come this way?” asked my companion.
“I thought you might prefer the short cut, sir.”
We explored the ruins of Vermelles, where many young Frenchmen had
fallen in fighting through the walls and gardens. One could see the
track of their strife, in trampled bushes and broken walls. Bits of
red rag--the red pantaloons of the first French soldiers--were still
fastened to brambles and barbed wire. Broken rifles, cartouches,
water-bottles, torn letters, twisted bayonets, and German stick-bombs
littered the ditches which had been dug as trenches across streets of
burned-out houses.
V
A young gunner officer whom we met was very civil, and stopped in front
of the chateau of Vermelles, a big red villa with the outer walls still
standing, and told us the story of its capture.
“It was a wild scrap. I was told all about it by a French sergeant who
was in it. They were under the cover of that wall over there, about a
hundred yards away, and fixing up a charge of high explosives to knock
a breach in the wall. The chateau was a machine-gun fortress, with
the Germans on the top floor, the ground floor, and in the basement,
protected by sand-bags, through which they fired. A German officer made
a bad mistake. He opened the front door and came out with some of his
machine-gunners from the ground floor to hold a trench across the square
in front of the house. Instantly a French lieutenant called to his men.
They climbed over the wall and made a dash for the chateau, bayoneting
the Germans who tried to stop them. Then they swarmed into the
chateau--a platoon of them with the lieutenant. They were in the
drawing-room, quite an elegant place, you know, with the usual gilt
furniture and long mirrors. In one corner was a pedestal, with a statue
of Venus standing on it. Rather charming, I expect. A few Germans were
killed in the room, easily. But upstairs there was a mob who fired
down through the ceiling when they found what had happened. The French
soldiers prodded the ceiling with their bayonets, and all the plaster
broke, falling on them. A German, fat and heavy, fell half-way through
the rafters, and a bayonet was poked into him as he stuck there. The
whole ceiling gave way, and the Germans upstairs came downstairs, in a
heap. They fought like wolves--wild beasts--with fear and rage. French
and Germans clawed at one another's throats, grabbed hold of noses,
rolled over each other. The French sergeant told me he had his teeth
into a German's neck. The man was all over him, pinning his arms, trying
to choke him. It was the French lieutenant who did most damage. He fired
his last shot and smashed a German's face with his empty revolver. Then
he caught hold of the marble Venus by the legs and swung it above his
head, in the old Berserker style, and laid out Germans like ninepins...
The fellows in the basement surrendered.”