most disagreeably, as with a sense of being utterly forlorn amid a play
of the elements, like Lear upon the heath. There came into my mind, as
our eyes groped for some human sign in the brooding landscape, the
thought of the prophet upon the mount amid the wind and the earthquake
and the fire seeking the presence of his God and finding it not. And
here too all these assaults upon our senses were fugitive and ghostly,
and we felt ourselves encompassed about as by some great conspiracy. We
walked curiously up the little street until we reached the last house in
the village, and came out beyond the screen of its wall. At the same
instant something sang past my ear like the twang of a Jew's harp, my
foot caught in a coil of wire, and I fell headlong. My companion,
lagging behind and not yet clear of the friendly wall, stopped dead and
cried to me not to stand up. I crawled back among the rubbish to the
cover of the house. We took counsel together. To retreat were perilous,
but to advance might be fatal. We lowered our voices as, cowering behind
walls, and picking our way delicately among the _débris_, we crept back
to our car behind the entrance to the village. The driver started the
engine and we moved forlornly along the narrow causeway, skirting the
unfathomable mud that lay on either side, until we spied a ruined
farmhouse where a company had made its billet and mud-coloured knots of
soldiers stood round braziers of glowing coals. We had some parley with
the company commander, who was of the earth earthy. His words were few
and discouraging. As we crawled on, darkness enveloped us, but we dared
not light our head-lamps. Suddenly the car slipped on the greasy road,
staggered, and lurched over into the morass, hurling us violently upon
our sides. We clambered out and contemplated it solemnly as we saw our
right wheels over the axles in mud. No friendly billet was now in sight,
and as we stood profanely considering our plight the darkness behind us
was split by a long shaft of greenish light, and the whole landscape was
illuminated with a pallid glow, as the German star-shells discharged
themselves over the fan-like tops of the elms silhouetted against the
sky. The jack was useless in the soft mud, it sank like a stone, and as
we shoved and cursed we awaited each fresh discharge of the star-shells
with increasing apprehension, for we presented an obvious target to the
enemy's snipers. On the seat of the car was my despatch-box, and in that
box was a little dossier of papers marked "O.H.M.S. German Atrocities.
Secret and Confidential." "If the Germans catch us there'll be one
atrocity the more," remarked my Staff Officer grimly, "but they'll spare
us the labour of recording it."
Our futile efforts were interrupted by the sound of feet upon the
causeway as a column of reliefs loomed up out of the darkness. A hurried
altercation in low tones, a subdued word of command, and a dozen men,
their rifles and entrenching tools slung over their shoulders, applied
themselves to the back of our car, and slowly it slithered out of the
mud. The column broke into file to allow us to pass, my companion went
on ahead with a tiny electric torch to show the way, and with infinite
caution we nudged slowly along the rank, the faint light of the torch
bringing face after face out of the darkness into _chiaroscuro_, faces
young and fresh and ruddy. Not a word was spoken save a whispered
command carried down the rank, mouth to ear, "No smoking, no talking
"--"No smoking, no talking "--"No talking, no smoking." Mules, carrying
sections of machine-guns and packs of straw, loomed up out of the
darkness as we passed, until the last of the column was reached and the
frieze of ghostly figures was swallowed up into the night. We drew a
long breath, for we knew now from the colonel of the battalion whose men
had delivered us from that Slough of Despond that we had been within 150
yards of the German lines. We had mistaken Richebourg l'Avoué for
Richebourg St. Vaast.
VIII
IDOLS OF THE CAVE
Like the Cyclopes they dwelt in hollow caves, and each Colonel uttered
the law to his children and recked not of the others except when the
Brigadier came round. True there were two and a half battalions in their
line of 2700 yards, but all they knew was that the next battalion to
their own was the Highlanders; it was only when the five days were up
and they were marched back to billets that they were able to cultivate
that somewhat exclusive society. Their trenches were like the suburbs,
they were faintly conscious that people lived in the next street, but
they never saw them. Their neighbours were as self-contained and silent
as themselves, except when their look-outs or machine-guns became
loquacious. Then they too became eloquent, and the whole line talked
freely at the Germans 200 yards away. By day the men slept heavily on
straw in hollows under the parapet, supported with crates and sprinkled
with chloride of lime; by night they were out at the listening posts,
in the sap-heads, or behind the parapet, with their eyes glued to the
field of yellow mustard in front of us. They had watched that field for
three months. They knew every blade of grass therein. No experimental
agriculturist ever studied his lucerne and sainfoin as they have studied
the grasses of that field. They have watched it from winter to spring;
they have seen the lesser celandine give way to pink clover and sorrel,
and the grass shoot up from an inch to a foot. They have, indeed, been
studying not botany but ethnology, searching for traces of that species
of primitive man known to anthropologists as the Hun. They have never
found him except once, when one of our look-outs saw something crawling
across that field about midnight and promptly emptied his magazine. In
the morning they saw a grey figure lying out in the open; the days
passed and the long grass sprang up and concealed it till nothing was
left to attest its obscene presence except a little cloud of black
flies. Their horizon is bounded by rows of sand-bags, and their interest
in those sand-bags is only equalled by their interest in the field in
front of them. Occasionally one of our men finds them more than usually
interesting. There is a loud report, the click of a bolt, and the
pungent smell of burnt cordite. Then all is still again.
The tangent-sight on the standard of their machine-gun is always at 200,
and they have not altered the range for three months. Occasionally at
night the N.C.O. seizes the traversing-handles, and with his thumb on
the button slowly sweeps that range of sand-bags, till the feed-block
sucks up the cartridge-belt like a chaff-cutter and the empty
cartridge-cases lie as thick round the tripod as acorns under an oak.
The Huns reply by taking a flashlight photograph of us with a calcium
flare, and then all is still again. In such excursions and alarms do
they pass the long night.
Though five-sixths of them slept stertorously in their holes by day, by
night they were as wakeful as owls, and not less predatory. Life in the
trenches is one long struggle for existence, and in the course of it
they developed those acquired characteristics whereby the birds of the
air and the beasts of the field maintain themselves in a world of
carnage. They learnt to walk delicately on the balls of their feet as
silently as hares, to see in the dark like foxes, to wriggle like the
creeping things of the field, to lower their voices with the direction
of the wind, to select a background with the moonlight, and to stand
motionless on patrol with muscles rigid like a pointer when the
star-shells dissolved the security of the night. They studied to
dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary of nature. They
grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked
with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their
claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the
integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were
very bright. At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and,
like the badger's, those earths were exceeding clean. The men were
numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched for two
hours while the other two worked, repairing parapets, strengthening
entanglements, and filling sand-bags. Every half-hour the N.C.O. on duty
crept round to report, or to post and relieve, while now and again a
patrol went out to observe. All this was done stealthily and with an
amazing economy of speech. Night was also the time of their foraging,
when the company's rations were brought up the communication trench and
handed over by the C.Q.M.S. to each platoon sergeant, who passed them on
to the section commander, and he in turn distributed them among his men
in such silence and with such little traffic that it seemed like the
provision of manna in the wilderness. At dawn pick-axe and spade were
laid aside, the rum ration was served out, and all men stood to, for
dawn was the hour of their apprehension.
Two miles behind them is a battery of our field guns, and they have with
them an observing officer who talks intimately to his battery on the
field telephone in that laconic language of which gunners are so fond,
such as "One hundred. Twenty minutes to the left." Then the shells sing
over their heads with a pretty low trajectory, and the Huns, beginning
to get annoyed, reply with their heavy guns. There is a low whistle up
aloft, a noise like the fluttering of invisible wings, and the next
moment a cloud of black smoke rises over the village of X---- Y----,
behind the trenches. The Smoke Prevention Society ought to turn their
attention to "Jack Johnsons"; their habits are positively filthy.
These things, however, disturbed them but little and bored them a great
deal. So they set to work to make their particular rabbit-warren into a
Garden City. They held it on a repairing lease, and were constantly
filling sand-bags, but that was merely to prevent depreciation, and
didn't count. They first of all paved their trenches with bricks; there
was no difficulty about the supply, as the "Jack Johnsons" obligingly
acted as house-breakers in the village behind our lines, and bricks
could be had for the fetching. Then the orderly transplanted some
pansies and forget-me-nots from the garden of a ruined house, and made a
border in front of the company commander's dug-out. The communication
trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a
man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of
an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic
bridge. When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on
the surface of the clear amber stream, the orchard through which the
communication trench had been cut burst into blossom, the sticky clay
walls of the trench became hard as masonry in the sun, and one morning a
board appeared with the legend "Hyde Park. Keep off the grass."
With these amenities their manners grew more and more refined. I have
read somewhere, in one of those dull collections of sweeping
generalisations that are called sociology, that each species of the
_genus homo_ has to go through a normal sequence of stages from
barbarism to civilisation, and that we were once what the South Sea
Islanders are now. Which may be very true, but as regards that
particular primitive community I can testify that their social evolution
has in three months gone through all the stages that occupy other
communities three thousand years. They began as cave-dwellers and they
end by occupying suburban villas--the captain's dug-out has a roof of
corrugated iron, a window, a book-shelf, a table, and even chairs, and
his table manners have vastly improved. They have progressed from
candles stuck in bully-beef tins to electric reading-lamps. Three months
ago they were hairy men whose beards did grow beneath their shoulders,
and their puttees were cemented with wet clay; to-day they are
clean-shaven and their Burberrys might be worn in Piccadilly. They slept
with nothing between them and the earth but a ground sheet what time
they were not, like the elephant, sleeping on their feet and propped
against a trench wall. Now they sleep on a bed with a wooden frame. I
have read somewhere that for a thousand years Europe was unwashed. It
may be so, but I know that this particular tribal community progressed
rapidly through all such stages, from a bucket to a shower-bath in
billets, in about six weeks, and you can see their men any day washing
themselves to the waist near the support trenches--men who a month or
two ago had forgotten how to take their clothes off. They are, in fact,
a highly civilised community. Some traces of their aboriginal state they
still retain, and they cherish their totem, which is a bundle of black
ribbons, rather like the flattened leaves of an artichoke, attached to
the back of their collars. It is the badge of their tribe. Also at night
some of them develop the most primitive of all instincts and crawl out
on their stomachs with a hand-grenade to get as near as may be to the
enemy's listening posts and taste the joy of killing. But by day they
are as demure and sleepy as the tortoiseshell cat which has taken up its
quarters in the dug-out.
Such is their life. But they are quietly preparing to get a move on.
Some R.G.A. men have arrived with four pretty toys from Vickers's, and
one fine morning they are going to disturb those sand-bags opposite them
with a battery of trench mortars; our field guns will draw a curtain of
shrapnel in front of the German support trenches, and then they will
satisfy their curiosity as to what is behind those inscrutable
sand-bags.
IX
STOKES'S ACT
An offender when in arrest is not to bear arms except by order of
his C.O. or in an emergency.--_The King's Regulations._
I
The President of the Court and the Judge-Advocate stood in private
colloquy in one of the deep traverse-like windows of the Hôtel de Ville
over-looking the Place. A heavy rain was falling from a sullen sky, and
the deserted square was a dancing sea of agitation as the raindrops
smote the little pools between the cobbles and ricochetted with a
multitudinous hiss. Now and again a gust of wind swept across, and the
rain rattled against the windows. On the opposite side of the square one
of the houses gaped curiously, with bedroom and parlour exposed to view,
as though some one had snatched away the walls and laid the scene for
one of those Palais Royal farces in which the characters pursue a
complicated domestic intrigue on two floors at once. That house, with
its bed exposed to the rain dripping from the open rafters, was indeed
both farcical and indecent; it stood among its unscathed neighbours like
a pariah. The rain was loud and insistent, but not so loud as to dull
the distant thunder of the guns. The intermittent gusts of wind now and
again interrupted its monotonous theme, but the intervals were as brief
as they were violent, and in this polyphonic composition of rain, wind,
and guns, the hissing of the raindrops came and went as in a fugue and
with an inexpressible mournfulness.
Inside the room was a table covered with green baize, on which were
methodically arranged in extended order a Bible, an inkstand, a sheaf of
paper, and a copy of the _Manual of Military Law_. Behind the table were
seven chairs, and to the right and left of them stood two others. The
seven chairs were for the members of the court; the chair on the extreme
right was for the "prisoner's friend," that on the left awaited the
Judge-Advocate. About five yards in front of the table, in the centre of
an empty space, stood two more chairs turned towards it. Otherwise the
room was as bare as a guard-room. And this austere meagreness gave it a
certain dignity of its own as of a place where nothing was allowed to
distract the mind from the serious business in hand. At the door stood
an orderly with a red armlet bearing the imprint of the letters "M.P."
in black.
"I have read the summary pretty carefully," the Judge-Advocate was
saying, "and it seems to me a clear case. The charge is fully made out.
And yet the curious thing is, the fellow has an excellent record, I
believe."
"That proves nothing," said the Colonel; "I've had a fellow in my
battalion found sleeping at his post on sentry-go, a fellow I could have
sworn by. And you know what the punishment for that is. It's these night
attacks; the men must not sleep by night and some of them cannot sleep
by day, and there are limits to human nature. We've no reserves to speak
of as yet, and the men are only relieved once in three weeks. Their feet
are always wet, and their circulation goes all wrong. It's the puttees
perhaps. And if your circulation goes wrong you can't sleep when you
want to, till at last you sleep when you don't want to. Or else your
nerves go wrong. I've seen a man jump like a rabbit when I've come up
behind him."
"Yes," mused the Judge-Advocate, "I know. But hard cases make bad law."
"Yes, and bad law makes hard cases. Between you and me, our military law
is a bit prehistoric. You're a lawyer and know more about it than I do.
But isn't there something for civilians called a First Offenders Act?
Bind 'em over to come up for judgment if called on--that kind of thing.
Gives a man another chance. Why not the soldier too?"
"Yes," replied the Judge-Advocate, "there is. I believe the War Office
have been talking about adopting it for years. But this is not the time
of day to make changes of that kind. Everybody's worked off his head."
Eight officers had entered the room at intervals, the subalterns a
little ahead of their seniors in point of time, as is the first duty of
a subaltern whether on parade or at a "general," and, having saluted the
President in the window, they stood conversing in low tones.
The Colonel suddenly glanced at his left wrist, walked to the middle
chair behind the table, and taking his seat said, "Now, gentlemen, carry
on, please!" As they took their places the Colonel, as President of the
Court, ordered the prisoner to be brought in. There was a shuffle of
feet outside, and a soldier without cap or belt or arms, and with a
sergeant's stripes upon his sleeve, was marched in under a sergeant's
escort. His face was not unpleasing--the eyes well apart and direct in
their gaze, the forehead square, and the contours of the mouth firm and
well-cut. The two took their places in front of the chair, and stood to
attention. The prisoner gazed fixedly at the letters "R.F.," which
flanked the arms of the Republic on the wall above the President's
head, and stood as motionless as on parade. A close observer, however,
would have noticed that his thumb and forefinger plucked nervously at
the seam of his trousers, and that his hands, though held at attention,
were never quite still. The escort kept his head covered.
At the President's order to "bring in the evidence," the soldier on duty
at the door vanished to return with a squad of seven soldiers in charge
of a sergeant, who formed them up in two ranks behind the prisoner and
his escort. And they also stood exceeding still.
The President read the order convening the court, and, as he recited
each officer's name and regiment, the owner acknowledged it with "Here,
sir." When he came to the prisoner's name he looked up and said, "Is
that your name and number?" The escort nudged the prisoner, who recalled
his attention from the wall with an immense effort and said "Yes, sir."
"Captain Herbert appears as prosecutor and takes his place." As the
ritual prescribed by the Red Book was religiously gone through, the
prisoner continued to stare at the wall above the President's head, and
the rain rattled against the window-panes with intermittent violence.
Having finished his recital, the President rose, and with him all the
members of the court rose also. He took a Bible in his hand and faced
the Judge-Advocate, who exhorted him that he should "well and truly try
the accused before the court according to the evidence," and that he
would duly administer justice according to the Army Act now in force,
without partiality, favour, or affection.... "So help you God." As the
colonel raised the book to his lips he chanted the antiphon "So help me
God." And the Judge-Advocate proceeded to swear the other members of the
court, individually or collectively, three subalterns who were jointly
and severally sworn holding the book together with a quaint solemnity,
as though they were singing hymns at church out of a common hymn-book.
Then the Judge-Advocate was in turn sworn by the President with his own
peculiar oath of office, and did faithfully and with great earnestness
promise that he would neither divulge the sentence, nor disclose nor
discover any votes or opinions as to the same. Which being done, and the
President having ordered the military policeman to march out the
evidence, the sergeant in charge cried "Left turn. Quick march. Left
wheel," and the little cloud of witnesses vanished through the doorway.
The President proceeded to read the charge-sheet:--
"_The accused, No. , Sergeant John Stokes, 2nd Battalion
Downshire Regiment, is charged with Misbehaving before the enemy in
such a manner as to show cowardice, in that he at , on
October 3rd, 1914, when on patrol, and when under the enemy's fire,
did run away._"
All this time the prisoner had been studying the wall, his eyes
travelling from the right to the left of the frieze, and then from the
left to the right again. It was noticeable that his lips moved slightly
at each stage of this laborious visual journey. "Forty-seven."
"Forty-nine." "Forty-eight." Stokes was immensely interested in that
compelling frieze. He counted and recounted the number of figures in the
Greek fret with painful iteration. Apparently he was satisfied at last,
and then his eyes began to study the inkstand in front of the President.
The President seemed an enormous distance away, but the inkstand very
near and very large, and he found himself wondering why it was round,
why it wasn't square, or hexagonal, or elliptic. Then he speculated
whether the ink was blue or black, or red, and why people never used
green or yellow. His brain had gone through all the colours of the
spectrum when a pull at his sleeve by the escort attracted his
attention. Apparently the Colonel was saying something to him.
"Do you plead guilty or not guilty?"
The prisoner stared, but said nothing. The escort again pulled his
sleeve as the Colonel repeated the question.
Stokes cleared his throat, and looking his interlocutor straight in the
face, said, "Guilty, sir." The members of the court looked at each
other, the Colonel whispered to the Judge-Advocate, the Judge-Advocate
to the Prosecutor. The Judge-Advocate turned to the prisoner, "Do you
realise," he asked, not unkindly, "that if you plead 'Guilty' you will
not be able to call any evidence as to extenuating circumstances?" The
prisoner pondered for a moment; it seemed to him that the
Judge-Advocate's voice was almost persuasive.
"Well, I'll say 'not guilty,' sir."
He now saw the President quite close to him; that monstrous inkstand had
diminished to its natural size. Nothing was to be heard beyond the
hissing of the rain but the scratching of the Judge-Advocate's quill, as
he slowly dictated to himself the words "The--prisoner--pleads--'not
guilty.'" But why they had asked him a question which could only admit
of one answer and then persuaded him to give the wrong one, was a thing
that both puzzled and distressed John Stokes. Why all this solemn
ritual, he speculated painfully; he was surely as good as dead already.
He found himself wondering whether the sentence of the Court would be
carried out in the presence of only the firing party, or whether the
whole of his battalion would be paraded. And he fell to wondering
whether he would be reported in the casualty lists as "killed in
action," or would it be "missing"? And would they send his wife his
identity-disc, as they did with those who had fallen honourably on the
field? All these questions both interested and perplexed him, but the
proceedings of the Court he regarded little, or not at all.
Meanwhile the Prosecutor was unfolding the charge in a clear, even
voice, neither extenuating nor setting down aught in malice. In a
court-martial no Prosecutor ever "presses" the charge; he may even
alleviate it. Which shows that Assizes and Sessions have something to
learn from courts-martial. The case was simple. Prisoner had gone out on
the night of the 3rd with a patrol commanded by a subaltern. An alarm
was raised, and he and the greater part of the patrol had run back to
the trenches, leaving the officer to stand his ground and to return
later with his left arm shattered by a German bullet.