There was more than half a gale blowing on the eve of the new year,
and the wind came howling with a savage violence across the rain-swept
fields, so that the first day of a fateful year had a stormy birth, and
there was no peace on earth.
Louder than the wind was the greeting of the guns to another year of
war. I heard the New-Year's chorus when I went to see the last of the
year across the battlefields. Our guns did not let it die in silence.
It went into the tomb of the past, with all its tragic memories,
to thunderous salvos, carrying death with them. The “heavies” were
indulging in a special strafe this New--Year's eve. As I went down a
road near the lines by Loos I saw, from concealed positions, the flash
of gun upon gun. The air was swept by an incessant rush of shells, and
the roar of all this artillery stupefied one's sense of sound. All about
me in the village of Annequin, through which I walked, there was no
other sound, no noise of human life. There were no New-Year's eve
rejoicings among those rows of miners' cottages on the edge of the
battlefield. Half those little red-brick houses were blown to pieces,
and when here and there through a cracked window-pane I saw a woman's
white face peering out upon me as I passed I felt as though I had seen a
ghost-face in some black pit of hell.
For it was hellish, this place wrecked by high explosives and always
under the fire of German guns. That any human being should be there
passed all belief. From a shell-hole in a high wall I looked across the
field of battle, where many of our best had died. The Tower Bridge of
Loos stood grim and gaunt above the sterile fields. Through the rain
and the mist loomed the long black ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where
many poor bodies lay in the rotting leaves. The ruins of Haisnes and
Hulluch were jagged against the sky-line. And here, on New--Year's eve,
I saw no sign of human life and heard no sound of it, but stared at the
broad desolation and listened to the enormous clangor of great guns.
* * *
Coming back that day through Bethune I met some very human life. It was
a big party of bluejackets from the Grand Fleet, who had come to see
what “Tommy” was doing in the war. They went into the trenches and saw
a good deal, because the Germans made a bombing raid in that sector and
the naval men did their little bit by the side of the lads in khaki,
who liked this visit. They discovered the bomb store and opened such a
Brock's benefit that the enemy must have been shocked with surprise.
One young marine was bomb-slinging for four hours, and grinned at the
prodigious memory as though he had had the time of his life. Another
confessed to me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off all
night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the dugouts, and every hour
was a long thrill.
“I don't mind saying,” said a petty officer who had fought in several
naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, “that I had a fair
fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to
look through a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. 'At
night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the parapet I put my
head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle
began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I
fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack... But I'm blessed if it wasn't
a swarm of rats!”
The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some
of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young
fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.
“Come up and have a look, Jack,” he said to one of the bluejackets.
“Not in these trousers, old mate!” said that young man.
“All as cool as cucumbers,” said a petty officer, “and take the
discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It's marvelous.
Good luck to them in the new year!”
* * *
Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed
to die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that
New-Year's day.
They were the heroes of Loos--or some of them--Camerons and Seaforths,
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish
Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away
to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their
battalions have been filled up with new drafts--of the same type as
themselves and of the same grit--but that day no ghost of grief, no dark
shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round
a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in
those days of the September battle.
There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from
Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship
which burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the
platform above the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when I came in,
and this hall in France was filled with the wild strains of it.
“And they're grand, the pipes,” said one of the Camerons. “When I've
been sae tired on the march I could have laid doon an' dee'd the touch
o' the pipes has fair lifted me up agen.”
The piper made way for a Kiltie at the piano, and for Highlanders, who
sang old songs full of melancholy, which seemed to make the hearts of
his comrades grow glad as when they helped him with “The Bonnie, Bonnie
Banks of Loch Lomond.” But the roof nearly flew off the hall to “The
March of the Cameron Men,” and the walls were greatly strained when the
regimental marching song broke at every verse into wild Highland
shouts and the war-cry which was heard at Loos of “Camerons, forward!”
“Forward, Camerons!”
“An Englishman is good,” said one of the Camerons, leaning over the
table to me, “and an Irishman is good, but a Scot is the best of all.”
Then he struck the palm of one hand with the fist of another. “But the
London men,” he said, with a fine, joyous laugh at some good memory,
“are as good as any fighting-men in France. My word, ye should have seen
'em on September 25th. And the London Irish were just lions!”
Out in the rain-slashed street I met the colonel of a battalion of
Argylls and Sutherlands, with several of his officers; a tall, thin
officer with a long stride, who was killed when another year had passed.
He beckoned to me and said: “I'm going the rounds of the billets to wish
the men good luck in the new year. It's a strain on the constitution, as
I have to drink their health each time!”
He bore the strain gallantly, and there was something noble and
chivalrous in the way he spoke to all his men, gathered together in
various rooms in old Flemish houses, round plum-pudding from home or
feasts provided by the army cooks. To each group of men he made the same
kind of speech, thanking them from his heart for all their courage.
“You were thanked by three generals,” he said, “after your attack at
Loos, and you upheld the old reputation of the regiment. I'm proud of
you. And afterward, in November, when you had the devil of a time in the
trenches, you stuck it splendidly and came out with high spirits. I wish
you all a happy new year, and whatever the future may bring I know I can
count on you.”
In every billet there were three cheers for the colonel, and another
three for the staff captain, and though the colonel protested that he
was afraid of spending a night in the guard-room (there were shouts of
laughter at this), he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the
custom of the day.
“Toodle-oo, old bird!” said a kilted cockney, halfway up a ladder, on
which he swayed perilously, being very drunk; but the colonel did not
hear this familiar way of address.
In many billets and in many halls the feast of New Year's day was kept
in good comradeship by men who had faced death together, and who in the
year that was coming fought in many battles and fell on many fields.