In queer psychology there was a strange mingling of the pitiful and
comic--among a division (the 35th) known as the Bantams. They were all
volunteers, having been rejected by the ordinary recruiting-officer on
account of their diminutive stature, which was on an average five feet
high, descending to four feet six. Most of them came from Lancashire,
Cheshire, Durham, and Glasgow, being the dwarfed children of industrial
England and its mid-Victorian cruelties. Others were from London, banded
together in a battalion of the Middlesex Regiment. They gave a shock
to our French friends when they arrived as a division at the port of
Boulogne.
“Name of a dog!” said the quayside loungers. “England is truly in a bad
way. She is sending out her last reserves!”
“But they are the soldiers of Lilliput!” exclaimed others.
“It is terrible that they should send these little ones,” said
kind-hearted fishwives.
Under the training of General Pi, who commanded them, they became smart
and brisk in the ranks. They saluted like miniature Guardsmen, marched
with quick little steps like clockwork soldiers. It was comical to see
them strutting up and down as sentries outside divisional headquarters,
with their bayonets high above their wee bodies. In trench warfare they
did well--though the fire-step had to be raised to let them see over the
top--and in one raid captured a German machine-gun which I saw in
their hands, and hauled it back (a heavier weight than ours) like ants
struggling with a stick of straw. In actual battle they were hardly
strong enough and could not carry all that burden of fighting-kit--steel
helmet, rifle, hand-grenades, shovels, empty sand-bags--with which other
troops went into action. So they were used as support troops mostly,
behind the Black Watch and other battalions near Bazentin and Longueval,
and there these poor little men dug and dug like beavers and crouched in
the cover they made under damnable fire, until many of them were blown
to bits. There was no “glory” in their job, only filth and blood, but
they held the ground and suffered it all, not gladly. They had a chance
of taking prisoners at Longueval, where they rummaged in German dugouts
after the line had been taken by the 15th Scottish Division and the 3d,
and they brought back a number of enormous Bavarians who were like the
Brobdingnagians to these little men of Lilliput and disgusted with that
humiliation. I met the whole crowd of them after that adventure, as
they sat, half naked, picking the lice out of their shirts, and the
conversation I had with them remains in my memory because of its
grotesque humor and tragic comicality. They were excited and emotional,
these stunted men. They cursed the war with the foulest curses of
Scottish and Northern dialects. There was one fellow--the jester of them
all--whose language would have made the poppies blush. With ironical
laughter, outrageous blasphemy, grotesque imagery, he described the
suffering of himself and his mates under barrage fire, which smashed
many of them into bleeding pulp. He had no use for this war. He cursed
the name of “glory.” He advocated a trade--unionism among soldiers
to down tools whenever there was a threat of war. He was a Bolshevist
before Bolshevism. Yet he had no liking for Germans and desired to cut
them into small bits, to slit their throats, to disembowel them. He
looked homeward to a Yorkshire town and wondered what his missus would
say if she saw him scratching himself like an ape, or lying with his
head in the earth with shells bursting around him, or prodding Germans
with a bayonet. “Oh,” said that five-foot hero, “there will be a lot of
murder after this bloody war. What's human life? What's the value of one
man's throat? We're trained up as murderers--I don't dislike it, mind
you--and after the war we sha'n't get out of the habit of it. It'll come
nat'ral like!”
He was talking for my benefit, egged on to further audacities by a group
of comrades who roared with laughter and said: “Go it, Bill! That's the
stuff!” Among these Lilliputians were fellows who sat aloof and sullen,
or spoke of their adventure with its recent horror in their eyes. Some
of them had big heads on small bodies, as though they suffered from
water on the brain... Many of them were sent home afterward. General
Haldane, as commander of the 6th Corps, paraded them, and poked his
stick at the more wizened ones, the obviously unfit, the degenerates,
and said at each prod, “You can go... You. ..You....” The Bantam
Division ceased to exist.
They afforded many jokes to the army. One anecdote went the round. A
Bantam died--of disease (“and he would,” said General Haldane)--and a
comrade came to see his corpse.
“Shut ze door ven you come out,” said the old woman of his billet.
“Fermez la porte, mon vieux.”
The living Bantam went to see the dead one, and came downstairs much
moved by grief.
“I've seed poor Bill,” he said.
“As-tu ferme la porte?” said the old woman, anxiously.
The Bantam wondered at the anxious inquiry; asked the reason of it.
“C'est a cause du chat!” said the old woman. “Ze cat, Monsieur, 'e 'ave
'ad your friend in ze passage tree time already to-day. Trois fois!”
Poor little men born of diseased civilization! They were volunteers to a
man, and some of them with as much courage as soldiers twice their size.
They were the Bantams who told me of the Anglican padre at Longueval. It
was Father Hall of Mirfield, attached to the South African Brigade. He
came out to a dressing station established in the one bit of ruin which
could be used for shelter, and devoted himself to the wounded with a
spiritual fervor. They were suffering horribly from thirst, which made
their tongues swell and set their throats on fire.
“Water!” they cried. “Water! For Christ's sake, water!”
There was no water, except at a well in Longueval, under the fire of
German snipers, who picked off our men when they crawled down like wild
dogs with their tongues lolling out. There was one German officer there
in a shell-hole not far from the well, who sat with his revolver handy,
and he was a dead shot.
But he did not shoot the padre. Something in the face and figure of that
chaplain, his disregard of the bullets snapping about him, the upright,
fearless way in which he crossed that way of death, held back the
trigger-finger of the German officer and he let him pass. He passed many
times, untouched by bullets or machine-gun fire, and he went into bad
places, pits of horror, carrying hot tea, which he made from the well
water for men in agony.