AN ADVANCED RAILHEAD

At an advanced railhead one has to contend with other difficulties than that of the congestion of railway traffic, which is inevitable near the line. There are the French, who control all the traction. This includes the shunting: you must not forget the shunting. It's the shunting that kills. Your pack (pack is the technical term for supply-train) may arrive at railhead at 5 p.m.; but it may not be in position for clearance by divisions until midnight. This plays the devil with divisional transport. You advise them by telephone that their pack will arrive at railhead at 5: let them get their transport down. Transport arrives at 4.30, to be "on the safe side"; but it waits impatiently six and eight and ten hours to clear. Very hard on horses, this; almost as hard on lorry-drivers, if the division is clearing by mechanical transport. There is language used by drivers waiting thus for hours in the snow or the bitter wind. The language of a horse-transport driver is a very expressive thing; it has a directness that is admirable.

At —— the transport—and especially the horse transport—got tired of this system, if system it could be called. They got to the stage at which they posted an orderly at railhead to watch the shunting of packs with his own eyes. That orderly was not to move off until he not only saw the train arrive, but saw it in position too. Not until he returned to Headquarters with this doubtfully welcome news were the horses taken from their lines.

It's urgently necessary that packs should be "placed" early, for more reasons than one. But one is that the men in the line are depending on a prompt delivery of rations by the divisional transport. If, therefore, the pack arrives twenty-four hours late (as frequently it does), it is manifestly undesirable that the French should delay its clearance ten hours more. Another reason is that if you have four packs arriving in the day—as many railheads have—your cour de gare will not accommodate them all for clearance simultaneously; usually it will not accommodate more than two at once. For yours are not the only trains whose clearance is urgent: there are ammunition-trains, stone-trains for road-making, trains of guns and horses for disembarkation, trains stuffed with ordnance stores and canteen stores, trains of timber for the R.E.'s. The clearance of any is needed urgently at any railhead. The term "railhead," by the way, is interpreted somewhat foggily by the popular mind. There used to be a notion abroad that it connoted a railway terminus. That is, of course, not so. It does connote a point in the line convenient for clearance by divisions. There may be five railheads in eighty miles of line, and the last of them not a terminus. A railhead, therefore, because it is a point convenient, is inevitably busy.

If tardiness in despatch from the base or railroad congestion en route should congest your railhead suddenly, it may be necessary to indent for fatigue from the corps whose railhead yours is. Usually it is a night fatigue that must be requisitioned. Conceive the attitude of the fatigue that marches to railhead at 9 p.m. through the snow-slush, for eight hours' work. Conceive, also, the ingenuity with which, during operations, they secrete themselves in the nooks and crannies of supply-stacks, out of the bitter blast, until the rum issue is made. Half the energy of the N.C.O.'s is dissipated in keeping their disgusted mob up to strength. Conceive, too, the appropriation of "grub" that goes on in the bowels of these supply-stacks, and the cases of jam and veal-loaf dropped and burst by accident in transit. All-night fatigues that are borrowed are the very deuce.

The winter-night clearance at railhead goes on in the face of much difficulty and hardship. The congestion of transport in the yard is almost impossibly unwieldy: it moves in six-inch mud and in pitch darkness, except for the flares of the issuers, and except when there is neither rain nor snow, which is seldom. The cold is bitter and penetrating, so is the wind. Horses plunge in the darkness; drivers, loaders, and issuers curse; and to the laymen, who cannot be expected to see the system which does lie beneath this apparent chaos, it is miraculous that the clearance gets done at all.

The mistakes occur which are inevitable in the circumstances. The divisions clear by brigades. One brigade sometimes gets off with the rum or the fresh vegetable of another. Sometimes this is accidental, sometimes not. In any case it is a matter for internal adjustment by the division itself.

The adjustment of packs is a matter of extreme difficulty at the railhead of a corps whose troops are mobile. Any corps railhead in the Arras sector in March, 1917, furnished a good example of that. We were to push at Arras. This meant that reinforcements whose arrival it was difficult, if not impossible, to forecast, were constantly coming in and raising the strength of the divisions drawing. It takes three days for orders on the base increasing the packs to take effect at railhead. An increase of five thousand in ration strength may be effected at half a day's notice only. They must be fed. The pack is inadequate to this extent. The division must be sent to another railhead to complete, or to a field supply depÔt, or to a reserve supply depÔt. It may take them a day to collect their full ration. You immediately wire the base for an increase in pack. By the time the wire has taken effect at railhead, the reinforcements (in these mobile days of an advance) may have moved on beyond Arras; you have all your increase as surplus on your hands. They must be dumped, and the increase in pack cancelled. It's not impossible that, the day after you have cancelled it, you will have need of it for fresh unadvised arrivals.

The thaw restrictions in traffic hit very hard the clearance at railheads. For seven days during the thaw, such was the parlous softness of the roads, it was out of the question to permit general traffic in lorries. All the clearance must be done by horse transport, which, by comparison with M.T., is damnably slow. It delayed the clearance of trains by half-days. Divisions which had to trek by G.S. waggon to other railheads to complete were hard put to it to get their men in the line fed.

Units which had no horse transport available had been instructed beforehand to draw thaw and reserve rations to tide them over the period. They stuck to their quarters, and ate tinned beef and biscuit.

But special dispensations had to be granted for traffic by lorries. When a coal-train arrived at railhead it was unthinkable to clear it by H.T. General Service waggons would take a week to clear four hundred tons of coal. Dispensations had to be granted for other urgent reasons. The cumulative effect was that of lorry traffic to a dangerous extent—dangerous because the frost bites so deep that when the thaw is at its height ruts are two feet deep. It bites down at the soft foundation beneath the cobble-stones of the village streets; and on the country roads the subsoil has no such protection as cobbles from the oppression of loaded lorries. But it was curious to see, in the villages, the cobbles rising en masse like jelly either flank of the lorry, or rising like a wave in the wake of the lumbering thing. Lorries got ditched in the country roads beyond immediate deliverance by other lorries. Nothing less than a steam tractor could move them. A convoy of tractors was set aside in each road-area for no other purpose than to obey calls to the rescue of ditched lorries. Certain roads were so badly cut that they had to be closed to traffic of any kind: motor-cycle with side-car that ventured on was bogged. The personnel of the road-control was increased twenty-fold to check speeds and to indicate prohibited roads. The worst tracts of the roads in use were so bad as to be paved with double rows of railway sleepers until the frost had worked out. Some roads will never recover; they will have to be closed until remade.

This advanced railhead was so near the line as to be full of interest on the eve of the April push. It was here you could see the immediate preparations and the immediate results of the preparatory activity. The local casualty clearing stations gave good evidence; you could tell, by watching their convoys, and talking with the wounded, and observing in the operating-theatre, what was going on. Such significant events as the growth of fresh C.C.S.'s and the kind of reserves they were putting-in, were eloquent. Talk with the legion of Flying-Corps observers who were about railhead was enlightening; so was the nature of the reserves they were laying up. The bulk and description of the supply-reserves dumped at railhead for pushing up by lorry-convoy to Arras told their tale also. Every night a convoy of lorries would load and move up under cover of the darkness. There was no mistaking the meaning of such commodities in their freight as chewing-gum and solidified alcohol. Do not suppose, reader, that chewing-gum is for mere distraction in the trenches. Neither is solidified alcohol for consumption by the addicted, but for fuel for Tommies' cookers when coal and wood are impossible of transport. Commodities such as these make one visualise a sudden and overwhelming advance. —— tons of baled straw were dumped at railhead. This was not for forage, but to strew the floors of empty returning supply-trains for wounded. Each C.C.S. in the area had to be prepared to improvise one such ambulance-train per day when the push was at its height. The handling of these things makes one abnormally busy; if he gets four-hours' sleep in twenty-four he is doing famously. But one is never so jaded as not to be interested in these portentous signs.

Once I went up to Arras on a night lorry. The convoy crept up into the lip of the salient. The guns flashed close on either flank; the star-shells lit the road from either side. The reserve dump was in an old factory in the Rue ——. An enormous dump it was. The Supply Officer lived next it on a ground-floor. His men burrowed in an adjacent cellar. He had laid on the floor of the attic above him eight layers of oats. A direct hit would have asphyxiated him with oats. His dump was unhappily placed. There were two batteries adjacent. Whenever there was a raid and the batteries let fly, they were immediately searched for. In the search his dump was found, on more than one occasion. There were ugly and recent shell-holes about it. The off-loading convoy was hit many nights at one point or another. He took me to the bottom of the road after dark. The scream of shell was so incessant that it rose to a melancholy intermittent moan.

Next day he took me about the town. Civilians were moving furtively. They were not used to emerge before night. In any case such shops and estaminets as remained were prohibited from opening before 7.30 in the evening. Wonderful!—how the civilians hang on. They have their property; also, they have the money they can always make from the herds of troops who make a fleeting sojourn in the place. Apart from the proprietors of cafÉs and estaminets, they are mostly caretakers who stay on: caretakers and rich old men with much property who prefer the chance of being hit to leaving what their industry has amassed over thirty years of labour....

The German fatigue on the railway was useful, if slow. It was supplied from the prisoners of war camp near the station. When the thaw was in progress we lost them, so heavy were the demands upon the camp for road labour. The O.C. the camp sometimes visited to see what manner of work they did. He threw light on their domestic behaviour in camp: "The greediest ——s on earth!" he would say. "If one of them leaves table for two minutes, his friends have pinched and swallowed his grub. They steal each other's food daily—and they're fed well enough. They're a sanctimonious crew, too; most of their post-cards from home are scriptural, laden with texts and pictorial demonstration of the way the Lord is with them. The camp is half-filled with religious fanatics; they sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs when they're free. But there's not much of the New Testament notion of the brotherhood of man amongst 'em; they do each other down most damnably!..."

When the Arras advance was imminent their camp was moved farther back from the line, and we lost them. The Deputy-Assistant-Director of Labour sent a fatigue of 125 of the halt and the maimed—the P.B.'s; altogether inadequate.

A Permanent-base man may be incapable of lumping. And even if he is not incapable, he is usually in a position to say he is—none daring to make him afraid. P.B. fatigues are highly undesirable.

"Pinching" supplies was by no means unheard of amongst them. (Amongst whom at all is it unheard-of? Australians themselves are the arch-appropriators of Army supplies.) But P.B. men do not pinch with that faculty of vulpine cunning which is clear of detection. One morning, after an all-night clearance, the A.P.M. found one of the P.B.'s sneaking back to billet in the cold grey dawn with three tins of pork and beans, two loaves of bread, six candles, imperfectly concealed. He promptly put him in the clink. There was a court-martial. The unhappy fellow got three months. Pinching in the Army should be done judiciously. It is not a moral crime. Getting caught is. At any rate, that is an intellectual, if not a moral crime.

I messed with a C.C.S. Most messes of medical officers are interesting and varied. The Colonel was a Regular—an accessible and companionable Regular. An Irishman he was, kind of heart and quick of temper; and so able that it was never dangerous for him to allow his Captains to argue with him on questions of administration, because he could always rout them: he was always right. A less able man would have taken risks in permitting argument on the subject of his administration.

He was the fiercest smoker and the ablest bridge-player I have ever known. He used to complain bitterly of the standard of bridge played by the mess in general. He put out his pipe chiefly to eat—to eat rather than to sleep. He was a hearty, but not a voluptuous, eater. His appetite was the consequence of genuine cerebration and of hard walking. He walked, unless hindered by the most inevitable obstacles, five miles a day—hard, with his two dogs and the Major. He was very deaf, and very fond of his dogs. They slept in his room, usually (one or other) on his bed. He slept little. He read and smoked in bed regularly until about two; was wakened at six; took a pipe (or two) with his tea before getting up; and sometimes—though rarely—resumed his reading in bed until eight, or spent a happy hour in earnest conversation with the dogs before rising.

His officers liked him; the Sisters loved him. To them he was indulgent. The day before the push began a Sister approached him in his office. She said that although it was her afternoon off, the Matron had advised her against tramping, lest a convoy of wounded should come in suddenly. He said: "My dear, you go."—"And how long may I be away?"—"Well, you don't go on duty until eight in the morning; as long as you're back by then, it's good enough. But mind—don't come reeling in at 8.30 with your hair down your back! That's all I ask." She left, adoring.

The Major was a mid-Victorian gentleman, with the gentlest manners and language, except when it came to talk of Germans. He got an acute attack of Wanderlust soon after I came—felt the call of Arras—and got command of a field ambulance up in the thick of it. The last I heard of him was that he was hurrying about the city under a steel helmet, succouring with his own hand those stricken down in the streets.

A French interpreter was attached to the hospital. He was a man of forty-five, with the heart of a boy of fifteen. He would sit at the gramaphone by the hour, playing his favourite music and staring into vacancy. His favourites were: a minuet of Haydn, Beethoven's Minuet in G, selections from the 1812 Overture, the Overture to Mignon, and the Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy. Everyone "pulled his leg"; everyone liked him—he was so gentle of heart, but so baffling in repartee. They called him the Pawkie Duke, a name that came to him through his comments when the facetious song of that title in the "St. Andrew's Song-Book" was being sung. He lived in a hut in hospital. Part of his duty consisted in mediation between the civilian sick and the English M.O.'s; for by international agreement they were due to treat any civilian sick who needed it. I first met Pawkie waiting in the anteroom of the operating-theatre with a distracted mother whose child was within under operation for appendicitis. She was a lovely girl of ten. The mother was weeping anxiously. Pawkie was almost in sympathetic tears himself. He made excursions of high frequency into the theatre to report progress to the mother. I went in. He came after, fumbling nervously with his hands and regarding the surgeons with a gaze of appeal. He would whisper to the Colonel, who reassured him. He tore out, colliding with the orderlies who were bearing in another "case." Seizing madame by the hands, he cried: "Bien, madame! Elle va bien! La pauvre petite fille fait de bon progrÈs. Les chirurgiens-major sont trÈs adroits. Le Capitaine est le chirurgien-spÉcialiste. Le Colonel assiste aussi. Ça ne fait rien, madame!" And he left madame with the conviction that nothing could go wrong.

But it was pathetic to see that beautiful child, her fair face smothered under the mask. At the end, when the wound was stitched, the surgeon took her up as gently as though she were his own offspring and carried her to her mother, and so on to the ward. There she stayed two weeks, tended by him with the affection of an elder brother.

On the eve of the push, during the preparatory and retaliatory bombardment, the theatre was a ghastly chamber. An abbatoir it was, five hours after the arrival of the convoys, when the preparation of the cases for operation had been completed. Five "tables" were in continuous use. On "taking-in" night the surgeons invariably worked through to daylight. This is very exhausting, so exhausting that they never worked continuously. At about two o'clock they adjourned to the mess for a rest and a meal—a solid meal of bacon and eggs and coffee. For the push there came reinforcements—teams, as they were called. They amounted to eight fresh surgeons, ten Sisters, and fifty additional orderlies.

The Colonel called his M.O.'s together in the anteroom the Sabbath before the attack, and gave them plain words of warning and advice. In a push they were not to be too elaborate; it would lead to injustice. Better twelve "abdominals" done roughly but safely than four exquisitely finished operations. In the former case all twelve would be rendered safe as far as the base; in the latter, the remaining eight would probably die on their hands.... The examining officers in the reception-room must come to a complete agreement with the surgeons as to what manner of "case" it was imperative to operate upon before evacuation to the base. There must be waste of neither surgical time nor surgical energy in operating upon "cases" that would carry to the base without it—and so on....

Anything one might say of Nursing-Sisters in France must seem inadequate. The wounded Tommy who has fallen into their hands is making their qualities known. They work harder than any M.O., and M.O.'s are hard-worked. Indeed, I defy a man to bear indefinitely the kind of work they do indefinitely—its nervous strain and its long hours. The M.O.'s do their examinations and their dressings and pass on; they are the merest visitors. The Sisters stay on and fight for the man without cessation, and then see him die. Five and six deaths in the ward in a night is horribly hard on the Sister in charge of it. No one but a Sister could do the work she does, in a ward or in the operating-theatre. It is nonsense to speak of abolishing women from the medical service; it would be inadequate without them. But their work will leave its mark upon them for ever. They have not a man's faculty of detachment.

Because they are so absorbed by their work—-as well as for other feminine reasons—they see the ethics of the struggle less clearly than a man.

Sisters on service are more prone to depression out of working hours than are men; which is not amazing. They are more the subjects of their moods, which is but temperamental too. But in the reaction of elation after depression they are more gay than any man—even in his most festive mood after evening mess. They smoke a good deal (and they deserve it), but not as heavily as their civilian sisters in general, though in isolated cases they smoke more heavily than any civilian woman. But no one blames the fair fiends, however false this form of consolation may be.