While we hung on the news from Verdun--it seemed as though the fate of
the world were in Fort Douaumont--our own lists of death grew longer.
In the casualty clearing station by Poperinghe more mangled men lay on
their stretchers, hobbled to the ambulance-trains, groped blindly with
one hand clutching at a comrade's arm. More, and more, and more, with
head wounds, and body wounds, with trench-feet, and gas.
“O Christ!” said one of them whom I knew. He had been laid on a
swing-bed in the ambulance-train.
“Now you will be comfortable and happy,” said the R.A.M.C. orderly.
The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping
a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his
forehead.
Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me
that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears
away and said:
“I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed.”
So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.
It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the
shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung
over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the
lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our
little hells.
“Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have
been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.” For
days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of
sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then
trench-mortars and bombs.
“It seemed like years!” said one of the Irish crowd. “None of us
expected to come out alive.”
Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a
midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully
beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black
coffee.
Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge--you remember Hooge?--the
14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in
shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before
they burst like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred
casualties in one battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were
killed on their way out to “rest”--camps to the left of the road between
Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe.
* * *
On March 28th the Royal Fusiliers and the Northumberland Fusiliers--the
old Fighting Fifth--captured six hundred yards of German trenches near
St.-Eloi and asked for trouble, which, sure enough, came to them who
followed them. Their attack was against a German stronghold built of
earth and sand-bags nine feet high, above a nest of trenches in the fork
of two roads from St.-Eloi to Messines. They mined beneath this place
and it blew up with a roaring blast which flung up tons of soil in a
black mass. Then the Fusiliers dashed forward, flinging bombs through
barbed wire and over sand-bags which had escaped the radius of the
mine-burst--in one jumbled mass of human bodies in a hurry to get on, to
kill, and to come back. One German machine-gun got to work on them. It
was knocked out by a bomb flung by an officer who saved his company. The
machine--gunners were bayoneted. Elsewhere there was chaos out of which
living men came, shaking and moaning.
I saw the Royal Fusiliers and Northumberland Fusiliers come back from
this exploit, exhausted, caked from head to foot in wet clay. Their
steel helmets were covered with sand-bagging, their trench-waders, their
rifles, and smoke helmets were all plastered by wet, white earth, and
they looked a ragged regiment of scarecrows gathered from the fields of
France. Some of them had shawls tied about their helmets, and some of
them wore the shiny black helmets of the Jaeger Regiment and the gray
coats of German soldiers. They had had luck. They had not left many
comrades behind, and they had come out with life to the good world.
Tired as they were, they came along as though to carnival. They had
proved their courage through an ugly job. They had done “damn well,” as
one of them remarked; and they were out of the shell-fire which ravaged
the ground they had taken, where other men lay.