It was a colonel of the North Staffordshires who revealed to me the
astounding belief that he was “immune” from shell-fire, and I met
other men afterward with the same conviction. He had just come out of
desperate fighting in the neighborhood of Thiepval, where his battalion
had suffered heavily, and at first he was rude and sullen in the hut.
I gaged him as a hard Northerner, without a shred of sentiment or the
flicker of any imaginative light; a stern, ruthless man. He was bitter
in his speech to me because the North Staffords were never mentioned in
my despatches. He believed that this was due to some personal spite--not
knowing the injustice of our military censorship under the orders of
G.H.Q.
“Why the hell don't we get a word?” he asked. “Haven't we done as well
as anybody, died as much?”
I promised to do what I could--which was nothing--to put the matter
right, and presently he softened, and, later was amazingly candid in
self-revelation.
“I have a mystical power,” he said. “Nothing will ever hit me as long as
I keep that power which comes from faith. It is a question of absolute
belief in the domination of mind over matter. I go through any barrage
unscathed because my will is strong enough to turn aside explosive
shells and machine-gun bullets. As matter they must obey my
intelligence. They are powerless to resist the mind of a man in touch
with the Universal Spirit, as I am.”
He spoke quietly and soberly, in a matter-of-fact way. I decided that he
was mad. That was not surprising. We were all mad, in one way or another
or at one time or another. It was the unusual form of madness that
astonished me. I envied him his particular “kink.” I wished I could
cultivate it, as an aid to courage. He claimed another peculiar form of
knowledge. He knew before each action, he told me, what officers and men
of his would be killed in battle. He looked at a man's eyes and knew,
and he claimed that he never made a mistake... He was sorry to possess
that second sight, and it worried him.
There were many men who had a conviction that they would not be killed,
although they did not state it in the terms expressed by the colonel of
the North Staffordshires, and it is curious that in some cases I know
they were not mistaken and are still alive. It was indeed a general
belief that if a man funked being hit he was sure to fall, that being
the reverse side of the argument.
I saw the serene cheerfulness of men in the places of death at many
times and in many places, and I remember one group of friends on the
Somme who revealed that quality to a high degree. It was when our
front-line ran just outside the village of Martinpuich to Courcelette,
on the other side of the Bapaume road, and when the 8th-10th Gordons
were there, after their fight through Longueval and over the ridge. It
was the little crowd I have mentioned before in the battle of Loos,
and it was Lieut. John Wood who took me to the battalion headquarters
located under some sand-bags in a German dug--out. All the way up to
Contalmaison and beyond there were the signs of recent bloodshed and of
present peril. Dead horses lay about, disemboweled by shell-fire. Legs
and arms protruded from shell-craters where bodies lay half buried.
Heavy crumps came howling through the sky and bursting with enormous
noise here, there, and everywhere over that vast, desolate battlefield,
with its clumps of ruin and rows of dead trees. It was the devil's
hunting-ground and I hated every yard of it. But John Wood, who lived
in it, was astoundingly cheerful, and a fine, sturdy, gallant figure,
in his kilted dress, as he climbed over sand-bags, walked on the top of
communication trenches (not bothering to take cover) and skirting round
hedges of barbed wire, apparently unconscious of the “crumps” that were
bursting around. I found laughter and friendly greeting in a hole in the
earth where the battalion staff was crowded. The colonel was courteous,
but busy. He rather deprecated the notion that I should go up farther,
to the ultimate limit of our line. It was no use putting one's head into
trouble without reasonable purpose, and the German guns had been blowing
in sections of his new-made trenches. But John Wood was insistent that
I should meet “old Thom,” afterward in command of the battalion. He had
just been buried and dug out again. He would like to see me. So we left
the cover of the dugout and took to the open again. Long lines of Jocks
were digging a support trench--digging with a kind of rhythmic movement
as they threw up the earth with their shovels. Behind them was another
line of Jocks, not working. They lay as though asleep, out in the open.
They were the dead of the last advance. Captain Thom was leaning up
against the wall of the front-line trench, smoking a cigarette, with his
steel hat on the back of his head--a handsome, laughing figure. He did
not look like a man who had just been buried and dug out again.
“It was a narrow shave,” he said. “A beastly shell covered me with a ton
of earth... Have a cigarette, won't you?”
We gossiped as though in St. James's Street. Other young Scottish
officers came up and shook hands, and said: “Jolly weather, isn't it?
What do you think of our little show?” Not one of them gave a glance at
the line of dead men over there, behind their parados. They told me some
of the funny things that had happened lately in the battalion, some grim
jokes by tough Jocks. They had a fine crowd of men. You couldn't beat
them. “Well, good morning! Must get on with the job.” There was no
anguish there, no sense of despair, no sullen hatred of this life, so
near to death. They seemed to like it... They did not really like it.
They only made the best of it, without gloom. I saw they did not like
this job of battle, one evening in their mess behind the line. The
colonel who commanded them at the time, Celt of the Celts, was in a
queer mood. He was a queer man, aloof in his manner, a little “fey.” He
was annoyed with three of his officers who had come back late from three
days' Paris leave. They were giants, but stood like schoolboys before
their master while he spoke ironical, bitter words. Later in the evening
he mentioned casually that they must prepare to go into the line
again under special orders. What about the store of bombs, small-arms
ammunition, machine-guns?
The officers were stricken into silence. They stared at one another as
though to say: “What does the old man mean? Is this true?” One of them
became rather pale, and there was a look of tragic resignation in his
eyes. Another said, “Hell!” in a whisper. The adjutant answered the
colonel's questions in a formal way, but thinking hard and studying the
colonel's face anxiously.
“Do you mean to say we are going into the line again, sir? At once?”
The colonel laughed.
“Don't look so scared, all of you! It's only a field-day for training.”
The officers of the Gordons breathed more freely. Poof! They had been
fairly taken in by the “old man's” leg-pulling... No, it was clear
they did not find any real joy in the line. They would not choose a
front-line trench as the most desirable place of residence.