He said: “There were only twenty houses in Daleswood. A place you
would scarcely have heard of. A village up top of the hills.
“When the war came there was no more than thirty men there between
sixteen and forty-five. They all went.
“They all kept together; same battalion, same platoon. They was like
that in Daleswood. Used to call the hop pickers foreigners, the ones
that come from London. They used to go past Daleswood, some of them,
every year, on their way down to the hop fields. Foreigners they used
to call them. Kept very much to themselves, did the Daleswood people.
Big woods all round them.
“Very lucky they was, the Daleswood men. They’d lost no more than
five killed and a good sprinkling of wounded. But all the wounded was
back again with the platoon. This was up to March when the big
offensive started.
“It came very sudden. No bombardment to speak of. Just a burst of Tok
Emmas going off all together and lifting the front trench clean out of
it; then a barrage behind, and the Boche pouring over in thousands.
‘Our luck is holding good,’ the Daleswood men said, for their trench
wasn’t getting it at all. But the platoon on their right got it. And
it sounded bad too a long way beyond that. No one could be quite sure.
But the platoon on their right was getting it: that was sure enough.
“And then the Boche got through them altogether. A message came to
say so. ‘How are things on the right?’ they said to the runner. ‘Bad,’
said the runner, and he went back, though Lord knows what he went back
to. The Boche was through right enough. ‘We’ll have to make a
defensive flank,’ said the platoon commander. He was a Daleswood man
too. Came from the big farm. He slipped down a communication trench
with a few men, mostly bombers. And they reckoned they wouldn’t see
any of them any more, for the Boche was on the right, thick as
starlings.
“The bullets were snapping over thick to keep them down while the
Boche went on, on the right: machine guns, of course. The barrage was
screaming well over and dropping far back, and their wire was still
all right just in front of them, when they put up a head to look.
There was the left platoon of the battalion. One doesn’t bother,
somehow, so much about another battalion as one’s own. One’s own gets
sort of homely. And there they were wondering how their own officer
was getting on, and the few fellows with them, on his defensive flank.
The bombs were going off thick. All the Daleswood men were firing half
right. It sounded from the noise as if it couldn’t last long, as if it
would soon be decisive, and the battle be won, or lost, just there on
the right, and perhaps the war ended. They didn’t notice the left.
Nothing to speak of.
“Then a runner came from the left. ‘Hullo!’ they said, ‘How are
things over there?’
“‘The Boche is through,’ he said. ‘Where’s the officer?’ ‘Through!’
they said. It didn’t seem possible. However did he do that? they
thought. And the runner went on to the right to look for the officer.
“And then the barrage shifted further back. The shells still screamed
over them, but the bursts were further away. That is always a relief.
Probably they felt it. But it was bad for all that. Very bad. It meant
the Boche was well past them. They realized it after a while.
“They and their bit of wire were somehow just between two waves of
attack. Like a bit of stone on the beach with the sea coming in. A
platoon was nothing to the Boche; nothing much perhaps just then to
anybody. But it was the whole of Daleswood for one long generation.
“The youngest full-grown man they had left behind was fifty, and some
one had heard that he had died since the war. There was no one else in
Daleswood but women and children, and boys up to seventeen.
“The bombing had stopped on their right; everything was quieter, and
the barrage further away. When they began to realize what that meant
they began to talk of Daleswood. And then they thought that when all
of them were gone there would be nobody who would remember Daleswood
just as it used to be. For places alter a little, woods grow, and
changes come, trees get cut down, old people die; new houses are built
now and then in place of a yew tree, or any old thing, that used to be
there before; and one way or another the old things go; and all the
time you have people thinking that the old times were best, and the
old ways when they were young. And the Daleswood men were beginning to
say, ‘Who would there be to remember it just as it was?’
“There was no gas, the wind being wrong for it, so they were able to
talk, that is if they shouted, for the bullets alone made as much
noise as breaking up an old shed, crisper like, more like new timber
breaking; and the shells of course was howling all the time, that is
the barrage that was bursting far back. The trench still stank of
them.
“They said that one of them must go over and put his hands up, or run
away if he could, whichever he liked, and when the war was over he
would go to some writing fellow, one of those what makes a living by
it, and tell him all about Daleswood, just as it used to be, and he
would write it out proper and there it would be for always. They all
agreed to that. And then they talked a bit, as well as they could
above that awful screeching, to try and decide who it should be. The
eldest, they said, would know Daleswood best. But he said, and they
came to agree with him, that it would be a sort of waste to save the
life of a man what had had his good time, and they ought to send the
youngest, and they would tell him all they knew of Daleswood before
his time, and everything would be written down just the same and the
old time remembered.
“They had the idea somehow that the women thought more of their own
man and their children and the washing and what-not; and that the deep
woods and the great hills beyond, and the plowing and the harvest and
snaring rabbits in winter and the sports in the village in summer, and
the hundred things that pass the time of one generation in an old, old
place like Daleswood, meant less to them than the men. Anyhow they did
not quite seem to trust them with the past.
“The youngest of them was only just eighteen. That was Dick. They
told him to get out and put his hands up and be quick getting across,
as soon as they had told him one or two things about the old time in
Daleswood that a youngster like him wouldn’t know.
“Well, Dick said he wasn’t going, and was making trouble about it, so
they told Fred to go. Back, they told him, was best, and come up
behind the Boche with his hands up; they would be less likely to shoot
when it was back towards their own supports.
“Fred wouldn’t go, and so on with the rest. Well, they didn’t waste
time quarrelling, time being scarce, and they said what was to be
done? There was chalk where they were, low down in the trench, a
little brown clay on the top of it. There was a great block of it
loose near a shelter. They said they would carve with their knives on
the big bowlder of chalk all that they knew about Daleswood. They
would write where it was and just what it was like, and they would
write something of all those little things that pass with a
generation. They reckoned on having the time for it. It would take a
direct hit with something large, what they call big stuff, to do any
harm to that bowlder. They had no confidence in paper, it got so
messed up when you were hit; besides, the Boche had been using
thermite. Burns, that does.
“They’d one or two men that were handy at carving chalk; used to do
the regimental crest and pictures of Hindenburg, and all that. They
decided they’d do it in reliefs.
“They started smoothing the chalk. They had nothing more to do but
just to think what to write. It was a great big bowlder with plenty of
room on it. The Boche seemed not to know that they hadn’t killed the
Daleswood men, just as the sea mightn’t know that one stone stayed dry
at the coming in of the tide. A gap between two divisions probably.
“Harry wanted to tell of the woods more than anything. He was afraid
they might cut them down because of the war, and no one would know of
the larks they had had there as boys. Wonderful old woods they were,
with a lot of Spanish chestnut growing low, and tall old oaks over it.
Harry wanted them to write down what the foxgloves were like in the
wood at the end of summer, standing there in the evening, ‘Great
solemn rows,’ he said, ‘all odd in the dusk. All odd in the evening,
going there after work; and makes you think of fairies.’ There was
lots of things about those woods, he said, that ought to be put down
if people were to remember Daleswood as it used to be when they knew
it. What were the good old days without those woods? he said.
“But another wanted to tell of the time when they cut the hay with
scythes, working all those long days at the end of June; there would
be no more of that, he said, with machines come in and all.
“There was room to tell of all that and the woods too, said the
others, so long as they put it short like.
“And another wanted to tell of the valleys beyond the wood, far
afield where the men went working; the women would remember the hay.
The great valleys he’d tell of. It was they that made Daleswood. The
valleys beyond the wood and the twilight on them in summer. Slopes
covered with mint and thyme, all solemn at evening. A hare on them
perhaps, sitting as though they were his, then lolloping slowly away.
It didn’t seem from the way he told of those old valleys that he
thought they could ever be to other folk what they were to the
Daleswood men in the days he remembered. He spoke of them as though
there were something in them, besides the mint and the thyme and the
twilight and hares, that would not stay after these men were gone,
though he did not say what it was. Scarcely hinted it even.
“And still the Boche did nothing to the Daleswood men. The bullets
had ceased altogether. That made it much quieter. The shells still
snarled over, bursting far, far away.
“And Bob said tell of Daleswood itself, the old village, with queer
chimneys, of red brick, in the wood. There weren’t houses like that
nowadays. They’d be building new ones and spoiling it, likely, after
the war. And that was all he had to say.
“And nobody was for not putting down anything any one said. It was
all to go in on the chalk, as much as would go in the time. For they
all sort of understood that the Daleswood of what they called the good
old time was just the memories that those few men had of the days they
had spent there together. And that was the Daleswood they loved, and
wanted folks to remember. They were all agreed as to that. And then
they said how was they to write it down. And when it came to writing
there was so much to be said, not spread over a lot of paper I don’t
mean, but going down so deep like, that it seemed to them how their
own talk wouldn’t be good enough to say it. And they knew no other,
and didn’t know what to do. I reckon they’d been reading magazines and
thought that writing had to be like that muck. Anyway, they didn’t
know what to do. I reckon their talk would be good enough for
Daleswood when they loved Daleswood like that. But they didn’t, and
they were puzzled.
“The Boche was miles away behind them now, and his barrage with him.
Still in front he did nothing.
“They talked it all over and over, did the Daleswood men. They tried
everything. But somehow or other they couldn’t get near what they
wanted to say about old summer evenings. Time wore on. The bowlder was
smooth and ready, and that whole generation of Daleswood men could
find no words to say what was in their hearts about Daleswood. There
wasn’t time to waste. And the only thing they thought of in the end
was ‘Please, God, remember Daleswood just like it used to be.’ And
Bill and Harry carved that on the chalk between them.
“What happened to the Daleswood men? Why, nothing. There come one of
them counter-attacks, a regular bastard for Jerry. The French made it
and did the Boche in proper. I got the story from a man with a hell of
a great big hammer, long afterwards when that trench was well behind
our line. He was smashing up a huge great chunk of chalk because he
said they all felt it was so damn silly.”