1

England had changed in the eighteen months since we put out so joyously from Avonmouth. Munition factories were in full blast, food restrictions in force, women in all kinds of uniforms, London in utter darkness at night, the country dotted with hutted training camps. Everything was quiet. We had taken a nasty knock or two and washed some of our dirty linen in public, not too clean at that. My own lucky star was in the ascendant. The voyage completely cured me, and within a week I was given a month’s sick leave by the Medical Board,—a month of heaven more nearly describes it, for I passed my days in a state of bliss which nothing could mar, except perhaps the realisation, towards the end, of the fact that I had to go back and settle into the collar again.

My mental attitude towards the war had changed. Whatever romance and glamour there may have been had worn off. It was just one long bitter waste of time,—our youth killed like flies by “dug-outs,” at the front, so that old men and sick might carry on the race, while profiteers drew bloated profits and politicians exuded noxious gas in the House. Not a comforting point of view to take back into harness. I was told on good authority that to go out to France in a field battery was a certain way of finding death. They were being flung away in the open to take another thousand yards of trench, so as to make a headline in the daily papers which would stir the drooping spirits of the old, the sick, and the profiteer over their breakfast egg. The embusquÉ was enjoying those headlines too. The combing-out process had not yet begun. The young men who had never been out of England were Majors and Colonels in training camps. It was the officers who returned to duty from hospital, more or less cured of wounds or sickness, who were the first to be sent out again. The others knew a thing or two.

That was how it struck me when I was posted to a reserve brigade just outside London.

Not having the least desire to be “flung away in the open,” I did my best to get transferred to a 6-inch battery. The Colonel of the reserve brigade did his best, but it was queered at once, without argument or appeal, by the nearest Brass Hat, in the following manner. The Colonel having signed and recommended the formal application, spoke to the General personally on my behalf.

“What sort of a fellow is he?” asked the General.

“Seems a pretty useful man,” said the Colonel.

“Then we’ll keep him,” said the General.

“The pity of it is,” said the Colonel to me later, “that if I’d said you were a hopeless damned fool, he would have signed it.”

On many subsequent occasions the Colonel flung precisely that expression at me so he might just as well have said it then.

However, as it seemed that I was destined for a short life, I determined to make it as merry as possible, and in the company of a kindred spirit, who was posted from hospital a couple of days after I was, and who is now a Bimbashi in the Soudan, I went up to town about three nights a week, danced and did a course of theatres. By day there was no work to do as the brigade already had far too many officers, none of whom had been out. The battery to which we were both posted was composed of category C1 men,—flat-footed unfortunates, unfit to fight on medical grounds, not even strong enough to groom horses properly.

A futile existence in paths of unintelligence and unendeavour worshipping perforce at the altar of destruction, creating nothing, a slave to dishonesty and jobbery,—a waste of life that made one mad with rage in that everything beautiful in the world was snapped in half and flung away because the social fabric which we ourselves had made through the centuries, had at last become rotten to the core and broken into flaming slaughter, and was being fanned by yellow press hypocrisy. Every ideal cried out against it. The sins of the fathers upon the wilfully blind children. The Kaiser was only the most pitch-covered torch chosen by Nemesis to set the bonfire of civilisation ablaze. But for one branch in the family tree he would have been England’s monarch, and then——?

There have been moments when I have regretted not having sailed to New York in August, 1914,—bitter moments when all the dishonesty has beaten upon one’s brain, and one has envied the pluck of the honest conscientious objector who has stood out against the ridicule of the civilised world.

The only thought that kept me going was “suppose the Huns had landed in England and I had not been fighting?” It was unanswerable,—as I thought then.

Now I wish that the Hun had landed in England in force and laid waste the East coast, as he has devastated Belgium and the north of France. There would have been English refugees with perambulators and babies, profiteers crying “Kamerad!” politicians fleeing the House. There would have been some hope of England’s understanding. But she doesn’t even now. There were in 1918, before the armistice, men—MEN!—who, because their valets failed to put their cuff links in their shirts one morning, were sarcastic to their war-working wives, and talked of the sacrifices they had made for their country.

How dared they have valets, while we were lousy and unshaved, with rotting corpses round our gun wheels? How dared they have wives, while we “unmarried and without ties” were either driven in our weakness to licensed women, or clung to our chastity because of the one woman with us every hour in our hearts, whom we meant to marry if ever we came whole out of that hell?

2

Christmas came. They would not let me go down to that little house among the pines and beeches, which has ever been “home” to me. But the day was spent quietly in London with my best pal. Seven days later I was on my way to Ireland as one of the advance representatives of the Division. The destination of my brigade was Limerick, that place of pigs, and smells, and pretty girls and schoolboy rebels, who chalked on every barrack wall, “Long live the Kaiser! Down with the King!” Have you ever been driven to the depths of despair, seen your work go to pieces before your eyes, and spent the dreadful days in dishonest idleness on the barrack square, hating it all the while, but unable to move hand or foot to get out of the mental morass? That is what grew up in Limerick. Even now my mind shivers in agony at the thought of it.

Reinforcements had poured into the battery of cripples, and the order came that from it a fighting battery should be formed. As senior subaltern, who had been promised a captaincy, I was given charge of them. The only other officer with me was the loyalest pal a man ever had. He had been promoted on the field for gallantry, having served ten years in the ranks as trumpeter, gunner, corporal and sergeant. Needless to say, he knew the game backwards, and was the possessor of amazing energy and efficiency. He really ought to have had the command, for my gunnery was almost nil, but I had one pip more than he, and so the system put him under my orders. So we paraded the first men, and told them off into sections and were given a horse or two, gradually building up a battery as more reinforcements arrived.

How we worked! The enthusiasm of a first command! For a fortnight we never left the barracks,—drilling, marching, clothing and feeding the fighting unit of which we hoped such great things. All our hearts and souls were in it, and the men themselves were keen and worked cheerily and well. One shook off depressing philosophies and got down to the solid reality of two hundred men. The early enthusiasm returned, and Pip Don—as my pal was called—and I were out for glory and killing Huns.

The Colonel looked us over and was pleased. Life wasn’t too bad, after all.

And then the blight set in. An officer was posted to the command of the little fighting unit.

In a week all the fight had gone out of it. In another week Pip Don and I declared ourselves beaten. All our interest was killed. The sergeant-major, for whom I have a lasting respect, was like Bruce’s spider. Every time he fell, he at once started reclimbing. He alone was responsible for whatever discipline remained. The captaincy which I had been promised on certain conditions was filled by some one else the very day I carried out the conditions. It didn’t matter. Everything was so hopeless that the only thing left was to get out,—and that was the one thing we couldn’t do, because we were more or less under orders for France. It reached such a pitch that even the thought of being flung away in the open was welcome. At least it would end it all. There was no secret about it. The Colonel knew. Didn’t he come to my room one night, and say, “Look here, Gibbs, what is the matter with your battery?” And didn’t we have another try, and another?

So for a time Pip Don and I smoked cigarettes on the barrack square, strolling listlessly from parade to parade, cursing the fate that should have brought us to such dishonour. We went to every dance in Limerick, organised concerts, patronised the theatre and filled our lives as much as we could with outside interests until such time as we should go to France. And then.—It would be different when shells began to burst!

3

In the ranks I first discovered that it was a struggle to keep one’s soul alive. That struggle had proved far more difficult as an officer in the later days of Salonica. The bitterness of Limerick, together with the reason, as I saw it, of the wholesale slaughter, made one’s whole firmament tremble. Rough hands seemed to tear down one’s ideals and fling then in the mud. One’s picture of God and religion faded under the red light of war. One’s brain flickered in the turmoil, seeking something to cling to. What was there? Truth? There was none. Duty? It was a farce. Honour? It was dead. There was only one thing left, one thing which might give them all back again,—Love.

If there was not that in one’s heart to keep fragrant, to cherish, to run to for help, to look forward to as the sunshine at the end of a long and awful tunnel, then one’s soul would have perished and a bullet been a merciful thing.

I was all unconscious that it had been my salvation in the ranks, in Salonica. Now, on the eve of going out to the Western Front I recognized it for the first time to the full. The effect of it was odd,—a passionate longing to tear off one’s khaki and leave all this uncleanness, and at the same time the certain knowledge that one must go on to the very end, otherwise one would lose it. If I had been offered a war job in New York, how could I have taken it, unwounded, the game unfinished, much as New York called me? So its third effect was a fierce impatience to get to France, making at least one more battery to help to end the war.

The days dragged by, the longer from the new knowledge within me. From time to time the Sinn Fein gave signs of renewed activity, and either we were all confined to barracks in consequence, presumably to avoid street fighting, or else we hooked into the guns and did route marches through and round about the town. From time to time arrests were made, but no open conflict recurred. Apart from our own presence there was no sign of war in Ireland. Food of all kinds was plentiful and cheap, restrictions nil. The streets were well lit at night. Gaiety was the keynote. No aeroplanes dropped bombs on that brilliant target. The Hun and pro-Hun had spent too much money there.

Finally our training was considered complete. The Colonel had laboured personally with all the subalterns, and we had benefited by his caustic method of imparting knowledge. And so once more we sat stiffly to attention while Generals rode round us, metaphorically poking our ribs to see if we were fat enough for the slaughter. Apparently we were, for the fighting units said good-bye to their parent batteries—how gladly!—and shipped across to England to do our firing practice.

The camp was at Heytesbury, on the other side of the vast plain which I had learnt so well as a trooper. We were a curious medley, several brigades being represented, each battery a little distrustful of the next, a little inclined to turn up its nose. Instead of being “AC,” “Beer,” “C” and “Don,” as before, we were given consecutive numbers, well into the hundreds, and after a week or so of dislocation were formed into brigades, and each put under the command of a Colonel. Then the stiffness wore off in friendly competition of trying to pick the best horses from the remounts. Our men challenged each other to football, sergeant-majors exchanged notes. Subalterns swapped lies about the war and Battery Commanders stood each other drinks in the mess. Within a fortnight we were all certain we’d got the best Colonel in England, and congratulated ourselves accordingly.

Meanwhile Pip Don and I were still outcasts in our own battery, up against a policy of continual distrust, suspicion, and scarcely veiled antagonism. It was at the beginning of April, 1917, that we first got to Heytesbury, and snow was thick upon the ground. Every day we had the guns out behind the stables and jumped the men about at quick, short series, getting them smart and handy, keeping their interest and keeping them warm. When the snow disappeared we took the battery out mounted, taking turns in bringing it into action, shooting over the sights on moving targets—other batteries at work in the distance—or laying out lines for indirect targets. We took the staff out on cross-country rides, scouring the country for miles, and chasing hares—it shook them down into the saddle—carrying out little signalling schemes. In short, we had a final polish up of all the knowledge we had so eagerly begun to teach them when he and I had been in sole command. I don’t think either of us can remember any single occasion on which the commanding officer took a parade.

Embarkation leave was in full swing, four days for all ranks, and the brigade next to us was ordered to shoot. Two range officers were appointed from our brigade. I was one. It was good fun and extremely useful. We took a party of signallers and all the rations we could lay hands on, and occupied an old red farmhouse tucked away in a fold of the plain, in the middle of all the targets. An old man and his wife lived there, a quaint old couple, toothless and irritable, well versed in the ways of the army and expert in putting in claims for fictitious damages. Our job was to observe and register each round from splinter proofs, send in a signed report of each series, stop the firing by signalling if any stray shepherd or wanderer were seen on the range, and to see that the targets for the following day’s shoot had not been blown down or in any other way rendered useless. It was a four-day affair, firing ending daily between three and four p.m. This left us ample time to canter to all the battery positions and work out ranges, angle of sight and compass bearings for every target,—information which would have been invaluable when our turn to fire arrived. Unfortunately, however, several slight alterations were intentionally made, and all our labour was wasted. Still, it was a good four days of bracing weather, with little clouds scudding across a blue sky, never quite certain whether in ten minutes’ time the whole world would be blotted out in a blizzard. The turf was springy, miles upon endless miles, and we had some most wonderful gallops and practised revolver shooting on hares and rooks, going back to a huge tea and a blazing wood fire in the old, draughty farmhouse.

The practice over, we packed up and marched back to our respective batteries. Events of a most cataclysmic nature piled themselves one upon the other,—friction between the commanding officer and myself, orders to fire on a certain day, orders to proceed overseas on a certain later day, and my dismissal from the battery, owing to the aforesaid friction, on the opening day of the firing. Pip Don was furious, the commanding officer wasn’t, and I “pursued a policy of masterly inactivity.” The outcome of the firing was not without humour, and certainly altered the whole future career of at least two of us. The Captain and the third subaltern left the battery and became “details.” The commanding officer became second in command under a new Major, who dropped out of the blue, and I was posted back to the battery, together with a new third subaltern, who had just recovered from wounds.

The business of getting ready was speeded up. The Ordnance Department, hitherto of miserly reluctance, gave us lavishly of their best. Gas masks were dished out, and every man marched into a gas chamber,—there either to get gassed or come out with the assurance that the mask had no defects! Final issues of clothing and equipment kept the Q.M.S. sweating from dawn to dusk, and the Major signed countless pay books, indents and documents generally.

Thus we were ready and eager to go and strafe the Hun in the merry month of May, 1917.

4

The personnel of the battery was odd but extremely interesting. Pip Don and myself knew every man, bombardier, corporal and sergeant, what he had done, tried to do, or could do. In a word we knew the battery inside out and exactly what it was worth. Not a man of them had ever been on active service, but we felt quite confident that the test of shell fire would not find them wanting. The great majority of them were Scots, and they were all as hard as nails.

The third subaltern was an unknown quantity, but all of us had been out. The Captain hadn’t.

The Major had been in every battle in France since 1914, but he didn’t know us or the battery, and if we felt supremely confident in him, it was, to say the least of it, impossible for him to return the compliment. He himself will tell you that he didn’t win the confidence of the battery until after a bold and rapidly-decided move in full light of day, which put us on the flank of a perfectly hellish bombardment. That may be true of some of the men, but as far as Pip Don and myself went, we had adopted him after the first five minutes, and never swerved,—having, incidentally, some wonderful arguments about him in the sleeping quarters at Heytesbury with the subalterns of other batteries.

It is extraordinary how the man at the head of a little show like that remains steadily in the lime-light. Everything he does, says or looks is noted, commented on and placed to either his credit or debit until the men have finally decided that he’s all right or—not. If they come to the first decision, then the Major’s life is not more of a burden to him than Divisional and Corps Staffs and the Hun can make it. The battery will do anything he asks of it, at any hour of day or night, and will go on shooting till the last man is knocked out. If, on the other hand, they decide that he is not all right, God help him. He gives orders. They are not carried out. Why? An infinite variety of super-excellent excuses. It is a sort of passive resistance, and he has got to be a mighty clever man to unearth the root of it and kill it before it kills him.

We went from Southampton to Havre—it looked exactly the same as when I’d landed there three years previously—and from Havre by train to Merville. There a guide met us in the chilly dawn and we marched up to Estaires, the guide halting us at a mud patch looking like the abomination of desolation, which he said was our wagon line. It was only about seven miles from the place where I’d been in the cavalry, and just as muddy, but somehow I was glad to be back. None of those side shows at the other end of the map had meant anything. France was obviously where the issue would ultimately be decided, and, apart from the Dardanelles, where the only real fighting was, or ever had been. Let us, therefore, get on with the war with all speed. Every year had brought talk of peace before Christmas, soon dwindling into columns about preparations for another winter campaign. Even our own men just landed discussed the chances of being back in Scotland for the New Year!

We were an Army brigade,—one of a series of illegitimate children working under Corps orders and lent to Divisions who didn’t evince any friendliness when it came to leave allotments, or withdrawn from our Divisional area to be hurried to some other part of the line and flung in in heaps to stiffen the barrage in some big show. Nobody loved us. Divisions saved their own people at our expense,—it was always an Army brigade which hooked in at zero hour and advanced at zero + 15, until after the Cambrai show. Ordnance wanted to know who the hell we were and why our indents had a Divisional signature and not a Corps one, or why they hadn’t both, or neither; A.S.C. explained with a straight face how we always got the best fresh meat ration; Corps couldn’t be bothered with us, until there was a show brewing; Army were polite but incredulous.

The immortal Pyecroft recommends the purchase of a ham as a sure means of seeing life. As an alternative I suggest joining an Army brigade.

5

In the old days of trench warfare the ArmentiÈres front was known as the peace sector. The town itself, not more than three thousand yards from the Hun, was full of happy money-grubbing civilians who served you an excellent dinner and an equally excellent bottle of wine, or, if it was clothes you sought, directed you to Burberry’s, almost as well installed as in the Haymarket. Divisional infantry used it as a rest billet. Many cook’s carts ambled peacefully along the cobbled streets laden with eggs, vegetables and drinks for officers’ messes. Now and then a rifle was fired in the front line resulting, almost, in a Court of Enquiry. Three shells in three days was considered a good average, a trench mortar a gross impertinence.

Such was the delightful picture drawn for us by veterans who heard we were going there.

The first step was the attaching of so many officers and N.C.O.’s to a Divisional battery in the line for “instruction.” The Captain and Pip Don went up first and had a merry week. The Major and I went up next and heard the tale of their exploits. The battery to which we were attached, in command of a shell-shocked Major, was in a row of houses, in front of a smashed church on the fringe of the town, and I learnt to take cover or stand still at the blast of a whistle which meant aeroplanes; saw a fighting map for the first time; an S.O.S. board in a gun pit and the explanation of retaliation targets; read the Divisional Defence Scheme through all its countless pages and remained in statu quo; went round the front-line trench and learned that a liaison officer didn’t take his pyjamas on raid nights; learned also that a trench mortar bombardment was a messy, unpleasant business; climbed rung by rung up a dark and sooty chimney, or was hauled up in a coffin-like box, to a wooden deck fitted with seats and director heads and telescopes and gazed down for the first time on No Man’s Land and the Hun trench system and as far as the eye could reach in his back areas, learning somewhat of the difficulties of flank observation. Every day of that week added depths to the conviction of my exceeding ignorance. Serbia had been nothing like this. It was elementary, child’s play. The Major too uttered strange words like calibration, meteor corrections, charge corrections. A memory of Salonica came back to me of a huge marquee in which we had all sat and listened to a gilded staff officer who had drawn diagrams on a blackboard and juggled with just such expressions while we tried hard not to go to sleep in the heat; and afterwards the Battery Commanders had argued it and decided almost unanimously that it was “all right for schools of gunnery but not a damn bit o’ use in the field.” To the Major, however, these things seemed as ordinary as whisky and pickles.

I came to the conclusion that the sooner I began to learn something the better. It wasn’t easy because young Pip Don had the hang of it all, so he and the Major checked each other’s figures while I looked on, vainly endeavouring to follow. There was never any question as to which of us ought to have had the second pip. However it worked itself out all right because, owing to the Major, he got his captaincy before I did, which was the best possible thing that could have happened, for I then became the Major’s right-hand man and felt the responsibility of it.

At the end of our week of instruction the brigade went into action, two batteries going to the right group, two to the left. The group consisted of the Divisional batteries, trench mortar batteries, the 60-pounders and heavy guns attached like ourselves. We were on the left, the position being just in front of a 4.5 howitzer battery and near the Lunatic Asylum.

It was an old one, four gun pits built up under a row of huge elms, two being in a row of houses. The men slept in bunks in the pits and houses; for a mess we cleaned out a room in the chÂteau at the corner which had been sadly knocked about, and slept in the houses near the guns. The chÂteau garden was full of lilac and roses, the beds all overgrown with weeds and the grass a jungle, but still very beautiful. Our zone had been allotted and our own private chimney O.P.—the name of which I have forgotten—and we had a copy of that marvellous defence scheme.

Then for a little we found ourselves in the routine of trench warfare,—tours of duty at the O.P. on alternate days and keeping a detailed log book in its swaying deck, taking our turn weekly to supply a liaison officer with the infantry who went up at dark, dined in their excellent mess, slept all night in the signalling officer’s bunk, and returned for a shave and a wash after breakfast next morning; firing retaliation salvos at the call of either the O.P. or the infantry; getting up rations and ammunition and letters at a regular hour every night; sending off the countless “returns” which are the curse of soldiering; and quietly feeling our feet.

The O.P. was in an eastern suburb called Houplines, some twenty minutes’ walk along the tram lines. At dawn one had reached it with two signallers and was looking out from the upper deck upon an apparently peaceful countryside of green fields splashed yellow with mustard patches, dotted with sleepy cottages, from whose chimneys smoke never issued, woods and spinneys in all the glory of their spring budding running up on to the ridge, the Aubers ridge. The trenches were an intricate series of gashes hidden by Nature with poppies and weeds. Then came a grim brown space unmarked by any trench, tangled with barbed wire, and then began the repetition of it all except for the ridge at our own trenches. The early hours were chilly and misty and one entered in the log book, “6 a.m. Visibility nil.”

But with the sun the mist rolled up like a blind at one’s window and the larks rocketed into the clear blue as though those trenches were indeed deserted. Away on the left was a town, rising from the curling river in terraces of battered ruins, an inexpressible desolation, silent, empty, dead. Terrible to see that gaping skeleton of a town in the flowering countryside. Far in the distance, peeping above the ridge and visible only through glasses, was a faint pencil against the sky—the great factory chimney outside Lille.

Peace seemed the keynote of it all in the soft perfumed heat of that early summer. Yet eyes looked steadily out from every chimney and other eyes from the opposite ridge; and with just a word down the wire trenches went in smoking heaps, houses fell like packs of cards touched by a child’s finger, noise beat upon the brain and Death was the master whom we worshipped, upon whose altar we made bloody sacrifice.

We hadn’t been there much more than a week when we had our first hint of the hourly reality of it. The third subaltern, who hadn’t properly recovered from the effect of his wound, was on his way up to the O.P. one morning and had a misadventure with a shell. He heard it coming, a big one, and sought refuge in the nearest house. The shell unfortunately selected the same house.

When the dust had subsided and the ruins had assumed their final shape the subaltern emerged, unwounded, but unlike his former self.—The doctor diagnosed shell shock and the work went on without him.

It seemed as though that were the turning point in the career of the peace sector.

The Hun began a leisurely but persistent destruction of chimneys with five-nines. One heard the gun in the distance, not much more than the popping of a champagne cork at the other end of the Carlton Grill. Some seconds later you thought you heard the inner circle train come in at Baker Street. Dust choked you, the chimney rocked in the frightful rush of wind, followed by a soul-shaking explosion,—and you looked through the black aperture of the chimney to see a pillar of smoke and falling earth spattering down in the sunshine. And from the lower deck immediately beneath you came the voice of the signaller, “They ought to give us sailor suits up ’ere, sir!”

And passing a finger round the inside of your sticky collar which seemed suddenly a little tight, you sat down firmly again and said, “Yes.—Is the steward about?”

Within sixty seconds another champagne cork popped. Curse the Carlton Grill!

In addition to the delights of the O.P. the Hun “found” the battery. It happened during the week that the Captain came up to have a look round and in the middle of the night. I was sleeping blissfully at liaison and returned next morning to find a most unpleasant smell of cordite hanging about, several houses lying on the pavement, including the one Pip Don and I shared, great branches all over the road and one gun pit looking somewhat bent. It appeared that Pip Don had spent the remainder of the night rounding up gunners in his pyjamas. No one was hurt. The Captain returned to the wagon line during the course of the morning.

Having found us, the Hun put in a few hundred rounds whenever he felt bored,—during the 9 a.m. parade, at lunch time, before tea and at the crack of dawn. The old red garden wall began to look like a GruyÈre cheese, the road was all pockmarked, the gun pits caught fire and had to be put out, the houses began to fall even when there was no shelling and it became a very unhealthy corner. Through it all the Major was a tower of strength. So long as he was there the shelling didn’t seem to matter, but if he were absent one didn’t quite know whether to give the order to clear for the time being or stick it out. The Hun’s attentions were not by any means confined to our position. The systematic bombardment of the town had begun and it became the usual thing to hear a horrible crackling at night and see the whole sky red. The Major of one of our batteries was killed, the senior subaltern badly wounded and several of their guns knocked out by direct hits. We were lucky.

6

Meanwhile the Right Group, who had been watching this without envy from the undisturbed calm of the countryside, decided to make a daylight raid by way of counter-attraction and borrowed us for the occasion. The Major and I went down to reconnoitre a battery position and found a delightful spot behind a hedge under a row of spreading elms. Between the two, camouflage was unnecessary and, as a cobbled road ran immediately in front of the hedge, there was no danger of making any tracks. It was a delightful position with a farmhouse two hundred yards along the road. The relief of getting out of the burning city, of not having to dodge shells at unexpected moments, of knowing that the rations and ammunition could come up without taking a twenty to one chance of being scuppered!

The raid was just like any other raid, except that it happened to be the first barrage we fired, the first barrage table we worked out, the first time we used the 106 fuse, and the first time that at the eleventh hour we were given the task, in which someone else had failed, of cutting the wire. I had been down with the Major when he shot the battery in,—and hadn’t liked it. In places there was no communication trench at all and we had to crawl on our bellies over a chaos of tumbled earth and revetments in full view of any sniper, and having to make frequent stops because the infernal signaller would lag behind and turn off. And a few hours before the show the Major was called upon to go down there and cut the wire at all costs. Pip Don was signalling officer. He and every available signaller, stacks of wire and lamps, spread themselves in a living chain between the Major and the front-line trench and me at the battery. Before going the Major asked me if I had the barrage at my finger tips. I had. Then if he didn’t get back in time, he said, I could carry out the show all right? I could,—and watched him go with a mouth full of bitter curses against the Battery Commander who had failed to cut that wire. My brain drew lurid pictures of stick-bombs, minnies, pineapples, pip-squeaks and five-nines being the reason why the Major wouldn’t get back “in time.” And I sat down by the telephonist, praying for the call that would indicate at least his safe arrival in the front-line trench.

Beside every gun lay a pile of 106 fuses ready. Orders were to go on firing if every German plane in the entire Vaterland came over.—Still they weren’t through on the ’phone!

I went along from gun to gun, making sure that everything was all right and insisting on the necessity of the most careful laying, stopping from time to time to yell to the telephonist “Through yet?” and getting a “No, sir” every time that almost made me hear those cursed minnies dropping on the Major. At last he called up. The tension was over. We had to add a little for the 106 fuse but each gun was registered on the wire within four rounds. The Major was a marvel at that. Then the shoot began.

Aeroplanes came winging over, regardless of our Archies. But we, regardless of the aeroplanes, were doing “battery fire 3 secs.” as steadily as if we were on Salisbury Plain, getting from time to time the order, “Five minutes more right.” We had three hundred rounds to do the job with and only about three per gun were left when the order “Stop” arrived. I stopped and hung on to the ’phone. The Major’s voice, coming as though from a million miles away, said, “Napoo wire. How many more rounds?”

“Three per gun, sir.”

“Right.—All guns five degrees more right for the onlooker, add two hundred, three rounds gun fire.”

I made it so, received the order to stand down, put the fitter and the limber gunners on to sponging out,—and tried to convince myself that all the noise down in front was miles away from the Major and Pip Don.—It seemed years before they strolled in, a little muddy but as happy as lambs.

It occurred to me then that I knew something at least of what our women endured at home every day and all day,—just one long suspense, without even the compensation of doing anything.

The raid came off an hour or so later like clockwork, without incident. Not a round came back at us and we stood down eventually with the feeling of having put in a good day’s work.

We were a very happy family in those days. The awful discouragement of Limerick had lifted. Bombardments and discomforts were subjects for humour, work became a joy, “crime” in the gun line disappeared and when the time arrived for sending the gunners down to the wagon line for a spell there wasn’t one who didn’t ask if he might be allowed to stay on. It was due entirely to the Major. For myself I can never be thankful enough for having served under him. He came at a time when one didn’t care a damn whether one were court-martialled and publicly disgraced. One was “through” with the Army and cared not a curse for discipline or appearances. With his arrival all that was swept away without a word being said. Unconsciously he set a standard to which one did one’s utmost to live, and that from the very moment of his arrival. One found that there was honour in the world and loyalty, that duty was not a farce. In some extraordinary way he embodied them all, forcing upon one the desire for greater self-respect; and the only method of acquiring it was effort, physical and mental, in order to get somewhere near his high standard. I gave him the best that was in me. When he left the brigade, broken in health by the ceaseless call upon his own effort, he wrote me a letter. Of all that I shall take back with me to civil life from the Army that letter is what I value most.

7

We had all cherished the hope that we had seen the last of the town; that Right Group, commanded by our own colonel, would keep us in our present position.

There was a distinct drop in the mental temperature when, the raid over, we received the order to report back to Left Group. But we still clung to the hope that we might be allowed to choose a different gun position. That avenue of trees was far too accurately pin-pointed by the Hun. Given, indeed, that there were many other places from which one could bring just as accurate and concentrated fire to bear on our part of the zone, it was criminal folly to order us back to the avenue. That, however, was the order. It needed a big effort to find any humour in it.

We hooked in and pulled out of that peaceful raid position with a sigh of regret and bumped our way back over the cobbles through the burning town, keeping a discreet distance between vehicles. The two houses which had been the emplacements of the left section were unrecognizable as gun pits, so we used the other four pits and put the left section forward in front of the Asylum under camouflage. Not less than ten balloons looked straight down on the gun muzzles. The detachment lived in a cellar under the Asylum baths.

Then Pip Don got his captaincy and went to another battery, to the safety and delights of the wagon line. One missed him horribly. We got a new subaltern who had never been out before but who was as stout as a lion. Within a few days our Captain was sent back ill and I followed Pip Don to the wagon lines as Captain in my own battery, a most amazing stroke of luck. We foregathered in a restaurant at Estaires and held a celebration dinner together, swearing that between us we would show the finest teams and the best harness in France, discussing the roads we meant to build through the mud, the improvements we were instantly going to start in the horse standings.

Great dreams that lasted just three days! Then his Major went on leave and he returned to command the battery, within five hundred yards of ours. The following day I was hurriedly sent for to find the whole world reeking with gas, mustard gas. Everybody had streaming eyes and noses. Within three minutes I was as bad as the rest.

How anybody got through the next days I don’t know. Four days and nights it lasted, one curious hissing rain of shells which didn’t burst with a crash but just uttered a little pop, upon which the ground became spattered with yellow liquid and a greyish fog spread round about. Five-nines, seventeen-inch, high explosive and incendiary shells were mixed in with the gas. Communications went wholesale. Fires roared in every quarter of the town. Hell was let loose and always the gas choked and blinded. Hundreds of civilians died of it although they had previously been warned repeatedly to clear out. The conviction was so strong that ArmentiÈres was the peace sector that the warnings were disregarded.

The howitzer battery behind us had been reinforced with ninety men and two officers the day before the show started. After that first night one officer was left. He had been up a chimney O.P. all night. The rest went away again in ambulance wagons. It was a holocaust, a shambles. A colossal attack was anticipated, and as all communications had gone the signallers were out in gas masks all over the town, endeavouring to repair lines broken in a hundred places, and a constant look-out was kept for S.O.S. signals from the infantry.

Except when shooting all our men were kept underground in gas masks, beating the gas away with “flappers.” The shelling was so ceaseless and violent round about the position that when men were sent from one section to another with messages they went in couples, their departure being telephoned to the section. If their arrival was not reported within ten minutes a search party was sent to find them. To put one’s head above ground at any moment of day or night was to take one’s life in one’s hands. Ammunition went up, and gun pits caught fire and the rain of shells never ceased. To get to the O.P. one had to fling oneself flat in a ditch countless times, always with an ear stretched for the next shell. From minute to minute it was a toss-up, and blackened corpses and screaming, mangled wounded left a bloody trail in the stinking, cobbled streets. The peace sector!

Was it just a Boche measure to prevent us from using the town as billets any more? Or was it a retaliation for the taking of the Messines Ridge which we had watched from our chimney not many weeks before, watched in awe and wonder, thanking God we were not taking part in that carnage? The unhealthy life and the unceasing strain told even on the Major. We were forced to live by the light of candles in a filthy cellar beneath the chÂteau, snatching uneasy periods of rest when one lay on a bunk with goggles on one’s smarting eyes, breathing with labour, listening to the heavy thud of shells up above and the wheezing and sneezing of the unfortunate signallers, getting up and going about one’s work in a sort of stupor, dodging shells rather by instinct than reason and tying up wounded with a dull sickness at the pit of one’s stomach.

But through it all one’s thoughts of home intertwined with the reek of death like honeysuckle with deadly nightshade, as though one’s body were imprisoned in that foul underground hole while one’s mind soared away and refused to come back. It was all a strange dream, a clammy nightmare. Letters came, filled with all the delicious everyday doings of another world, filling one’s brain with a scent of verbena and briar rose, like the cool touch of a woman’s hands on the forehead of a man in delirium.

8

On the morning of the fifth day the gas shelling ceased and the big stuff became spasmodic,—concentrations of twenty minutes’ duration.

One emerged into the sun, sniffing carefully. The place was even more unrecognizable than one had imagined possible. The chÂteau still stood but many direct hits had filled the garden with blocks of stone. The Asylum was a mass of ruins, the grounds pitted with shell holes. The town itself was no longer a place to dine and shop. A few draggled inhabitants slunk timidly about like rats, probing the debris of what had once been their homes. The cobbled streets were great pits where seventeen-inch shells had landed, half filled again with the houses which had toppled over on either side. The hotels, church and shops in the big square were gutted by fire, great beams and house fronts blocking the roadway. Cellars were blown in and every house yawned open to the sky. In place of the infantry units and transports clattering about the streets was a desolate silent emptiness punctuated by further bombardments and the echoing crash of falling walls. And, over all, that sickly smell of mustard.

It was then that the Left Group Commander had a brain wave and ordered a trial barrage on the river Lys in front of Frelinghein. It was about as mad a thing as making rude noises at a wounded rhinoceros, given that every time a battery fired the Boche opened a concentration.

Pip Don had had three seventeen-inch in the middle of his position. Nothing much was found of one gun and its detachment except a head and a boot containing a human foot.

The Group Commander had given the order, however, and there was nothing to do but to get on with it.—

The barrage was duly worked out. It was to last eighteen minutes with a certain number of lifts and switches. The Group Commander was going to observe it from one of the chimneys.

My job was to look after the left section in the open in front of the Asylum. Ten minutes before zero I dived into the cellar under the baths breathless, having dodged three five-nines. There I collected the men and gathered them under cover of the doorway. There we waited for a minute to see where the next would burst. It hit a building twenty-five yards away.

“Now!” said I, “double!” and we ran, jumping shell holes and flinging ourselves flat for one more five-nine. The guns were reached all right, the camouflage pulled back and everything made ready for action. Five Hun balloons gazed down at us straight in front, and three of his aeroplanes came and circled low over our heads, and about every minute the deafening crash of that most demoralizing five-nine burst just behind us. I lay down on the grass between the two guns and gazed steadfastly at my wrist watch.

“Stand by!”

The hands of the Numbers 3 stole out to the handles of the firing lever.

“Fire!”

The whole of ArmentiÈres seemed to fire at once. The Group Commander up in his chimney ought to have been rather pleased. Four rounds per gun per minute was the rate. Then at zero plus one I heard that distant pop of Hun artillery and with the usual noise the ground heaved skyward between the two guns just in front. It wasn’t more than twelve and a half yards away. The temptation to run made me itch all over.

Pop! it went again. My forehead sank on to my wrist watch.

A good bracket, twelve and a half yards behind, and again lumps of earth spattered on to my back. The itch became a disease. The next round, according to all the laws of gunnery, ought to fall between my collar and my waist.—

I gave the order to lift, straining my ears.

There came no pop. I held my breath so that I might hear better,—and only heard the thumping of my heart. We lifted again and again.—

I kept them firing for three full seconds after the allotted time before I gave the order to cease fire. The eighteen minutes—lifetimes—were over and that third pop didn’t come till we had stopped. Then having covered the guns we ran helter-skelter, each man finding his own way to the cellar through the most juicy bombardment we’d heard for quite twenty-four hours.

Every man answered to his name in the cellar darkness and there was much laughter and tobacco smoke while we got back our breath.

Half an hour later their bombardment ceased. The sergeant and I went back to have a look at the guns. Number 5 was all right. Number 6, however, had had a direct hit, one wheel had burnt away and she lay on her side, looking very tired.

I don’t know how many other guns had been knocked out in the batteries taking part, but, over and above the value of the ammunition, that trial barrage cost at least one eighteen-pounder! And but for a bit of luck would have cost the lives of the detachment.

9

The Major decided to move the battery and gained the reluctant consent of the Group Commander who refused to believe that there had been any shelling there till he saw the gun lying burnt and smashed and the pits burnt and battered. The Hun seemed to take a permanent dislike to the Asylum and its neighbourhood. It may have been coincidence but any time a man showed there a rain of shells chivvied him away. It took the fitter and the detachment about seven trips before they got a new wheel on, and at any hour of day or night you could bet on at least a handful of four-twos. The gas was intermittent.

At four o’clock in the morning after a worrying night when I had gone out twice to extinguish gun pits reported on fire, the Major announced that he was going to get the gun out and disappeared out of the cellar into the shell-lit darkness.

Two hours later he called up from Group Headquarters and told me to get the other out and take her to Archie Square, a square near the station, so-called because a couple of anti-aircraft guns had used it as an emplacement in the peace days. With one detachment on each drag rope we ran the gauntlet in full daylight of a four-two bombardment, rushing shell holes and what had once been flower beds, keeping at a steady trot, the sweat pouring off us.

The Major met us in Archie Square and we went back to our cellar for breakfast together.

Of the alternative positions one section was in Chapelle d’ArmentiÈres. We hoped great things of it. It looked all right, pits being built in the back yards of a row of small houses, with plenty of trees for cover and lots of fruit for the men,—raspberries, plums, and red currants. Furthermore the shell holes were all old. The only crab about it was getting there. Between us and it were two much-shelled spots called Sandbag Corner and Snow Corner. Transports used to canter past them at night and the Hun had an offensive habit of dropping barrages on both of them any time after dark. But there was a place called Crown Prince House at Sandbag Corner and I fancy he used this as a datum point. While the left section went straight on to the Chapelle the other two turned to the right at Snow Corner and were to occupy some houses just along the road and a garden next to them under camouflage.

I shall not forget the night of that move in a hurry. In the afternoon the Major returned to the battery at tea time. There was no shelling save our own anti-aircraft, and perfect sunshine.

“The teams are due at ten o’clock,” said he. “The Hun will start shelling precisely at that time. We will therefore move now. Let us function.” We functioned!

The battery was called together and the nature of the business explained. Each detachment pulled down the parados in the rear of the gun pits and such part of the pit itself as was necessary to allow the gun to come out,—no light task because the pits had been built to admit the gun from the front. As soon as each reported ready double detachments were told off to the drag ropes and the gun, camouflaged with branches, was run out and along the lane and round the corner of the chÂteau. There they were all parked, one by one. Then the ammunition was brought, piles of it. Then all the gun stores and kits.

At ten o’clock the teams were heard at the other end of the cobbled street. A moment later shells began to burst on the position, gun fire. From the cover afforded by the chÂteau and the wall we loaded up without casualty and hooked in, bits of shell and wall flying over our heads viciously.

I took charge of the left section in Archie Square. The vehicles were packed, dixies tied on underneath. The Major was to follow with the four guns and the other subaltern at ten minutes’ interval.

Keeping fifty yards between vehicles I set off, walking in front of the leading gun team. We clattered along the cobbled streets, rattling and banging. The station was being bombarded. We had to go over the level crossing a hundred yards or so in rear of it. I gave the order to trot. A piece of shell sent up a shower of sparks in front of the rear gun team. The horses bucked violently and various dixies fell off, but I kept on until some distance to a flank under the houses. The dixies were rescued and re-tied. There was Sandbag Corner to navigate yet, and Snow Corner. It was horribly dark, impossible to see shell holes until you were into them, and all the time shells were bursting in every direction. The road up to the two Corners ran straight towards the Hun, directly enfiladed by him. We turned into it at a walk and were half-way along when a salvo fell round Crown Prince House just ahead. I halted immediately, wondering where in heaven’s name the next would fall, the horses snorting and prancing at my back. For a couple of minutes there was a ragged burst of gun fire while we stood with the bits missing us. Then I gave the order to trot. The horses needed no encouragement. I could only just keep in front, carrying maps and a torch and with most of my equipment on. We carried on past Crown Prince House, past Sandbag Corner and walked again, blown and tottering, towards Snow Corner, and only just got past it when a barrage dropped right on the cross-roads. It was there that the Major would have to turn to the right with his four guns presently. Please God it would stop before he came along.

We weren’t very far behind the support lines now and the pop-pop-pop, pop-pop-pop of machine guns was followed by the whistling patter of bullets. I kept the teams as close under the houses as I dared. There was every kind of devilment to bring a horse down, open drains, coils of tangled wire, loose debris. Eventually we reached the Chapelle and the teams went off at the trot as soon as the ammunition was dumped and the kits were off.

Then in the black night we heaved and hauled the guns into their respective pits and got them on to their aiming posts and S.O.S. lines.

It was 3 a.m. before I got back to the new headquarters, a house in an orchard, and found the Major safe and sound.

A couple of days later the Major was ordered to a rest camp and at a moment’s notice I found myself in command of the battery. It was one of the biggest moments of my life. Although I had gone down to take the Captain’s place my promotion hadn’t actually gone through and I was still a subaltern, faced with the handling of six guns at an extremely difficult moment and with the lives of some fifty men in my hands, to say nothing of the perpetual responsibility to the infantry in the front line.

It was only when the Major had said good-bye and I was left that I began to realize just how greatly one had depended on him. All the internal arrangements which he had handled so easily that they seemed no trouble loomed up as insurmountable difficulties—returns, ammunition, rations, relieving the personnel—all over and above the constant worry of gun detachments being shelled out, lines being cut, casualties being got away. It was only then that I realized what a frightful strain he must have endured during those days of continual gas and bombardment, the feeling of personal responsibility towards every single man, the vital necessity through it all of absolute accuracy of every angle and range, lest by being flustered or careless one should shoot one’s own infantry, the nights spent with one ear eternally on the telephone and the added strain of sleeplessness.—A lonely job, Battery Commander.

I realized, too, what little use I had been to him. Carrying out orders, yes, but not really taking any of the weight off his shoulders.

The insignificance of self was never so evident as that first night with my ear to the ’phone, all the night noises accentuated in the darkness, the increasing machine-gun fire which might mean an attack, the crashing of shells which might get my supply wagons on their way back, the jump when the ’phone buzzed suddenly, making my heart leap against my ribs, only to put me through to Group for an order to send over thirty rounds on a minnie firing in C 16 d o 4.—It was good to see the blackness turn to grey and recognize objects once more in the room, to know that at last the infantry were standing down and to sink at last into deep sleep as the grey became rose and the sun awoke.

Do the men ever realize, I wonder, that the Major who snaps out orders, who curses so freely, who gives them extra guards and docks their pay, can be a human being like themselves whose one idea is their comfort and safety, that they may strafe the Hun and not get strafed?

It was my first experience in handling subalterns, too, and I came to see them from a new point of view. Hitherto one’s estimation of them had been limited by their being good fellows or not. The question of their knowledge or ignorance hadn’t mattered. One could always give them a hand or do the thing oneself. Now it was reversed. Their knowledge, working capabilities and stout-heartedness came first. Their being good fellows was secondary, but helpful. The most ignorant will learn more in a week in the line than in ten weeks in a gunnery school.

10

The first few days in the new position were calm. It gave one time to settle down. We did a lot of shooting and apart from a spare round or two in our direction nothing came back in return. The Hun was still plastering the Asylum and the avenue at all times of day, to our intense joy. The more he shelled it the more we chuckled. One felt that the Major had done Fritz in the eye. So we gathered plums and raspberries in the warm sun, rejoicing that the horrible smell of mustard gas was no more. There was a fly in the ointment, of course. It consisted of several thousand rounds of ammunition in the Asylum which we were ordered to salvage. The battery clerk, a corporal of astounding stout-heartedness who had had countless escapes by an inch already in the handling of it, and who subsequently became one of the best sergeants in the battery, undertook to go and see what could be done. He took with him the fitter, a lean Scot, who was broken-hearted because he had left a file there and who wanted to go and scratch about the ruins to try and recover it. These two disappeared into the Asylum during a momentary lull. Before they returned the Hun must have sent in about another fifteen hundred rounds, all big stuff. They came in hot and covered with brick dust. The fitter had got his file and showed it with joy and affection. The corporal had made a rough count of the rounds and estimated that at least a couple of hundred had “gone up” or were otherwise rendered useless.

To my way of thinking it would have been manslaughter to have sent teams to get the stuff away, so I decided to let time solve the problem and leave well alone. Eventually it did solve itself. Many weeks later another battery occupied the position (Poor devils. It still reeked of gas) and I had the pleasure of showing the Battery Commander where the ammunition was and handing it over.

Meanwhile the Boche had “found” the left and centre sections. In addition to that the Group Commander conceived a passion to experiment with guns in the front-line trenches, to enfilade the enemy over open sights at night and generally to put the fear of God into him. Who more suitable than the Army brigade battery commanded by that subaltern?

I was sent for and told all about it, and sent to reconnoitre suitable positions. Seeing that the enemy had all the observation and a vast preponderance of artillery I did all in my power to dissuade the Commander. He had been on active service, however, before I was born—he told me so—and had forgotten more things than I should ever know. He had, indeed, forgotten them.

The long and short of it was that I took a subaltern with me, and armed with compasses and trench maps, we studied the whole zone at distances varying from three to five hundred yards from the enemy front-line trench. The best place of all happened to be near Battalion Headquarters. Needless to say, the Colonel ordered me off.

“You keep your damn things away. There’s quite enough shelling here without your planting a gun. Come and have a drink.”

Eventually, however, we got two guns “planted” with cover for the detachments. It was an absolute waste of guns. The orders were only to fire if the enemy came over the top by day and on special targets by night. The difficulty of rationing them was extreme, it made control impossible from battery headquarters, because the lines went half a dozen times a day and left me only two sections to do all the work with.

The only thing they ever fired at was a very near balloon one afternoon. Who gave the order to fire remains a mystery. The sergeant swore the infantry Colonel gave it.

My own belief is that it was a joy shoot on the sergeant’s part. He was heartily cursed for his pains, didn’t hit the balloon, and within twenty-four hours the gun was knocked out. The area was liberally shelled, to the discomfort of the infantry, so if the Colonel did give the order, he had only himself to thank for the result.

The headquarters during this time was an odd round brick building, like a pagoda in the middle of a narrow orchard. A high red brick wall surrounded the orchard which ran down to the road. At the road edge were two houses completely annihilated. Plums, greengages, raspberries and red currants were in abundance. The signallers and servants were in dug-outs outside the wall. Curiously enough, this place was not marked on the map. Nor did the Hun seem to have it on his aeroplane photographs. In any case, although he shelled round about, I can only remember one which actually burst inside the walls.

Up at Chapelle d’ArmentiÈres the left section was almost unrecognizable. Five-nines had thumped it out of all shape, smashed down the trees, ploughed up the garden and scattered the houses into the street. The detachment spent its time day and night in clearing out into neighbouring ditches and dug-outs, and coming back again. They shot between whiles, neither of the guns having been touched, and I don’t think they slept at all. None of them had shaved for days.

As regards casualties we were extraordinarily lucky. Since leaving the town not a man had been hit or gassed. For the transport at night I had reconnoitred a road which avoided the town entirely and those dangerous cross-roads, and took them right through the support line, within a quarter of a mile of the Boche. The road was unshelled, and only a few machine-gun bullets spat on it from time to time. So they used it nightly, and not a horse or driver was touched.

Then the Right Group had another raid and borrowed us again. The white house and the orchard which we had used before were unoccupied. I decided to squeeze up a bit and get all six guns in. The night of the move was a colossal undertaking. The teams were late, and the Hun chose to drop a gas barrage round us. More than that, in the afternoon I had judged my time and dodged in between two bombardments to visit the left section. They were absolutely done in, so tired that they could hardly keep their eyes open. The others were little better, having been doing all the shooting for days. However, I ordered them to vacate the left section and come along to me at Battery Headquarters for a rest before the night’s work. They dragged themselves there, and fell asleep in heaps in the orchard in the wet. The subaltern and the sergeant came into the building, drank a cup of tea each and filled the place with their snores. So I sent for another sergeant and suggested that he and his men, who had had a brief rest that day, should go and get the left section guns out while these people handled his as best they could. He jumped at it and swore he’d get the guns out, begging me to keep my teams well to the side of the road. If he had to canter they were coming out, and he was going to ride the lead horse himself,—splendid fellow.

Then I collected the subalterns and detailed them for the plan of campaign. The left section man said he was going with his guns. So I detailed the junior to see the guns into the new positions, and send me back the ammunition wagons as he emptied them. The third I kept with the centre section. The corporal clerk was to look after the headquarters. I was to function between the lot.

The teams should have been up at 9 p.m. They didn’t arrive till ten, by which time the gas hung about thick, and people were sneezing right and left. Then they hung up again because of a heavy shelling at the corner on the way to the left section. However, they got through at last, and after an endless wait, that excellent sergeant came trotting back with both guns intact. We had, meanwhile yanked out the centre section and sent them back. The forward guns came back all right from the trenches, but no ammunition wagons or G.S. returned from the position, although filled by us ages before and sent off.

So I got on a bicycle and rode along to see what the trouble was. It was a poisonous road, pitch dark, very wet and full of shell holes. I got there to find a column of vehicles standing waiting all mixed up, jerked the bicycle into a hedge and went downstairs to find the subaltern.

There was the Major! Was I pleased?—I felt years younger. However, this was his night off. I was running the show. “Carry on, Old Thing,” said he.

So I went out into the chaotic darkness and began sorting things out. Putting the subaltern in charge of the ammunition I took the guns. It was a herculean task to get those six bundooks through the wet and spongy orchard with men who were fresh. With these men it was asking the impossible. But they did it, at the trot.

You know the sort of thing—“Take the strain—together—heave! Together—heave! Now keep her going! Once more—heave! Together—heave! and again—heave! Easy all! Have a blow—Now look here, you fellows, you must wait for the word and put your weight on together. Heels into the mud and lean on it, but lean together, all at the same moment, and she’ll go like a baby’s pram. Now then, come on and I’ll bet you a bottle of Bass all round that you get her going at a canter if only you’ll heave together—Take the strain—together—heave! Ter-rot! Canter! Come on now, like that—splendid,—and you owe me a bottle of Bass all round.”

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? but oh, my God, to see those poor devils, dropping with fatigue, putting their last grunting ounce on to it, with always just one more heave left! Magnificent fellows, who worked till they dropped, and then staggered up again, in the face of gas and five-nines, and went on shooting till they were dead,—they’ve won this war for us if anybody has, these Tommies who don’t know when they’re beaten, these “simple soldiers,” as the French call them, who grouse like hell but go on working whether the rations come up or whether they don’t, until they’re senseless from gas or stop a shell and get dropped into a hole in an army blanket. These are the men who have saved England and the world, these,—and not the gentlemen at home who make fortunes out of munitions and “war work,” and strike for more pay, not the embusquÉ who cannot leave England because he’s “indispensable” to his job, not the politicians and vote-seekers, who bolster up their parties with comfortable lies more dangerous than mustard gas, not the M.L.O.’s and R.T.O.’s and the rest of the alphabetic fraternity and Brass Hats, who live in comfort in back areas, doing a lot of brain work and filling the Staff leave boat,—not any of these, but the cursing, spitting, lousy Tommy, God save him!

The last of the guns was in by three o’clock in the morning, but there wasn’t a stitch of camouflage in the battery. However, I sent every last man to bed, having my own ideas on the question of camouflage. The subaltern and I went back to the house. The ammunition was also unloaded and the last wagon just about to depart. The servants had tea and sandwiches waiting, a perfect godsend.

“What about tracks?” The Major cocked an eye in my direction. He was fully dressed, lying on his valise. I stifled a million yawns, and spoke round a sandwich. “Old Thing and I are looking after that when it gets light.”

“Old Thing” was the centre section commander, blinking like a tired owl, a far-away expression on his face.

“And camouflage?” said the Major.

“Ditto,” said I.

The servants were told to call us in an hour’s time. I was asleep before I’d put my empty tea-cup on the ground. A thin grey light was creeping up when I was roughly shaken. I put out a boot and woke Old Thing. Speechless, we got up shivering, and went out. The tracks through the orchard were feet deep.

We planted irregular branches and broke up the wheel tracks. Over the guns was a roof of wire netting which I’d had put up a day previously. Into these we stuck trailing vine branches one by one, wet and cold. The Major appeared in the middle of the operation and silently joined forces. By half-past four the camouflage was complete. Then the Major broke the silence.

“I’m going up to shoot ’em in,” he said.

Old Thing, dozing on a gun seat, woke with a start and stared. He hadn’t been with the Major as long as I had.

“D’you mind if one detachment does the whole thing?” said I. “They’re all just about dead, but C’s got a kick left.”

The Major nodded. Old Thing staggered away, collected two signallers who looked like nothing human, and woke up C sub-section. They came one by one, like silent ghosts through the orchard, tripping over stumps and branches, sightless with sleep denied.

The Major took a signaller and went away. Old Thing and I checked aiming posts over the compass.

Fifteen minutes later the O.P. rang through, and I reported ready.

The sun came out warm and bright, and at nine o’clock we “stood down.” Old Thing and I supported each other into the house and fell on our valises with a laugh. Some one pulled off our gum boots. It must have been a servant but I don’t know. I was asleep before they were off.

The raid came off at one o’clock that night in a pouring rain. The gunners had been carrying ammunition all day after about four hours’ sleep. Old Thing and I had one. The Major didn’t have any. The barrage lasted an hour and a half, during which one sub-section made a ghastly mistake and shot for five full minutes on a wrong switch.

A raid of any size is not just a matter of saying, “Let’s go over the top to-night, and nobble a few of ’em! Shall us?”

And the other fellow in the orthodox manner says, “Let’s”—and over they go with a lot of doughty bombers, and do a lot of dirty work. I wish it were.

What really happens is this. First, the Brigade Major, quite a long way back, undergoes a brain-storm which sends showers of typewritten sheets to all sorts of Adjutants, who immediately talk of transferring to the Anti-Aircraft. Other sheets follow in due course, contradicting the first and giving also a long list of code words of a domestic nature usually, with their key. These are hotly pursued by maps on tracing paper, looking as though drawn by an imaginative child.

At this point Group Commanders, Battalion Commanders, and Battery Commanders join in the game, taking sides. Battery Commanders walk miles and miles daily along duck boards, and shoot wire in all sorts of odd places on the enemy front trench, and work out an exhaustive barrage.

Then comes a booklet, which is a sort of revision of all that has gone before, and alters the task of every battery. A new barrage table is worked out. Follows a single sheet giving zero day.

The raiders begin cutting off their buttons and blacking their faces and putting oil drums in position.

Battery wagon lines toil all night, bringing up countless extra rounds. The trench mortar people then try and cut the real bit of wire, at which the raiders will enter the enemy front line. As a rule they are unsuccessful, and only provoke a furious retaliatory bombardment along the whole sector.

Then Division begins to get excited and talks rudely to Group. Group passes it on. Next a field battery is ordered to cut that adjective wire and does.

A Gunner officer is detailed to go over the top with the raid commander. He writes last letters to his family, drinks a last whisky, puts on all his Christmas-tree, and says, “Cheero” as though going to his own funeral. It may be.

Then telephones buzz furiously in every brigade, and everybody says “Carrots” in a whisper.

You look up “Carrots” in the code book, and find it means “raid postponed 24 hours.” Everybody sits down and curses.

Another paper comes round saying that the infantry have changed the colours of all the signal rockets to be used. All gunners go on cursing.

Then comes the night! Come up to the O.P. and have a dekko with me, but don’t forget to bring your gas mask.

Single file we zigzag down the communication trenches. The O.P. is a farmhouse, or was, in which the sappers have built a brick chamber just under the roof. You climb up a ladder to get to it, and find room for just the signaller and ourselves, with a long slit through which you can watch Germany. The Hun knows it’s an O.P. He’s got a similar one facing you, only built of concrete, and if you don’t shell him he won’t shell you. But if you do shell him with a futile 18-pounder H.E. or so, he turns on a section of five-nines, and the best thing you can do is to report that it’s “snowing,” clear out quick and look for a new O.P. The chances are you won’t find one that’s any good.

It’s frightfully dark; can’t see a yard. If you want to smoke, for any sake don’t strike matches. Use a tinder. See that sort of extra dark lump, just behind those two trees—all right, poles if you like. They were trees!—Well, that’s where they’re going over.

Not a sound anywhere except the rumble of a battle away up north. Hell of a strafe apparently.

Hullo! What’s the light behind that bank of trees?—Fritz started a fire in his own lines? Doesn’t look like a fire.—It’s the moon coming up, moon, moon, so brightly shining. Pity old Pelissier turned up his toes.—Ever heard the second verse of “Au Clair de la Lune?”

(singing)

’Tis the moon all right, a corker too.—What do you make the time?—A minute to go, eh? Got your gas mask at the alert?

The moon came out above the trees and shed a cold white light on the countryside. On our side, at least, the ground was alive with men, although there wasn’t a sound or a movement. Tree stumps, blasted by shell fire, stood out stark naked. The woods on the opposite ridge threw a deep belt of black shadow. The trenches were vague uneven lines, camouflaging themselves naturally with the torn ground.

Then a mighty roar that rocked the O.P., made the ground tremble and set one’s heart thumping, and the peaceful moonlight was defiled. Bursts of flame and a thick cloud of smoke broke out on the enemy trenches. Great red flares shot up, the oil drums, staining all the sky the colour of blood. Rifle and machine-gun fire pattered like the chattering of a thousand monkeys, as an accompaniment to the roaring of lions. Things zipped past or struck the O.P. The smoke out there was so thick that the pin-points of red fire made by the bursting shells could hardly be seen. The raiders were entirely invisible.

Then the noise increased steadily as the German sky was splashed with all-coloured rockets and Verey lights and star shells, and their S.O.S. was answered. There’s a gun flash! What’s the bearing? Quick.—There she goes again!—Nine-two magnetic, that’s eighty true. Signaller! Group.—There’s another! By God, that’s some gun. Get it while I bung this through.—Hullo! Hullo, Group! O.P. speaking. Flash of enemy gun eight—0 degrees true. Another flash, a hell of a big one, what is it?—One, one, two degrees,—Yes, that’s correct. Good-bye.

Then a mighty crash sent earth and duckboards spattering on to the roof of the O.P., most unpleasantly near. The signaller put his mouth to my ear and shouted, “Brigade reports gas, sir.” Curse the gas. You can’t see anything in a mask.—Don’t smell it yet, anyhow.

Crash again, and the O.P. rocked. Damn that five-nine. Was he shooting us or just searching? Anyhow, the line of the two bursts doesn’t look quite right for us, do you think? If it hits the place, there’s not an earthly. Tiles begin rattling down off the roof most suggestively. It’s a good twenty-foot drop down that miserable ladder. Do you think his line.—Look out! She’s coming.—Crash!

God, not more than twenty yards away! However, we’re all right. He’s searching to the left of us. Where is the blighter? Can you see his flash? Wonder how our battery’s getting on?—

Our people were on the protective barrage now, much slower. The infantry had either done their job or not. Anyhow they were getting back. The noise was distinctly tailing off. The five-nine was searching farther and farther behind to our left. The smell of gas was very faint. The smoke was clearing. Not a sign of life in the trenches. Our people had ceased fire.

The Hun was still doing a ragged gun fire. Then he stopped.

A Verey light or two went sailing over in a big arc.

The moon was just a little higher, still smiling inscrutably. Silence, but for that sustained rumble up north. How many men were lying crumpled in that cold white light?

Division reported “Enemy front line was found to be unoccupied. On penetrating his second line slight resistance was encountered. One prisoner taken. Five of the enemy were killed in trying to escape. Our casualties slight.”

At the end of our barrage I called that detachment up, reduced three of them to tears and in awful gloom of spirit reported the catastrophe to the Major. He passed it on to Brigade who said they would investigate.

A day later Division sent round a report of the “highly successful raid which from the adverse weather conditions owed its success to the brilliance of the artillery barrage....”

That same morning the Colonel went to Division, the General was on leave. The Major was sent for to command the Group, and my secret hopes of the wagon line were dashed to the ground. I was a Battery Commander again in deed if not in rank.

12

The wagon line all this while had, in the charge of the sergeant-major, been cursed most bitterly by horse masters and A.D.V.S.’s who could not understand how a sergeant-major, aged perhaps thirty-nine, could possibly know as much about horse management as a new-fledged subaltern anywhere between nineteen and twenty-one.

From time to time I pottered down on a bicycle for the purpose of strafing criminals and came away each time with a prayer of thanks that there was no new-fledged infant to interfere with the sergeant-major’s methods.

On one occasion he begged me to wait and see an A.D.V.S. of sorts who was due at two o’clock that afternoon and who on his previous tour of inspection had been just about as nasty as he could be. I waited.

Let it be granted as our old enemy Euclid says that the horse standings were the worst in France—the Division of course had the decent ones—and that every effort was being made to repair them. The number of shelled houses removed bodily from the firing line to make brick standings and pathways through the mud would have built a model village. The horses were doing this work in addition to ammunition fatigues, brigade fatigues and every other sort of affliction. Assuming too that a sergeant-major doesn’t carry as much weight as a Captain (I’d got my third pip) in confronting an A.S.C. forage merchant with his iniquities, and I think every knowledgeable person admitted that our wagon line was as good as, if not better than, shall we say, any Divisional battery. Yet the veterinary expert (?) crabbed my very loyal supporter, the sergeant-major, who worked his head and his hands off day in, day out. It was displeasing,—more, childish.

In due course he arrived,—in a motor car. True, it wasn’t a Rolls-Royce, but then he was only a Colonel. But he wore a fur coat just as if it had been a Rolls-Royce. He stepped delicately into the mud, and left his temper in the car. To the man who travels in motors, a splash of mud on the boots is as offensive as the sight of a man smoking a pipe in Bond Street at eleven o’clock in the morning. It isn’t done.

I saluted and gave him good morning. He grunted and flicked a finger. Amicable relations were established.

“Are you in charge of these wagon lines?” said he.

“In theory, yes, sir.”

He didn’t quite understand, and cocked a doubtful eye at me.

I explained. “You see, sir, the B.C. and I are carrying on the war. He’s commanding Group and I’m commanding the battery. But we’ve got the fullest confidence in the sergeant-maj.—”

Was it an oath he swallowed? Anyhow, it went down like an oyster.

The Colonel moved thus expressing his desire to look round.

I fell into step.

“Have you got a hay sieve?” said he.

“Sergeant-Major, where’s the hay sieve?” said I.

“This way, sir,” said the sergeant-major.

Two drivers were busily passing hay through it. The Colonel told them how to do it.

“Have you got wire hay racks above the horses?”

“Sergeant-Major,” said I, “have we got wire hay racks?”

“This way, sir,” said the sergeant-major.

Two drivers were stretching pieces of bale wire from pole to pole.

The Colonel asked them if they knew how to do it.

“How many horses have you got for casting?” said the Colonel.

“Do we want to cast any horses, Sergeant-Major?” said I.

“Yes, sir,” said the Sergeant-Major. “We’ve got six.”

It was a delightful morning. Every question that the Colonel asked I passed on to the sergeant-major, whose answer was ever ready. Wherever the Colonel wished to explore, there were men working.

Could a new-fledged infant unversed in the ways of the Army have accomplished it?

One of the sections was down the road, quite five minutes away. During the walk we exchanged views about the war. He confided to me that the ideal was to have in each wagon line an officer who knew no more about gunnery than that turnip, but who knew enough about horses to take advice from veterinary officers.

In return I told him that there ought not to be any wagon lines, that the horse was effete in a war of this nature, that over half the man-power of the country was employed in grooming and cleaning harness, half the tonnage of the shipping taken up in fetching forage, and that there was more strafing over a bad turn-out than if a battery had shot its own infantry for four days running.

The outcome of it all was pure farce. He inspected the remaining section and then told me he was immensely pleased with the marked improvement in the condition of the animals and the horse management generally (nothing had been altered), and that if I found myself short of labour when it came to building a new wagon line, he thought he knew where he could put his hand on a dozen useful men. Furthermore, he was going to write and tell my Colonel how pleased he was.

The sergeant-major’s face was a study!

The psychology of it is presumably the same that brings promotion to the officer who, smartly and with well-polished buttons, in reply to a question from the General, “What colour is black?” whips out like a flash, “White, sir!”

And the General nods and says, “Of course!—Smart young officer that! What’s his name?”

Infallible!

13

It is difficult to mark the exact beginnings of mental attitudes when time out there is one long action of nights and days without names. One keeps the date, because of the orders issued. For the rest it is all one. One can only trace points of view, feelings, call them what you will, as dating before or after certain outstanding events. Thus I had no idea of war until the gas bombardment in ArmentiÈres, no idea that human nature could go through such experiences and emotions and remain sane. So, once in action, I had not bothered to find the reason of it all, contenting myself merely with the profound conviction that the world was mad, that it was against human nature,—but that to-morrow we should want a full Échelon of ammunition. Even the times when one had seen death only gave one a momentary shock. One such incident will never leave me, but I cannot feel now anything of the horror I experienced at the moment.

It was at lunch one day before we had left the chÂteau. A trickle of sun filtered down into the cellar where the Major, one other subaltern and myself were lunching off bully beef and ration pickles. Every now and again an H.E. shell exploded outside, in the road along which infantry were constantly passing. One burst was followed by piercing screams. My heart gave a leap and I sprang for the stairs and out. Across the way lay three bodies, a great purple stain on the pavement, the mark of a direct hit on the wall against which one was huddled. I ran across. Their eyes were glassy, their faces black. Grey fingers curled upwards from a hand that lay back down. Then the screams came again from the corner house. I dashed in. Our corporal signaller was trying to bandage a man whose right leg was smashed and torn open, blood and loose flesh everywhere. He lay on his back, screaming. Other screams came from round the corner. I went out again and down the passage saw a man, his hands to his face, swaying backwards and forwards.

I ran to him. “Are you hit?”

He fell on to me. “My foot! Oh, my foot! Christ!”

Another officer, from the howitzer battery, came running. We formed a bandy chair and began to carry him up towards the road.

“Don’t take me up there,” he blubbered. “Don’t take me there!”

We had to. It was the only way, to step over those three black-faced corpses and into that house, where there was water and bandages. There was a padre there now and another man. I left them and returned to the cellar to telephone for an ambulance. I was cold, sick. But they weren’t our dead. They weren’t our gunners with whose faces one was familiar, who were part of our daily life. The feeling passed, and I was able to go on with the bully beef and pickles and the war.

During the weeks that followed the last raid I was to learn differently. They were harassing weeks with guns dotted all over the zone. The luck seemed to have turned, and it was next to impossible to find a place for a gun which the Hun didn’t immediately shell violently. Every gun had, of course, a different pin-point, and map work became a labour, map work and the difficulty of battery control and rationing. One’s brain was keyed incessantly up to concert pitch.

Various changes had taken place. We had been taken into Right Group and headquarters was established in a practically unshelled farm with one section beside it. Another section was right forward in the Brickstack. The third was away on the other side of the zone, an enfilade section which I handed over, lock, stock and barrel, to the section commander, who had his own O.P. in Moat Farm, and took on his own targets. We were all extremely happy, doing a lot of shooting.

One morning, hot and sunny, I had to meet the Major to reconnoitre an alternative gun position. So I sent for the enfilade section commander to come and take charge, and set out in shorts and shirt sleeves on a bicycle. The Major, another Headquarters officer and myself had finished reconnoitring, and were eating plums, when a heavy bombardment began in the direction of the battery farm. Five-nines they were in section salvos, and the earth went up in spouts, not on the farm, but mighty close. I didn’t feel anxious at first, for that subaltern had been in charge of the Chapelle section and knew all about clearing out. But the bombardment went on. The Major and the other left me, advising me to “give it a chance” before I went back.

So I rode along to an O.P. and tried to get through to the battery on the ’phone. The line was gone.

Through glasses I could see no signs of life round about the farm. They must have cleared, I thought. However, I had to get back some time or other, so I rode slowly back along the road. A track led between open fields to the farm. I walked the bicycle along this until bits of shell began flying. I lay flat. Then the bombardment slackened. I got up and walked on. Again they opened, so I lay flat again.

For perhaps half an hour bits came zooming like great stagbeetles all round, while I lay and watched.

They were on the gun position, not the farm, but somehow my anxiety wouldn’t go. After all, I was in charge of the battery, and here I was, while God knew what might have happened in the farm. So I decided to make a dash for it, and timed the bursts. At the end of five minutes they slackened and I thought I could do it. Two more crashed. I jumped on the bike, pedalled hard down the track until it was blotted out by an enormous shell hole into which I went, left the bike lying and ran to the farm gate, just as two pip-squeaks burst in the yard. I fell into the door, covered with brick dust and tiles, but unhurt.

The sound of singing came from the cellar. I called down, “Who’s there?” The servants and the corporal clerk were there. And the officer? Oh, he’d gone over to the guns to see if everybody had cleared the position. He’d given the order as soon as the bombardment began. But over at the guns the place was being chewed up.

Had he gone alone? No. One of the servants had gone with him. How long ago? Perhaps twenty minutes. Meanwhile, during question and answer, four more pip-squeaks had landed, two at the farm gate, one in the yard, one just over.

It was getting altogether too hot. I decided to clear the farm first. Two at a time, taking the word from me, they made a dash for it through the garden and the hedge to a flank, till only the corporal clerk and myself were left. We gathered the secret papers the “wind gadget,” my compass and the telephone and ran for it in our turn.

We caught the others who were waiting round the corner well to a flank. I handed the things we’d brought to the mess cook, and asked the corporal clerk if he’d come with me to make sure that the subaltern and the gunners had got away all right.

We went wide and got round to the rear of the position. Not a sign of any of the detachments in any houses round about. Then we worked our way up a hedge which led to the rear of the guns, dropping flat for shells to burst. They were more on the farm now than the guns. We reached the signal pit,—a sort of dug-out with a roof of pit props, and earth and a trench dug to the entrance.

The corporal went along the trench. “Christ!” he said, and came blindly back.

For an instant the world spun. Without seeing I saw. Then I climbed along the broken trench. A five-nine had landed on the roof of the pit and crashed everything in.

A pair of boots was sticking out of the earth.—

He had been in charge of the battery for me. From the safety of the cellar he had gone out to see if the men were all right. He had done my job!

Gunners came with shovels. In five minutes we had him out. He was still warm. The doctor was on his way. We carried him out of the shelling on a duck board. Some of the gunners went on digging for the other boy. The doctor was there by the time we’d carried him to the road. He was dead.

14

A pair of boots sticking out of the earth.

For days I saw nothing else. That jolly fellow whom I’d left laughing, sitting down to write a letter to his wife,—a pair of boots sticking out. Why? Why?

We had laid him in a cottage. The sergeant and I went back, and by the light of a candle which flickered horribly, emptied his pockets and took off his ring. How cold Death was. It made him look ten years younger.

Then we put him into an army blanket with his boots on and all his clothes. The only string we had was knotted. It took a long time to untie it. At last it was done.

A cigarette holder, a penknife, a handkerchief, the ring. I took them out with me into the moonlight, all that King and country had left of him.

What had this youngster been born for, sent to a Public School, earned his own living and married the pretty girl whose photo I had seen in the dug-out? To die like a rat in a trap, to have his name one day in the Roll of Honour and so break two hearts, and then be forgotten by his country because he was no more use to it. What was the worth of Public School education if it gave the country no higher ideal than war?—to kill or be killed. Were there no brains in England big enough to avert it? He hadn’t wanted it. He was a representative specimen. What had he joined for? Because all his pals had. He didn’t want them to call him coward. For that he had left his wife and his home, and to-morrow he would be dropped into a hole in the ground and a parson would utter words about God and eternal life.

What did it all mean? Why, because it was the “thing to do,” did we all join up like sheep in a Chicago packing yard? What right had our country—the “free country”—to compel us to live this life of filth and agony?

The men who made the law that sent us out, they didn’t come too. They were the “rudder of the nation,” steering the “Ship of State.” They’d never seen a pair of boots sticking out of the earth. Why did we bow the neck and obey other men’s wills?

Surely these conscientious objectors had a greater courage in withstanding our ridicule than we in wishing to prove our possession of courage by coming out. What was the root of this war,—honour? How can honour be at the root of dishonour, and wholesale manslaughter? What kind of honour was it that smashed up homesteads, raped women, crucified soldiers, bombed hospitals, bayoneted wounded? What idealism was ours if we took an eye for an eye? What was our civilization, twenty centuries of it, if we hadn’t reached even to the barbaric standards,—for no barbarian could have invented these atrocities. What was the festering pit on which our social system was built?

And the parson who talked of God,—is there more than one God, then, for the Germans quoted him as being on their side with as much fervour and sincerity as the parson? How reconcile any God with this devastation and deliberate killing? This war was the proof of the failure of Christ, the proof of our own failure, the failure of the civilized world. For twenty centuries the world had turned a blind eye to the foulness stirring inside it, insinuating itself into the main arteries; and now the lid was wrenched off and all the foul stench of a humbug Christian civilization floated over the poisoned world.

One man had said he was too proud to fight. We, filled with the lust of slaughter, jeered him as we had jeered the conscientious objectors. But wasn’t there in our hearts, in saner moments, a respect which we were ashamed to admit,—because we in our turn would have been jeered at? Therein lay our cowardice. Death we faced daily, hourly, with a laugh. But the ridicule of our fellow cowards, that was worse than death. And yet in our knowledge we cried aloud for Peace, who in our ignorance had cried for War. Children of impulse satiated with new toys and calling for the old ones! We would set back the clock and in our helplessness called upon the Christ whom we had crucified.

And back at home the law-makers and the old men shouted patriotically from their club fenders, “We will fight to the last man!”

The utter waste of the brown-blanketed bundle in the cottage room!

What would I not have given for the one woman to put her arms round me and hide my face against her breast and let me sob out all the bitterness in my heart?

15

From that moment I became a conscientious objector, a pacifist, a most bitter hater of the Boche whose hand it was that had wrenched the lid off the European cesspit. Illogical? If you like, but what is logic? Logically the war was justified. We crucified Christ logically and would do so again.

From that moment my mind turned and twisted like a compass needle that had lost its sense of the north. The days were an endless burden blackened by the shadow of death, filled with emptiness, bitterness and despair.

The day’s work went on as if nothing had happened. A new face took his place at the mess table, the routine was exactly the same. Only a rough wooden cross showed that he had ever been with us. And all the time we went on shooting, killing just as good fellows as he, perhaps, doing our best to do so at least. Was it honest, thinking as I did? Is it honest for a convict who doesn’t believe in prisons to go on serving his time? There was nothing to be done but go on shooting and try and forget.

But war isn’t like that. It doesn’t let you forget. It gives you a few days, or weeks, and then takes some one else. “Old Thing” was the next, in the middle of a shoot in a front line O.P.

I was lying on my bed playing with a tiny kitten while the third subaltern at the ’phone passed on the corrections to the battery. Suddenly, instead of saying “Five minutes more right,” he said, “What’s that?—Badly wounded?” and the line went.

I was on the ’phone in a flash, calling up battalion for stretcher bearers and doctors.

They brought me his small change and pencil-ends and pocketbook,—and the kitten came climbing up my leg.

The Major came back from leave—which he had got on the Colonel’s return—in time to attend Old Thing’s funeral with the Colonel and myself. Outside the cemetery a football match was going on all the time. They didn’t stop their game. Why should they? They were too used to funerals,—and it might be their turn in a day or two.

Thanks to the Major my leave came through within a week. It was like the answer to a prayer. At any price I wanted to get away from the responsibility, away from the sight of khaki, away from everything to do with war.

London was too full of it, of immaculate men and filmy girls who giggled. I couldn’t face that.

I went straight down to the little house among the beeches and pines,—an uneasy guest of long silences, staring into the fire, of bursts of violent argument, of rebellion against all existing institutions.

But it was good to watch the river flowing by, to hear it lapping against the white yacht, to hear the echo of rowlocks, flung back by the beech woods, and the wonderful whir! whir! whir! of swans as they flew down and down and away; to see little cottages with wisps of blue smoke against the brown and purple of the distant woods, not lonely ruins and sticks; to see the feathery green moss and the watery rays of a furtive sun through the pines, not smashed and torn by shells; at night to watch the friendly lights in the curtained windows and hear the owls hooting to each other unafraid and let the rest and peace sink into one’s soul; to shirk even the responsibility of deciding whether one should go for a walk or out in the dinghy, or stay indoors, but just to agree to anything that was suggested.

To decide anything was for out there, not here where war did not enter in.

Fifteen dream days, like a sudden strong whiff of verbena or honeysuckle coming out of an envelope. For the moment one shuts one’s eyes,—and opens them again to find it isn’t true. The sound of guns is everywhere.

So with that leave. I found myself in France again, trotting up in the mud and rain to report my arrival as though I’d never been away. It was all just a dream to try and call back.

16

Everything was well with the battery. My job was to function with all speed at the building of the new horse lines. Before going on leave I had drawn a map to scale of the field in which they were to be. This had been submitted to Corps and approved, and work had started on it during my leave.

My kit followed me and I installed myself in a small canvas hut with the acting-Captain of another of our batteries whose lines were belly deep in the next field. He had succeeded Pip Don who went home gassed after the ArmentiÈres shelling and who, on recovering, had been sent out to Mesopotamia.

The work was being handled under rather adverse conditions. Some of the men were from our own battery, others from the Brigade Ammunition Column, more from a Labour Company, and there was a full-blown Sapper private doing the scientific part. They were all at loggerheads; none of the N.C.O.’s would take orders from the Sapper private, and the Labour Company worked Trades Union hours, although dressed in khaki and calling themselves soldiers. The subaltern in charge was on the verge of putting every one of them under arrest,—not a bad idea, but what about the standings?

By the time I’d had a look round tea was ready. At least there seemed to be plenty of material.

At seven next morning I was out. No one else was. So I took another look round, did a little thinking, and came and had breakfast. By nine o’clock there seemed to be a lot of cigarette smoke in the direction of the works.

I began functioning. My servant summoned all the heads of departments and they appeared before me in a sullen row. At my suggestion tongues wagged freely for about half an hour. I addressed them in their own language and then, metaphorically speaking, we shook hands all round, sang hymn number 44 and standings suddenly began to spring up like mushrooms.

It was really extraordinary how those fellows worked once they’d got the hang of the thing. It left me free to go joy-riding with my stable companion in the afternoons. We carried mackintoshes on the saddle and scoured the country, splashing into Bailleul—it was odd to revisit the scene of my trooper days after three years—for gramophone records, smokes, stomachic delicacies and books. We also sunk a lot of francs in a series of highly artistic picture postcards which, pinned all round the hut at eye level, were a constant source of admiration and delight to the servants and furnished us with a splash of colour which at least broke the monotony of khaki canvas. These were—it goes without saying—supplemented from time to time with the more reticent efforts of La Vie Parisienne.

All things being equal we were extremely comfortable, and, although the stove was full of surprises, quite sufficiently frowzy during the long evenings, which were filled with argument, invention, music and much tobacco. The invention part of the programme was supplied by my stable companion who had his own theories concerning acetylene lamps, and who, with the aid of a couple of shell cases and a little carbide nearly wrecked the happy home. Inventions were therefore suppressed.

They were tranquil days, in which we built not only book shelves, stoves and horse standings but a great friendship,—ended only by his death on the battlefield. He was all for the gun line and its greater strenuousness.

As for me, then, at least, I was content to lie fallow. I had seen too much of the guns, thanked God for the opportunity of doing something utterly different for a time and tried to conduct a mental spring-clean and rearrangement. As a means to this I found myself putting ideas on paper in verse—a thing I’d never done in all my life—bad stuff but horribly real. One’s mind was tied to war, like a horse on a picketing rope, and could only go round and round in a narrow circle. To break away was impossible. One was saturated with it as the country was with blood. Every cog in the machinery of war was like a magnet which held one in spite of all one’s struggles, giddy with the noise, dazed by its enormity, nauseated by its results.

The work provided one with a certain amount of comic relief. Timber ran short and it seemed as if the standings would be denied completion. Stones, gravel and cinders had been already a difficulty, settled only by much importuning. Bricks had been brought from the gun line. But asking for timber was like trying to steal the chair from under the General. I went to Division and was promptly referred to Corps, who were handling the job. Corps said, “You’ve had all that’s allowed in the R.E. handbook. Good morning.” I explained that I wanted it for wind screens. They smiled politely and suggested my getting some ladies’ fans from any deserted village. On returning to Division they said, “If Corps can’t help you, how the devil can you expect us to?”

I went to Army. They looked me over and asked me where I came from and who I was, and what I was doing, and what for and on what authority, and why I came to them instead of going to Division and Corps? To all of which I replied patiently. Their ultimate answer was a smile of regret. There wasn’t any in the country, they said.

So I prevailed upon my brother who, as War Correspondent, ran a big car and no questions asked about petrol, to come over and lunch with me. To him I put the case and was immediately whisked off to O.C. Forests, the Timber King. At the lift of his little finger down came thousands of great oaks. Surely a few branches were going begging?

He heard my story with interest. His answer threw beams of light. “Why the devil don’t Division and Corps and all the rest of them ask for it if they want it? I’ve got tons of stuff here. How much do you want?”

I told him the cubic stature of the standings.

He jotted abstruse calculations for a moment. “Twenty tons,” said he. “Are you anywhere near the river”?

The river flowed at the bottom of the lines.

“Right. I’ll send you a barge. To-day’s Monday. Should be with you by Wednesday. Name? Unit?”

He ought to have been commanding an army, that man.

We lunched most triumphantly in Hazebrouck, had tea and dinner at Cassel and I was dropped on my own doorstep well before midnight.

It was not unpleasing to let drop, quite casually of course, to Division and Corps and Army, that twenty tons of timber were being delivered at my lines in three days and that there was more where that came from. If they wanted any, they had only to come and ask me about it.

17

During this period the Major had handed over the eighteen-pounders, receiving 4.5 howitzers in exchange, nice little cannons, but apparently in perpetual need of calibration. None of the gunners had ever handled them before but they picked up the new drill with extraordinary aptitude, taking the most unholy delight in firing gas shells. They hadn’t forgotten ArmentiÈres either.

My wagon line repose was roughly broken into by an order one afternoon to come up immediately. The Colonel was elsewhere and the Major had taken his place once more.

Furthermore, a raid was to take place the same night and I hadn’t the foggiest idea of the numberless 4.5 differences. However we did our share in the raid and at the end of a couple of days I began to hope we should stick to howitzers. The reasons were many,—a bigger shell with more satisfactory results, gas as well as H.E., four guns to control instead of six, far greater ease in finding positions and a longer range. This was in October, ’17. Things have changed since then. The air recuperator with the new range drum and fuse indicator have made the 18-pounder a new thing.

Two days after my going up the Hun found us. Between 11 a.m. and 4 p.m. he sent over three hundred five-nines, but as they fell between two of the guns and the billet, and he didn’t bother to switch, we were perfectly happy. To my way of thinking his lack of imagination in gunnery is one of the factors which has helped him to lose the war. He is consistent, amazingly thorough and amazingly accurate. We have those qualities too, not quite so marked perhaps, but it is the added touch of imagination, of sportingness, which has beaten him. What English subaltern for instance up in that Hun O.P. wouldn’t have given her five minutes more right for luck,—and got the farm and the gun and the ammunition? But because the Boche had been allotted a definite target and a definite number of rounds he just went on according to orders and never thought of budging off his line. We all knew it and remained in the farm although the M.P.I. was only fifty yards to a flank.

The morning after the raid I went the round of the guns. One of them had a loose breechblock. When fired the back flash was right across the gun pit. I put the gun out of action, the chances being that very soon she would blow out her breech and kill every man in the detachment.

As my knowledge was limited to eighteen-pounders, however, I sent for the brigade artificer. His opinion confirmed mine.

That night she went down on the tail of a wagon. The next night she came back again, the breech just as loose. Nothing had been done. The Ordnance workshop sent a chit with her to say she’d got to fire so many hundred more rounds at 4th charge before she could be condemned.

What was the idea? Surely to God the Hun killed enough gunners without our trying to kill them ourselves? Assuming that a 4.5 cost fifteen hundred pounds in round figures, four gunners and a sergeant at an average of two shillings a day were worth economising, to say nothing of the fact that they were all trained men and experienced soldiers, or to mention that they were human beings with wives and families. It cannot have been the difficulty of getting another gun. The country was stiff with guns and it only takes a busy day to fire four hundred rounds.

It was just the good old system again! I left the gun out of action.

Within a couple of days we had to hand over again. We were leaving that front to go up into the salient, Ypres. But I didn’t forget to tell the in-coming Battery Commander all about that particular gun.

Ypres! One mentions it quite casually but I don’t think there was an officer or man who didn’t draw a deep breath when the order came. It was a death trap.

There was a month’s course of gunnery in England about to take place,—the Overseas Course for Battery Commanders. My name had been sent in. It was at once cancelled so that the Ypres move was a double disappointment.

So the battery went down to the wagon line and prepared for the worst. For a couple of days we hung about uneasily. Then the Major departed for the north in a motor lorry to take over positions. Having seen him off we foregathered with the officers of the Brigade Ammunition Column, cursed with uneasy laughter and turned the rum-specialist on to brewing flaming toddy.

The next day brought a telegram from the Major of which two words at least will never die: “Move cancelled.”

We had dinner in Estaires that night!

But the brigade was going to move, although none of us knew where. The day before they took the road I left for England in a hurry to attend the Overseas Course. How little did I guess what changes were destined to take place before I saw them again!

18

The course was a godsend in that it broke the back of the winter. A month in England, sleeping between sheets, with a hot bath every day and brief week-ends with one’s people was a distinct improvement on France, although the first half of the course was dull to desperation. The chief interest, in fact, of the whole course was to see the fight between the two schools of gunners,—the theoretical and the practical. Shoebury was the home of the theoretical. We filled all the Westcliff hotels and went in daily by train to the school of gunnery, there to imbibe drafts of statistics—not excluding our old friend T.O.B.—and to relearn all the stuff we had been doing every day in France in face of the Hun, a sort of revised up-to-date version, including witty remarks at the expense of Salisbury which left one with the idea, “Well, if this is the last word of the School of Gunnery, I’m a damned sight better gunner than I thought I was.”

Many of the officers had brought their wives down. Apart from them the hotels were filled with indescribable people,—dear old ladies in eighteenth-century garments who knitted and talked scandal and allowed their giggling daughters to flirt and dance with all and sundry. One or two of the more advanced damsels had left their parents behind and were staying there with “uncles,”—rather lascivious-looking old men, rapidly going bald. Where they all came from is a mystery. One didn’t think England contained such people, and the thought that one was fighting for them was intolerable.

After a written examination which was somewhat of a farce at the end of the first fortnight, we all trooped down to Salisbury to see the proof of the pudding in the shooting. Shoebury was routed. A couple of hundred bursting shells duly corrected for temperature, barometer, wind and the various other disabilities attaching to exterior ballistics will disprove the most likely-sounding theory.

Salisbury said, “Of course they will tell you this at Shoebury. They may be perfectly right. I don’t deny it for a moment, but I’ll show you what the ruddy bundook says about it.” And at the end of half an hour’s shooting the “ruddy bundook” behind us had entirely disposed of the argument. We had calibrated that unfortunate battery to within half a foot a second, fired it with a field clinometer, put it through its paces in snow-storms and every kind of filthy weather and went away impressed. The gun does not lie. Salisbury won hands down.

The verdict of the respective schools upon my work was amusing and showed that at least they had fathomed the psychology of me.

Shoebury said, “Fair. A good second in command.” Salisbury said, “Sound practical work. A good Battery Commander.”

Meanwhile the papers every day had been ringing with the Cambrai show. November, ’17, was a memorable month for many others besides the brigade. Of course I didn’t know for certain that we were in it, but it wasn’t a very difficult guess. The news became more and more anxious reading, especially when I received a letter from the Major who said laconically that he had lost all his kit; would I please collect some more that he had ordered and bring it out with me?

This was countermanded by a telegram saying he was coming home on leave. I met him in London and in the luxury of the Carlton Grill he told me the amazing story of Cambrai.

The net result to the brigade was the loss of the guns and many officers and men, and the acquiring of one D.S.O. which should have been a V.C., and a handful of M.C.’s, Military Medals, and Croix de Guerre.

I found them sitting down, very merry and bright, at a place called Poix in the Lines of Communication, and there I listened to stories of Huns shot with rifles at one yard, of days in trenches fighting as infantry, of barrages that passed conception, of the amazing feats of my own Major who was the only officer who got nothing out of it,—through some gross miscarriage of justice and to my helpless fury.

There was a new Captain commanding my battery in the absence of the Major. But I was informed that I had been promoted Major and was taking over another battery whose commander had been wounded in the recent show. Somehow it had happened that that battery and ours had always worked together, had almost always played each other in the finals of brigade football matches and there was as a result a strong liking between the two. It was good therefore to have the luck to go to them instead of one of the others. It completed the entente between the two of us.

Only the Brigade Headquarters was in Poix. The batteries and the Ammunition Column had a village each in the neighbourhood. My new battery, my first command, was at Bergicourt, some three miles away, and thither I went in the brigade trap, a little shy and overwhelmed at this entirely unexpected promotion, not quite sure of my reception. The Captain was an older man than I, and he and some of the subalterns had all been lieutenants together with me in the Heytesbury days.

From the moment of getting out of the trap, as midday stables was being dismissed, the Captain’s loyalty to me was of the most exceptional kind. He did everything in his power to help me the whole time I remained in command, and I owe him more gratitude and thanks than I can ever hope to repay. The subalterns too worked like niggers, and I was immensely proud of being in command of such a splendid fighting battery.

Bergicourt was a picturesque little place that had sprung up in a hillside cup. A tiny river ran at the bottom of the hill, the cottages were dotted with charming irregularity up and down its flank and the surrounding woody hills protected it a little from the biting winter winds. The men and horses were billeted among the cottages. The battery office was in the Mairie, and the mess was in the presbytery. The AbbÉ was a diminutive, round-faced, blue-chinned little man with a black skull cap, whose simplicity was altogether exceptional. He had once been on a Cook’s tour to Greece, Egypt and Italy but for all the knowledge of the world he got from it he might as well have remained in Bergicourt. He shaved on Sundays and insinuated himself humbly into the mess room—his best parlour—with an invariable “Bonjour, mon commandant!” and a “je vous remerc—ie,” that became the passwords of the battery. The S sound in remercie lasted a full minute to a sort of splashing accompaniment emerging from the teeth. We used to invite him in to coffee and liqueurs after dinner and his round-eyed amazement when the Captain and one of the subalterns did elementary conjuring tricks, producing cards from the least expected portions of his anatomy and so on as he sat there in front of the fire with a drink in his hand and a cigarette smouldering in his fingers, used to send us into helpless shrieks of laughter.

He bestowed on me in official moments the most wonderful title, that even Haig might have been proud of. He called me “Monsieur le Commandant des armÉes anglaises À Bergicourt,”—a First Command indeed!

Christmas Day was a foot deep in snow, wonderfully beautiful and silent with an almost canny stillness. The Colonel and the Intelligence Officer came and had dinner with us in the middle of the day, after the Colonel had made a little speech to the men, who were sitting down to theirs, and been cheered to the echo.

At night there was a concert and the battery got royally tight. It was the first time they’d been out of action for eight months and it probably did them a power of good.

Four Christmases back I had been in Florida splashing about in the sea, revelling in being care free, deep in the writing of a novel. It was amazing how much water had flowed under the bridges since then,—one in Fontainehouck, one in Salonica, one in London, and now this one at Bergicourt with six guns and a couple of hundred men under me. I wondered where the next would be and thought of New York with a sigh. If anyone had told me in Florida that I should ever be a Major in the British Army I should have thought he’d gone mad.

19

The time was spent in Poix in completing ourselves with all the things of which the batteries were short—technical stores—in making rings in the snow and exercising the horses, in trying to get frost nails without success, in a comic chasse au sanglier organised by a local sportsman in which we saw nothing but a big red fox and a hare and bagged neither, in endeavouring to camouflage the fuel stolen by the men, in wondering what 1918 would bring forth.

The bitter cold lasted day after day without any sign of a break and in the middle of it came the order to move. We were wanted back in the line again.

I suppose there is always one second of apprehension on receiving that order, of looking round with the thought, “Whose turn this time?” There seemed to be no hope or sign of peace. The very idea was so remote as to be stillborn. Almost it seemed as if one would have to go on and on for ever. The machine had run away with us and there was no stopping it. Every calendar that ran out was another year of one’s youth burnt on the altar of war. There was no future. How could there be when men were falling like leaves in autumn?

One put up a notice board on the edge of the future. It said, “Trespassers will be pip-squeaked.” The present was the antithesis of everything one had ever dreamed, a ghastly slavery to be borne as best one could. One sought distractions to stop one’s thinking. Work was insufficient. One developed a literary gluttony, devouring cannibalistically all the fiction writers, the war poets, everything that one could lay hands on, developing unconsciously a higher criticism, judging by the new standards set by three years of war—that school of post-impressionism that rubs out so ruthlessly the essential, leaving the unessential crowing on its dunghill. It only left one the past as a mental playground and even there the values had altered. One looked back with a different eye from that with which one had looked forward only four years ago. One had seen Death now and heard Fear whispering, and felt the pulse of a world upheaved by passions.

The war itself had taken on a different aspect. The period of peace sectors was over. Russia had had enough. Any day now would see the released German divisions back on the western front. It seemed that the new year must inevitably be one of cataclysmic events. It was not so much “can we attack?” as “will they break through?” And yet trench warfare had been a stalemate for so long that it didn’t seem possible that they could. But whatever happened it was not going to be a joy-ride.

We were going to another army. That at least was a point of interest. The batteries, being scattered over half a dozen miles of country, were to march independently to their destinations. So upon the appointed day we packed up and said good-bye to the little priest and interviewed the mayor and haggled over exorbitant claims for damages and impossible thefts of wood and potatoes, wondering all the while how the horses would ever stand up on the frozen roads without a single frost nail in the battery. It was like a vast skating rink and the farrier had been tearing his hair for days.

But finally the last team had slithered down to the gun park, hooked in and everything was reported ready. Billeting parties had gone on ahead.

It is difficult to convey just what that march meant. It lasted four days, once the blizzard being so thick and blinding that the march was abandoned, the whole brigade remaining in temporary billets. The pace was a crawl. The team horses slid into each other and fell, the leads bringing the centres down, at every twenty yards or so. The least rise had to be navigated by improvising means of foothold—scattering a near manure heap, getting gunners up with picks and shovels and hacking at the road surface, assisting the horses with drag-ropes—and all the time the wind was like a razor on one’s face, and the drivers up on the staggering horses beat their chests with both arms and changed over with the gunners when all feeling had gone from their limbs. Hour after hour one trekked through the blinding white, silent country, stamping up and down at the halts with an anxious eye on the teams, chewing bully beef and biscuits and thanking God for coffee piping hot out of a thermos in the middle of the day. Then on again in the afternoon while the light grew less and dropped finally to an inky grey and the wind grew colder,—hoping that the G.S. wagons, long since miles behind, would catch up. Hour after hour stiff in the saddle with icy hands and feet, one’s neck cricked to dodge the wind, or sliding off stiffly to walk and get some warmth into one’s aching limbs, the straps and weight of one’s equipment becoming more and more irksome and heavy with every step forward that slipped two back. To reach the destination at all was lucky. To get there by ten o’clock at night was a godsend, although watering the horses and feeding them in the darkness with frozen fingers that burned on straps and buckles drew strange Scotch oaths. For the men, shelter of sorts, something at least with a roof where a fire was lit at risk of burning the whole place down. For the officers sometimes a peasant’s bed, or valises spread on the floor, unpacking as little as possible for the early start on the morning, the servants cooking some sort of a meal, either on the peasant’s stove or over a fire of sticks.

The snow came again and one went on next day, blinded by the feathery touch of flakes that closed one’s eyes so gently, crept down one’s neck and pockets, lodged heavily in one’s lap when mounted, clung in a frozen garment to one’s coat when walking, hissed softly on one’s pipe and made one giddy with the silent, whirling, endless pattern which blotted out the landscape, great flakes like white butterflies, soft, velvety, beautiful but also like little hands that sought to stop one persistently, insidiously. “Go back,” said their owner, “go back. We have hidden the road and the ditches and all the country. We have closed your eyelids and you cannot see. Go back before you reach that mad place where we have covered over silent things that once were men, trying to give back beauty to the ugliness that you have made. Why do you march on in spite of us? Do you seek to become as they? Go back. Go back,” they whispered.

But we pushed blindly through, stumbling to another billet to hear that the snow had stalled the motor lorries and therefore there were no rations for the men and that the next day’s march was twenty miles.

During the night a thaw set in. Snowflakes turned to cold rain and in the dawn the men splashed, shivering, and harnessed the shivering horses. One or two may have drunk a cup of coffee given them by the villagers. The rest knew empty stomachs as well as shivering. The village had once been in the war zone and only old women and children clung precariously to life. They had no food to give or sell. The parade was ordered for six o’clock. Some of the rear wagons, in difficulties with teams, had not come in till the dawn, the Captain and all of them having shared a biscuit or two since breakfast. But at six the battery was reported ready and not a man was late or sick. The horses had been in the open all night.

So on we went again with pools of water on the icy crust of the road, the rain dripping off our caps. Would there be food at the other end? Our stomachs cried out for it.

And back in England full-fed fathers hearing the rain splashing against the windows put an extra coal on the fire, crying again, “We will fight to the last man!”; railway men and munitioners yelled, “Down tools! We need more pay!” and the Government flung our purses to them and said, “Help yourselves—of course we shall count on you to keep us in power at the next election.”

20

The village of Chuignolles, ice-bound, desolate, wood-patched was our destination. The battles of the Somme had passed that way, wiping everything out. Old shell holes were softened with growing vegetation. Farm cottages were held together by bits of corrugated iron. The wind whistled through them, playing ghostly tunes on splintered trunks that once had been a wood.

Two prison camps full of Germans, who in some mysterious way knew that we had been in the Cambrai push and commented about it as we marched in, were the only human beings, save the village schoolmaster and his wife and child, in whose cottage we shared a billet with a Canadian forester. The schoolmaster was minus one arm, the wife had survived the German occupation, and the child was a golden-haired boy full of laughter, with tiny teeth, blue eyes and chubby fingers that curled round his mother’s heart. The men were lodged under bits of brick wall and felting that constituted at least shelter, and warmed themselves with the timber that the Canadian let them remove from his Deccaville train which screamed past the horse lines about four or five times a day. They had stood the march in some marvellous way that filled me with speechless admiration. Never a grouse about the lack of rations, or the awful cold and wet, always with a song on their lips they had paraded to time daily, looked after the horses with a care that was almost brotherly, put up with filthy billets and the extremes of discomfort with a readiness that made me proud. What kept them going? Was it that vague thing patriotism, the more vague because the war wasn’t in their own country? Was it the ultimate hope of getting back to their Flos and Lucys, although leave, for them, was practically non-existent? What had they to look forward to but endless work in filth and danger, heaving guns, grooming horses, cleaning harness eternally? And yet their obedience and readiness and courage were limitless, wonderful.

We settled down to training and football and did our best to acquire the methods of the new army. My Major, who had been in command of the brigade, had fallen ill on the march and had been sent to England. The doctor was of opinion that he wouldn’t be coming out again. He was worn out. How characteristic of the wilfully blind system which insists that square pegs shall be made to fit round holes! There was a man who should have been commanding an army, wasted in the command of a battery, while old men without a millionth part of his personality, magnetism or knowledge recklessly flung away lives in the endeavour to justify their positions. In the Boer War if a General lost three hundred men there was an inquiry into the circumstances. Now if he didn’t lose three hundred thousand he was a bad General. There were very few bad ones apparently!

At least one could thank God that the Major was out of it with a whole skin, although physically a wreck.

The guns we drew from Ordnance at Poix and Chuignolles were not calibrated, but there was a range half a day’s march distant and we were ordered to fire there in readiness for going back into the line. So one morning before dawn we set out to find the pin-point given us on the map. Dawn found us on a road which led through a worse hell than even Dante visited. Endless desolation spread away on every side, empty, flat, filled with an infinite melancholy. No part of the earth’s surface remained intact. One shell hole merged into another in an endless pattern of pockmarks, unexploded duds lying in hundreds in every direction. Bits of wreckage lay scattered, shell baskets, vague shapes of iron and metal which bespoke the one-time presence of man. Here and there steam rollers, broken and riddled, stuck up like the bones of camels in the desert. A few wooden crosses marked the wayside graves, very few. For the most part the dead had lain where they fell, trodden into the earth. Everywhere one almost saw a hand sticking up, a foot that had worked up to the surface again. A few bricks half overgrown marked where once maidens had been courted by their lovers. The quiet lane ringing with the songs of birds where they had met in the summer evenings at the stroke of the Angelus was now one jagged stump, knee-high, from which the birds had long since fled. The spirits of a million dead wailed over that ghastly graveyard, unconsecrated by the priests of God. In the grey light one could nearly see the corpses sit up in their countless hundreds at the noise of the horses’ feet, and point with long fingers, screaming bitter ridicule through their shapeless gaping jaws. And when at last we found the range and the guns broke the eerie stillness the echo in the hills was like bursts of horrible laughter.

And on the edge of all this death was that little sturdy boy with the golden hair, bubbling with life, who played with the empty sleeve of his young father spewed out of the carnage, mutilated, broken in this game of fools.

February found us far from Chuignolles. Our road south had taken us through a country of optimism where filled-in trenches were being cultivated once more by old women and boys, barbed wire had been gathered in like an iron harvest and life was trying to creep back again like sap up the stem of a bruised flower. Their homes were made of empty petrol tins, bits of corrugated iron, the wreckage of the battlefield,—these strange persistent old people, clinging desperately to their clod of earth, bent by the storm but far from being broken, ploughing round the lonely graves of the unknown dead, sparing a moment to drop a bunch of green stuff on them. Perhaps some one was doing the same to their son’s grave.

We came to Jussy and Flavy-le-Martel, an undulating country of once-wooded hillsides now stamped under the Hun’s heel and where even then the spiteful long-range shell came raking in the neatly swept muck heaps that once had been villages. The French were there, those blue-clad, unshaven poilus who, having seen their land laid waste, turned their eyes steadily towards Germany with the gleam of faith in them that moves mountains, officered by men who called them “mes enfants” and addressed each one as “thou.”

We had reached the southern end of the British line and were to take over the extra bit down to Barisis. Our own zone was between Essigny and Benay and in a morning of thick fog the Divisional Battery Commanders and ourselves went up to the gun positions held by the slim French 75’s. They welcomed us politely, bowing us into scratches in the earth and offering sausages and red wine and cigarettes of Caporal. It appeared that peace reigned on that front. Not a shell fell, hardly was a round ever fired. Then followed maps and technical details of pin-points and zero lines and O.P.’s and the colour of S.O.S. rockets. We visited the guns and watched them fire a round or two and discussed the differences between them and our eighteen-pounders and at last after much shaking of hands bade them au revoir and left them in the fog.

The relief took place under cover of night without a hitch, in a silence unbroken by any gun, and finally, after having journeyed to the O.P. with the French Battery Commander, up to our thighs in mud, fired on the zero point to check the line, reported ourselves ready to take on an S.O.S. and watched the French officer disappear in the direction of his wagon line, we found ourselves masters of the position.

The fog did eventually lift, revealing the least hopeful of any gun positions it has ever been my lot to occupy. The whole country was green, a sort of turf. In this were three great white gashes of upturned chalk visible to the meanest intelligence as being the three battery positions. True, they were under the crest from any Hun O.P., but that didn’t minimize the absurdity. There were such things as balloons and aeroplanes. Further inspection revealed shell holes neatly bracketing the guns, not many, but quite sufficient to prove that Fritz had done his job well. Beside each gun pit was a good deep dugout for the detachment and we had sleeping quarters that would stop at least a four-two. The mess was a quaint little hut of hooped iron above ground, camouflaged with chalky earth, big enough to hold a table and four officers, if arranged carefully. We rigged up shelves and hung new fighting maps and Kirchners and got the stove to burn and declared ourselves ready for the war again. We spent long mornings exploring the trenches, calling on a rather peevish infantry whose manners left much to be desired, and found that as usual the enemy had all the observation on the opposite ridge. Behind the trench system we came upon old gun positions shelled out of all recognition, and looked back over an empty countryside with rather a gloomy eye. It was distinctly unprepossessing. If there were ever a show——

So we played the gramophone by night and invented a knife-throwing game in the door of the hut and waited for whatever Fate might have in store for us. The Captain had gone on leave from Chuignolles. The night after his return he came up to the guns as my own leave was due again. So having initiated him into the defence scheme and the S.O.S. rules I packed up my traps and departed,—as it turned out for good.

Fate decreed that my fighting was to be done with the battery which I had helped to make and whose dead I had buried.

On my return from leave fourteen days later, towards the end of February, I was posted back to them. The end of February,—a curious period of mental tightening up, of expectation of some colossal push received with a certain incredulity. He’d push all right, but not here. And yet, in the depths of one’s being, there formed a vague apprehension that made one restless and took the taste out of everything. The work seemed unsatisfactory in the new battle positions to which we were moved, a side-step north, seven thousand yards from the front line, just behind Essigny which peeped over a million trenches to St. Quentin. The men didn’t seem to have their hearts in it and one found fault in everything. The new mess, a wooden hut under trees on a hilltop with a deep dugout in it, was very nice, allowing us to bask in the sun whenever it shone and giving a wonderful view over the whole zone, but seemed to lack privacy. One yearned to be alone sometimes and always there was some one there. The subalterns were practically new to me, and although one laughed and talked one couldn’t settle down as in the old days with the Major and Pip Don. The Scots Captain was also occupying the hilltop. It was good to go off on long reconnaissances with him and argue violently on all the known philosophies and literatures, to challenge him to revolver shooting competitions and try and escape the eternal obsession that clouded one’s brain, an uneasiness that one couldn’t place, like the feeling that makes one cold in the pit of the stomach before going down to get ready for a boxing competition, magnified a million times.

The weather was warm and sunny after misty dawns and the whole country was white with floating cobwebs. The last touches were being put to the gun position and a narrow deep trench ran behind the guns which were a quarter of a mile beyond the hilltop, down beyond the railway line under camouflage in the open. Word came round that “The Attack,” was for this day, then that, then the other, and the heavy guns behind us made the night tremble with their counter-preparation work, until at last one said, “Please God, they’ll get on with it, and let’s get it over!” The constant cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” was trying.

Everybody knew about it and all arrangements were made, extra ammunition, and extra gunners at the positions, details notified as to manning O.P.’s, the probable time at which we should have to open fire being given as ten o’clock at night at extreme range.

My Captain, a bloodthirsty Canadian, had gone on leave to the south of France, which meant leaving a subaltern in the wagon line while I had three with me.

The days became an endless tension, the nights a jumpy stretch of darkness, listening for the unknown. Matters were not helped by my brother’s rolling up one day and giving out the date definitely as the twenty-first. It was on the ninth that he arrived and took me for a joy-ride to Barisis to have a look at the Hun in the ForÊt de St. Gobain, so deeply wooded that the car could run to within a hundred yards of the front-line trench. We dined at the charming old town of Noyon on the way back and bought English books in a shop there, and stayed the night in a little inn just off the market square. The next morning he dropped me at the battery and I watched him roll away in the car, feeling an accentuated loneliness, a yearning to go with him and get out of the damned firing line, to escape the responsibility that rode one like an Old Man from the Sea.

In war there is only one escape.

The nights of the eighteenth and nineteenth were a continuous roll of heavy guns, lasting till just before the dawn, the days comparatively quiet. Raids had taken place all along the front on both sides and identifications made which admitted of no argument.

On the night of the twentieth we turned in as usual about midnight with the blackness punctuated by flashes and the deep-voiced rumble of big guns a sort of comfort in the background. If Brother Fritz was massing anywhere for the attack at least he was having an unpleasant time. We were unable to join in because we were in battle positions seven thousand yards behind the front line. The other eighteen-pounders in front of us were busy, however, and if the show didn’t come off we were going up to relieve them in a week’s time. So we played our goodnight tune on the gramophone, the junior subaltern waiting in his pyjamas while the last notes were sung. Then he flicked out the light and hopped into bed, and presently the hut was filled by his ungentle snores. Then one rang through a final message to the signaller on duty at the guns and closed one’s eyes.

22

The twenty-first of March, 1918, has passed into history now, a page of disaster, blood and prisoners, a turning point in the biggest war in history, a day which broke more hearts than any other day in the whole four and a half years; and yet to some of us it brought an infinite relief. The tension was released. The fight was on to the death.

We were jerked awake in the darkness by a noise which beat upon the brain, made the hill tremble and shiver, which seemed to fill the world and all time with its awful threat.

I looked at my watch,—4 a.m.

The subaltern who lay on the bed beside mine said, “She’s off!” and lit a candle with a laugh. He was dead within six hours. We put coats over our pyjamas and went out of the hut. Through the fog there seemed to be a sort of glow along the whole front right and left, like one continuous gun flash. The Scots Captain came round with his subalterns and joined us, and two “Archie” gunners who shared a tent under the trees and messed with us. We stood in a group, talking loudly to make ourselves heard. There was nothing to be done but to stand by. According to plan we should not come into action until about 10 p.m. that night to cover the retreat, if necessary, of the gunners and infantry in the line. Our range to start with would be six thousand yards.

So we dressed and talked to Brigade, who had no information. At six o’clock Brigade issued an order, “Man O.P.’s at once.” The fog still hung like a blanket, and no news had come through from the front line. The barrage was reported thick in front of and in Essigny with gas.

The signallers were ready, three of them. The subaltern detailed had only to fill his pockets with food.

The subaltern detailed! It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it isn’t any fun detailing a man to go out into a gas barrage in any sort of a show, and this was bigger than the wildest imagination could conceive. I wondered, while giving him instructions, whether I should ever see him again. I never did. He was taken prisoner, and the signallers too.

They went out into the fog while the servants lit the fire and bustled about, getting us an early breakfast. The Anti-Aircraft discussed the advisability of withdrawing immediately or waiting to see what the barrage would do. They waited till about 9 a.m. and then got out. The Scots Captain and I wished them luck and looked at each other silently and refilled pipes.

There was a hint of sun behind the fog now, but visibility only carried about two hundred yards. The Guns reported that the barrage was coming towards them. The Orderly Officer had been down and found all things in readiness for any emergency. None of the O.P.’s answered. Somewhere in that mist they were dodging the barrage while we sat and waited, an eye on the weather, an eye on the time, an ear always for the buzz of the telephone; box respirators in the alert position, the guns laid on the S.O.S. loaded with H.E.

Does one think in times like that? I don’t know. Only little details stand out in the brain like odd features revealed in a flash of lightning during a storm. I remember putting a drawing-pin into the corner of a Kirchner picture and seeing the headlines of the next day’s paper at home; I saw the faces of my people as they read them. I saw them just coming down to breakfast at the precise moment that I was sticking in the drawing-pin, the door open on to the lawn—in America, still asleep, as they were six hours behind, or possibly only just turning in after a dance—in Etaples, where perhaps the noise had already reached one of them. When would they hear from me again? They would be worrying horribly.

The ’phone buzzed. “Brigade, sir!”

“Right. Yes?—S.O.S. 3000! Three thousand?—Right! Battery! Drop to three thousand, S.O.S.—Three rounds per gun per minute till I come down.”

It was 10 a.m. and that was the range, when according to plan it shouldn’t have come till 10 p.m. at double the range.

The subalterns were already out, running down to the guns as I snatched the map and followed after, to hear the battery open fire as I left the hut.

The greater significance of this S.O.S. came to me before I’d left the hut. At that range our shells would fall just the other side of Essigny, still a vague blur in the mist. What had happened to the infantry three thousand yards beyond? What had become of the gunners? There were no signs of our people coming back. The country, as far as one could see in the fog, was empty save for the bursting shells which were spread about between Essigny and the railway, with the battery in the barrage. The noise was still so universal that it was impossible to know if any of our guns farther forward were still in action. They couldn’t be if we were firing. It meant—God knew what it meant!

The subalterns went on to the guns while I stopped in the control dug into the side of the railway and shed my coat, sweating after the quarter-mile run. Five-nines and pip-squeaks were bursting on the railway and it seemed as if they had the battery taped.

To get off my coat was a matter of less than half a minute. It had only just dropped to the ground when the signaller held me the instrument. “Will you speak here, sir?”

I took it.

“Is that the Major?”

“Yes.”

“Will you come, sir? Mr. B.’s badly wounded. Sergeant —— has lost an eye and there’s no one here to——”

“Go on firing. I’m coming over.” Badly wounded?

I leaped up out of the dugout and ran. There was no shell with my name on it that morning. The ground went up a yard away from me half a dozen times but I reached the guns and dived under the camouflage into the trench almost on top of poor old B. who was lying motionless, one arm almost smashed off, blood everywhere. It was he who had said “She’s off!” and lit the candle with a laugh. A man was endeavouring to tie him up. Behind him knelt a sergeant with his face in his hands. As I jumped down into the trench he raised it. “I’m blind, sir,” he said. His right eye was shot away.

The others were all right. I went from gun to gun and found them firing steadily.

Somehow or other we tied up the subaltern and carried him along the narrow trench. Mercifully he was unconscious. We got him out at last on to a stretcher. Four men went away with it, the sergeant stumbling after. The subaltern was dead before they reached a dressing station. He left a wife and child.

There were only the junior subaltern and myself left to fight the battery. He was twenty last birthday and young at that. If I stopped anything there was only that boy between King and country and the Hun. Is any reward big enough for these babes of ours?

Perhaps God will give it. King and country won’t.

---

Vague forms of moving groups of men could be seen through my glasses in the neighbourhood of Essigny impossible to say whether British or German. The sun was struggling to pierce the mist. The distance was about a thousand yards. We were still firing on the S.O.S. range, as ordered.

I became aware of a strange subaltern grinning up at me out of the trench.

“Where the devil do you spring from?” said I.

He climbed out and joined me on the top, hatless, minus box respirator, cheery. Another babe.

“I’m from the six-inch section straight in front, sir,” he said. “They’ve captured my guns. Do you think you could take ’em on?”

They were Germans, then, those moving forms!

I swept the glasses round once more anxiously. There were six, seven, ten, creeping up the railway embankment on the left flank behind the battery. Where the hell were our infantry reinforcements? My Babe sent the news back to Brigade while I got a gun on top and fired at the six-inch battery in front over open sights at a thousand yards with fuse 4. The Hun was there all right. He ran at the third round. Then we switched and took on individual groups as they appeared.

The party on the railway worried me. It was improper to have the enemy behind one’s battery. So I got on the ’phone to the Scots Captain and explained the position. It looked as if the Hun had established himself with machine guns in the signal box. The skipper took it on over open sights with H.E. At the fourth round there was only a settling mass of red brick dust. I felt easier in my mind and continued sniping groups of two or three with an added zest and most satisfactory results. The Hun didn’t seem to want to advance beyond Essigny. He hung about the outskirts and, when he showed, ran, crouching low. From his appearance it looked as if he had come to stay. Each of them had a complete pack strapped on to his back with a new pair of boots attached. The rest of the battery dropped their range and searched and swept from the pits. The Skipper joined in the sniping.

A half platoon of infantry came marching at a snail’s pace along the railway behind me,—on the top of course, in full view! I wanted to make sure of those Huns on the embankment, so I whistled to the infantry officer and began semaphoring, a method of signalling at which I rather fancied myself.

It seemed to frighten that infantry lad. At the first waggle he stopped his men and turned them about. In twenty leaps I covered the hundred yards or so between us, screaming curses, and brought him to a halt. He wore glasses and looked like a sucking curate. He may have been in private life but I gave tongue at high pressure, regardless of his feelings, and it was a very red-faced platoon that presently doubled along the other side of the railway under cover towards the embankment, thirsting for blood, mine for choice, Fritz’s from embarras de richesse.

I returned to my sniping, feeling distinctly better, as the little groups were no longer advancing but going back,—and there was that ferocious platoon chivvying them in the rear!

Things might have been much worse.

A megaphone’s all right, but scream down it for three hours and see what happens to your voice. Mine sounded much like a key in a rusty lock. Hunger too was no longer to be denied about three o’clock in the afternoon after breakfast at cock-crow. The six-inch subaltern had tried unsuccessfully to get back to his guns. The Hun, however, had established a machine-gun well the other side of them and approach single-handed was useless. Lord knew where his gunners were! Prisoners, probably. So he returned and asked if I had any use for him. Stout lads of his kidney are not met with every day. So I sent him up the hill to get food and a box respirator. He returned, grinning more cheerily than before, so I left him and the Babe to fight the good fight and went to get a fresh point of view from the tree O.P. up the hill. They seemed to be doing useful work between them by the time I got up the tree, so I left them to it and went to the mess to get some food.

It seemed curiously empty. Kits, half-packed, lay about the floor. The breakfast plates, dirty, were still on the table. I called each servant by name. No answer.

The other battery’s servants were round the corner. I interviewed them. They had seen nothing of my people for hours. They thought that they had gone down to the wagon line. In other words it meant that while we were stopping the Hun, with poor old B. killed and the sergeant with an eye blown out, those dirty servants had run away!

It came over me with something of a shock that if I put them under arrest the inevitable sentence was death.

I had already sent one officer and three men to their death, or worse, at the O.P. and seen another killed at the guns. Now these four! Who would be a Battery Commander?

However, food was the immediate requirement. The other battery helped and I fed largely, eased my raw throat with pints of water and drank a tot of rum for luck. Those precious servants had left my even more precious cigars unpacked. If the Hun was coming I’d see him elsewhere before he got those smokes. So I lit one and filled my pockets with the rest, and laden with food and a flask of rum went back to the guns and fed my subaltern. The men’s rations had been carried over from the cook house.

A few more infantry went forward on the right and started a bit of a counter-attack but there was no weight behind it. They did retake Essigny or some parts of it, but as the light began to fail they came back again, and the Hun infantry hung about the village without advancing.

With the darkness we received the order to retire to Flavy as soon as the teams came up. The barrage had long since dropped to desultory fire on the Hun side, and as we were running short of ammunition, we only fired as targets offered. On returning up the hill I found it strongly held by our infantry, some of whom incidentally stole my trench coat.

The question of teams became an acute worry as time went on. The Hun wasn’t too remote and one never knew what he might be up to in the dark, and our infantry were no use because the line they held was a quarter of a mile behind the nearest battery. The skipper and I sent off men on bicycles to hurry the teams, while the gunners got the guns out of the pits in the darkness ready to hook in and move off at a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile we ate again and smoked and summoned what patience we could, endeavouring to snatch a sleep. It wasn’t till ten o’clock that at last we heard wheels,—the gun limbers, cooks’ cart and a G.S. wagon came up with the wagon line officer who had brought the servants back with him. There was no time to deal with them. The officer went down to hook in to the guns and I saw to the secret papers, money, maps and office documents which are the curse of all batteries. The whole business of packing up had to be done in pitch darkness, in all the confusion of the other battery’s vehicles and personnel, to say nothing of the infantry. We didn’t bother about the Hun. Silence reigned.

It was not till midnight that the last of the guns was up and the last of the vehicles packed, and then I heard the voice of the Babe calling for me. He crashed up on a white horse in the darkness and said with a sob, “Dickie’s wounded!”

“Dickie” was the wagon line subaltern, a second lieutenant who had got the D.S.O. in the Cambrai show, one of the stoutest lads God ever made. In my mind I had been relying on him enormously for the morrow.

“Is he bad? Where is he?”

“Just behind, sir,” said the Babe. “I don’t know how bad it is.”

Dickie came up on a horse. There was blood down the horse’s shoulder and he went lame slightly.

“Where is it, Dickie, Old Thing?”

His voice came from between his teeth. “A shrapnel bullet through the foot,” he said. “I’m damn sorry Major.”

“Let’s have a look.” I flashed a torch on it. The spur was bent into his foot just behind the ankle, broken, the point sticking in.

There was no doctor, no stretcher, no means of getting the spur out.

“Can you stick it? The wagon is piled mountains high. I can’t shove you on that. Do you think you can hang on till we get down to Flavy?”

“I think so,” he said.

He had a drink of rum and lit a cigarette and the battery got mounted. I kept him in front with me and we moved off in the dark, the poor little horse, wounded also, stumbling now and again. What that boy must have suffered I don’t know. It was nearly three hours later before the battery got near its destination and all that time he remained in the saddle, lighting one cigarette from another and telling me he was “damn sorry.” I expected him to faint every moment and stood by to grab him as he fell.

At last we came to a crossroads at which the battery had to turn off to reach the rendezvous. There was a large casualty clearing station about half a mile on.

So I left the battery in charge of the Babe and took Dickie straight on, praying for a sight of lights.

The place was in utter darkness when we reached it, the hut doors yawning open, everything empty. They had cleared out!

Then round a corner I heard a motor lorry starting up. They told me they were going to Ham. There was a hospital there.

So Dickie slid off his horse and was lifted into the lorry.

As my trench coat had been stolen by one of the infantry he insisted that I should take his British warm, as within an hour he would be between blankets in a hospital.

I accepted his offer gladly,—little knowing that I was not to take it off again for another nine days or so!

Dickie went off and I mounted my horse again, cursing the war and everything to do with it, and led his horse, dead lame now, in search of the battery. It took me an hour to find them, parked in a field, the gunners rolled up in blankets under the wagons.

The 21st of March was over. The battery had lost three subalterns, a sergeant, three signallers and a gunner.

France lost her temper with England.

Germany, if she only knew it, had lost the war.

23

The new line of defence was to be the canal at Flavy.

After two hours’ sleep in boots, spurs and Dickie’s coat, a servant called me with tea and bacon. Washing or shaving was out of the question. The horses were waiting—poor brutes, how they were worked those days—and the Quartermaster-sergeant and I got mounted and rode away into the unknown dark, flickering a torch from time to time on to the map and finding our way by it.

With the Captain on leave, one subaltern dead, another left behind in Germany, a third wounded, one good sergeant and my corporal signaller away on a course, it didn’t look like a very hopeful start for fighting an indefinite rearguard action.

I was left with the Babe, keen but not very knowledgeable, and one other subaltern who became a stand-by. They two were coming with me and the guns; the sergeant-major would be left with the wagon line. Furthermore I had absolutely no voice and couldn’t speak above a whisper.

Of what had happened on the flanks of our army and along the whole front, there was absolutely no news. The Divisional infantry and gunners were mostly killed or captured in the mist. We never saw anything of them again but heard amazing tales of German officers walking into the backs of batteries in the fog and saying, “Will you cease fire, please? You are my prisoners,” as polite as you please.

What infantry were holding the canal, I don’t know,—presumably those who had held our hilltop overnight. All we knew was that our immediate job was to meet the Colonel in Flavy and get a position in the Riez de Cugny just behind and pump shells into the Germans as they advanced on the canal. The Babe and the Stand-by were to bring the battery to a given rendezvous. Meanwhile the Colonel and all of us foregathered in a wrecked cottage in Flavy and studied maps while the Colonel swallowed a hasty cup of tea. He was ill and a few hours later was sent back in an ambulance.

By eight o’clock we had found positions and the guns were coming in. Camouflage was elementary. Gun platforms were made from the nearest cottage wall or barn doors. Ammunition was dumped beside the gun wheels.

While that was being done I climbed trees for an O.P., finding one eventually in a farm on a hill, but the mist hid everything. The Huns seemed to get their guns up as if by magic and already shells were smashing what remained of Flavy. It was impossible to shoot the guns in properly. The bursts couldn’t be seen so the line was checked and rechecked with compass and director, and we opened fire on targets ordered by Brigade, shooting off the map.

Riez de Cugny was a collection of cottages with a street running through and woods and fields all around and behind. The inhabitants had fled in what they stood up in. We found a chicken clucking hungrily in a coop and had it for dinner that night. We installed ourselves in a cottage and made new fighting maps, the Scots Captain and I—his battery was shooting not a hundred yards from mine—and had the stove lit with anything burnable that came handy, old chairs, meat rolling boards, boxes, drawers and shelves.

It seemed that the attack on the canal was more or less half-hearted. The bridges had been blown up by our sappers and the machine gunners made it too hot for the Hun. Meanwhile we had the gun limbers hidden near the guns, the teams harnessed. The wagon line itself was a couple of miles away, endeavouring to collect rations, forage and ammunition. The sergeant-major was a wonder. During the whole show he functioned alone and never at any time did he fail to come up to the scratch.

Even when I lost the wagon line for two days I knew that he was all right and would bring them through safely. Meanwhile aeroplanes soared over and drew smoke trails above the battery and after a significant pause five-nines began searching the fields for us. Our own planes didn’t seem to exist and the Hun explored at will. On the whole things seemed pretty quiet. Communication was maintained all the time with Brigade; we were quietly getting rid of a lot of ammunition on targets indicated by the infantry and the five-nines weren’t near enough to worry about. So the Scot and I went off in the afternoon and reconnoitred a way back by a cross-country trail to the wagon line,—a curious walk that, across sunny fields where birds darted in and out of hedges in utter disregard of nations which were stamping each other into the earth only a few hedges away. Tiny buds were on the trees, tingling in the warmth of the early sun. All nature was beginning the new year of life while we fools in our blind rage and folly dealt open-handedly with death, heeding not the promise of spring in our veins, with its colour and tenderness and infinite hope.

Just a brief pause it was, like a fleecy cloud disappearing from view, and then we were in the wagon lines, soldiers again, in a tight position, with detail trickling from our lips, and orders and arrangements. Dickie was well on his way to England now, lucky Dickie! And yet there was a fascination about it, an exhilaration that made one “fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.” It was the real thing this, red war in a moving battle, and it took all one’s brain to compete with it. I wouldn’t have changed places with Dickie. A “Blighty” wound was the last thing that seemed desirable. Let us see the show through to the bitter end.

We got back to the guns and the cottage and in front of us Flavy was a perfect hell. Fires in all directions and shells spreading all round and over the area. Our wagons returned, having snatched ammunition from blazing dumps, like a new version of snapdragon, and with the falling darkness the sky flared up and down fitfully. That night we dished out rum all round to the gunners and turned half of them in to sleep beside the guns while the other half fought. Have you ever considered sleeping beside a firing eighteen-pounder? It’s easy—when you’ve fought it and carried shells for forty-eight hours.

We had dinner off that neglected fowl, both batteries in the cottage, and made absurd remarks about the photos left on the mantelpiece and fell asleep, laughing, on our chairs or two of us on a bed, booted and spurred still, taking turns to wake and dash out and fire a target, called by the liaison officer down there with the infantry, while the others never moved when the salvos rocked the cottage to its foundations, or five-nines dropped in the garden and splashed it into the street.

The Hun hadn’t crossed the canal. That was what mattered. The breakfast was very nearly cooked next morning about seven and we were shooting gun fire and salvos when the order came over the ’phone to retire immediately and rendezvous on the Villeselve-Beaumont crossroads. Fritz was over the canal in the fog. The Babe dashed round to warn the teams to hook in. They had been in cottages about two hundred yards from the guns, the horses harnessed but on a line, the drivers sleeping with them. The Stand-by doubled over to the guns and speeded up the rate of fire. No good leaving ammunition behind. The signallers disconnected telephones and packed them on gun limbers. Both gunners and drivers had breakfasted. We ate ours half cooked in our fingers while they were packing up.

The mist was like a wet blanket. At twenty yards objects lost their shape and within about twenty minutes of receiving the order the battery was ready. We had the other battery licked by five good minutes and pulled out of the field on to the road at a good walk. In the fog the whole country looked different. Direction was impossible. One prayed that one wasn’t marching towards Germany—and went on. At last I recognised the cross-country track with a sigh of relief. It was stiff going for the horses, but they did it and cut off a mile of road echoing with shouts and traffic in confusion, coming out eventually on an empty main road. We thought we were well ahead but all the wagon lines were well in front of us. We caught up their tail-ends just as we reached Beaumont, which was blocked with every kind of infantry, artillery and R.A.M.C. transport, mules, horses and motors. However there was a Headquarters in Beaumont with Generals buzzing about and signallers, so I told the Stand-by to take the battery along with the traffic to the crossroads and wait for me.

Our own General was in that room. I cleaved a passage to him and asked for orders. He told me that it was reported that the Hun was in Ham—right round our left flank. I was, therefore, to get into position at the crossroads and “Cover Ham.”

“Am I to open fire, sir?”

“No. Not till you see the enemy.”

I’d had enough of “seeing the enemy” on the first day. It seemed to me that if the Hun was in Ham the whole of our little world was bound to be captured. There wasn’t any time to throw away, so I leaped on to my horse and cantered after the battery followed by the groom. At the crossroads the block was double and treble while an officer yelled disentangling orders and pushed horses in the nose.

The map showed Ham to be due north of the crossroads. There proved to be an open field, turfed just off the road with a dozen young trees planted at intervals. What lay between them and Ham it was impossible to guess. The map looked all right. So I claimed the traffic officer’s attention, explained that a battery of guns was coming into action just the other side and somehow squeezed through, while the other vehicles waited. We dropped into action under the trees. The teams scattered about a hundred yards to a flank and we laid the line due north.

At that moment a Staff subaltern came up at the canter. “The General says that the Hun is pretty near, sir. Will you send out an officer’s patrol?”

He disappeared again, while I collected the Stand-by, a man of considerable stomach.

The orders were simply, “Get hold of servants, cooks, spare signallers and clerks. Arm them with rifles and go off straight into the fog. Spread out and if you meet a Hun fire a salvo and double back immediately to a flank.”

While that was being done the Babe went round and had a dozen shells set at fuse 4 at each gun. It gives a lovely burst at a thousand yards. The Stand-by and his little army went silently forth. The corner house seemed to indicate an O.P. I took a signaller with me and we climbed upstairs into the roof, knocked a hole in the tiles and installed a telephone which eventually connected with Brigade.

I began to get the fidgets about the Stand-by. This cursed fog was too much of a good thing. It looked as if the God the Huns talked so much about was distinctly on their side. However, after an agonising wait, with an ear strained for the salvo of rifle fire, the fog rolled up. Like dots in the distant fields I saw the Stand-by with two rows of infantry farther on. The Stand-by saw them too and turned about. More than that, through glasses I could see troops and horse transports advancing quickly over the skyline in every direction. Columns of them, Germans, far out of range of an eighteen-pounder. As near as I could I located them on the map and worried Brigade for the next hour with pin-points.

Ham lay straight in front of my guns. The Germans were still shelling it and several waves of our own infantry were lying in position in series waiting for their infantry to emerge round the town. It was good to see our men out there, although the line looked dangerously bulgy.

After a bit I climbed down from the roof. The road had cleared of traffic and there was a subaltern of the Scot’s battery at the corner with the neck of a bottle of champagne sticking out of his pocket. A thoughtful fellow.

So was I! A little later one of the Brigade Headquarters officers came staggering along on a horse, done to the world, staying in the saddle more by the grace of God than his own efforts. Poor old thing, he was all in, mentally and physically. We talked for a while but that didn’t improve matters and then I remembered that bottle of fizz. In the name of humanity and necessity I commandeered it from the reluctant subaltern and handed it up to the man in the saddle. Most of it went down his unshaven chin and inside his collar, but it did the trick all right.

What was left was mine by right of conquest, and I lapped it down, a good half bottle of it. There were dry biscuits forthcoming too, just as if one were in town, and I was able to cap it with a fat cigar. Happy days!

Then the Scot arrived upon his stout little mare followed by his battery, which came into position on the same crossroads a hundred yards away, shooting at right angles to me, due east, back into Cugny from where we had come. Infantry were going up, rumours of cavalry were about and the bloodstained Tommies who came back were not very numerous. There seemed to be a number of batteries tucked away behind all the hedges and things looked much more hopeful. Apart from giving pin-points of the far distant enemy there was nothing to be done except talk to all and sundry and try and get news. Some French machine-gunner officers appeared who told us that the entire French army was moving by forced marches to assist in stopping the advance and were due to arrive about six o’clock that night. They were late.

Then too, we found that the cellar of the O.P. house was stored with apples. There weren’t many left by the time the two batteries had helped themselves. As many horses as the farmyard would hold were cleared off the position and put under cover. The remainder and the guns were forced to remain slap in the open. It was bad luck because the Hun sent out about a dozen low-flying machines that morning and instead of going over Ham, which would have been far more interesting for them, they spotted us and opened with machine guns.

The feeling of helplessness with a dozen great roaring machines spitting at you just overhead is perfectly exasperating. You can’t cock an eighteen-pounder up like an Archie and have a bang at them, and usually, as happened then, your own machine gun jams. It was a comic twenty minutes but trying for the nerves. The gunners dived under the gun shields and fired rifles through the wheels. The drivers stood very close to the horses and hoped for the best. The signallers struggled with the machine gun, uttering a stream of blasphemies. And all the time the Hun circled and emptied drum after drum from a height of about a hundred feet. I joined in the barrage with my revolver.

Two horses went down with a crash and a scream. A man toppled over in the road. Bullets spat on the ground like little puffs of smoke. Two went through my map, spread out at my feet, and at last away they roared,—presumably under the impression that they had put us out of action. The horses were dead!

The man was my servant, who had run away on the first morning. Three through his left leg. Better than being shot at dawn, anyhow.

Curiously enough, the mess cook had already become a casualty. He was another of the faint-hearted and had fallen under a wagon in the fog and been run over. A rib or two went. Poetic justice was rampant that morning. It left me two to deal with. I decided to let it go for the time and see if fate would relieve me of the job. As a matter of fact it didn’t, and many many lifetimes later, when we were out of action, I had the two of them up in a room with a ceiling and a cloth on the table, and the Babe stood at my elbow as a witness.

One was a man of about thirty-eight or forty, a long-nosed, lazy, unintelligent blighter. The other was a short, scrubby, Dago-looking, bullet-headed person,—poor devils, both cannon fodder. My face may have looked like a bit of rock but I was immensely sorry for them. Given a moment of awful panic, what kind of intelligence could they summon to fight it, what sort of breeding and heredity was at the back of them? None. You might as well shoot two horses for stampeding at a bursting shell. They were gripped by blind fear and ran for it. They didn’t want to. It was not a reasoned thing. It was a momentary lack of control.

But to shoot them for it was absurd, a ridiculous parody of justice. Supposing I had lost my nerve and cleared out? The chances are that being a senior officer I should have been sent down to the base as R.T.O. or M.L.O. and after a few months received the D.S.O. It has been done. They, as Tommies, had only earned the right to a firing party.

It seemed to me, therefore, that my job was to prevent any recurrence, so in order to uproot the fear of death I implanted the fear of God in them both. Sweat and tears ran down their faces at the end of the interview,—and I made the Dago my servant forthwith.

He has redeemed himself many times under worse shell fire than that barrage of the 21st of March.

24

Headquarters gave me another subaltern during the day. He had been with the battery in the early days at ArmentiÈres but for various reasons had drifted to another unit.

He joined us just before the order was received to take up another position farther back and lay out a line on the Riez de Cugny. The enemy was apparently coming on. So we hooked in once more about 4.30 in the afternoon and trekked up the road on to a ridge behind which was the village of Villeselve. The Hun seemed to have taken a dislike to it. Five-nines went winging over our heads as we came into action and bumped into the village about two hundred yards behind. The Babe rode back to Brigade to report and ask for orders. There were no means of knowing where our infantry were except through Brigade who were at infantry headquarters, and obviously one couldn’t shoot blind.

Meanwhile the Dago servant collected bread and bully and a Tommy’s water bottle, which stank of rum but contained only water, and the Stand-by, the new lad and myself sat under a tree watching the Hun barrage splash in all directions and made a meal.

The Babe didn’t return as soon as he ought to have done. With all that shooting going on I was a little uneasy. So the new lad was told to go to Brigade and collect both the orders and the Babe.

It was getting dark when the Scot brought up his battery and wheeled them to drop into action beside us. As he was doing so the Babe and the new lad returned together. Their news was uncomforting. Brigade Headquarters had retired into the blue, and the other two batteries which had been on the road had also gone. There was no one there at all.

So the Scotsman and I held a council of war, while the Stand-by went off on a horse to reconnoitre a passable way round the shelled village. The light had gone and the sky behind us was a red glare. The village was ablaze and at the back of it on the next ridge some aeroplane hangars were like a beacon to guide storm-tossed mariners. The crackling could be heard for miles.

There was no one to give us the line or a target, no means of finding where the headquarters were or any likelihood of their finding us as we hadn’t been able to report our position. We were useless.

At the back of my brain was the word Guivry. I had heard the Adjutant mention it as a rendezvous. On the map it seemed miles away, but there was always the chance of meeting some one on the way who would know. So while the other people snatched a mouthful of ration biscuit we brought the teams up and hooked in.

The Scotsman led as his battery was nearest the track that the Stand-by reported passable. The only light was from the burning hangars and we ran into mud that was axle deep. Incidentally we ran into the barrage. A subaltern of the other battery was blown off his feet and deposited in a sitting position in a mud hole. He was fished out, spluttering oaths, and both batteries went off at a trot that would have made an inspecting General scream unintelligible things in Hindustani. Mercifully they don’t inspect when one is trying to hurry out of a barrage, so we let it rip up the slope until we had got past the hangars in whose glow we showed up most uncomfortably on the top of the ridge. As soon as we had got into darkness again we halted and took stock of ourselves. No one was hurt or missing, but all the dismounted men were puffing and using their sleeves to wipe the sweat off their faces. I was one.

It was from this point that the second phase of the retreat began. It was like nothing so much as being in that half dead condition on the operating table when the fumes of ether fill one’s brain with phantasies and flapping birds and wild flights of imagination just before one loses consciousness, knowing at the time that one hasn’t quite “gone.” Overfatigue, strain, lack of food and above all was a craving to stop everything, lie down, and sleep and sleep and sleep. One’s eyes were glued open and burnt in the back of one’s head, the skin of one’s face and hands tightened and stretched, one’s feet were long since past shape and feeling; wherever the clothes touched one’s body they irritated—not that one could realize each individual ache then. The effect was one ceaseless dolour from which the brain flung out and away into the no man’s land of semi-consciousness, full of thunder and vast fires, only to swing back at intervals to find the body marching, marching, endlessly, staggering almost drunkenly, along the interminable roads of France in the rain and cold. Hour after hour one rode side by side with the Scot, silent, swaying in the saddle, staring hollow-eyed into the dark ahead, or sliding with a stiff crash to the ground and blundering blindly from rut to rut, every muscle bruised and torn. Unconsciously every hour one gave a ten-minute halt. The horses stood drooping, the men lay down on the side of the road, motionless bundles like the dead, or sprawled over the vehicles, limp and exhausted, not smoking, not talking, content to remain inert until the next word of command should set them in motion again; wonderful in their recognition of authority, their instant unquestioning obedience, their power of summoning back all their faculties for just one more effort, and then another after that.

The country was unknown. Torches had given out their last flicker. Road junctions were unmarked. We struck matches and wrestled with maps that refused to fold in the right place, and every time Guivry seemed a million miles away. The noise of shelling dropped gradually behind until it became a mere soothing lullaby like the breaking of waves upon a pebble beach while we rolled with crunching wheels down the long incline into Buchoire, a village of the dead, without lights, doors creaking open at the touch of the wind.

We halted there to water the horses and give them what forage could be scraped together. The Scot and I rode on alone to Guivry, another seven kilometres. As we neared it so the sound of guns increased again as though a military band had died away round one corner and came presently marching back round another, playing the same air, getting louder as it came.

In a small room lit by oil lamps, Generals and Staffs were bending over huge maps scored heavily with red and blue pencils. Telephones buzzed and half conversations with tiny voices coming from back there kept all the others silent. Orderlies came in motor overalls with all the dust of France over them.

They gave us food,—whisky, bully and bread, apples with which we filled our pockets. Of our Corps they knew nothing, but after much telephoning they “thought” we should find them at ChÂteau Beines.

The Scot and I looked at one another. ChÂteau Beines was ten minutes from the burning hangars. We had passed it on our way down empty, silent, hours ago, in another life. Would the horses get us back up that interminable climb? Who should we find when we got there—our people or Germans? We rode back to Buchoire and distributed apples to the Babe, the Stand-by and the others and broke it to them that we had to go back on the chance of finding our brigade. The horses had been watered but not fed.

We turned about and caught up French transport which had blocked the road in both directions. We straightened them out, a wagon at a time, after endless wagging of hands and tongues and finally got to ChÂteau Beines to find a French Headquarters installed there who knew nothing about our brigade. There were English artillery in the farm a mile farther.

We went there. The farm was a ruin wreathed in fog, but from beneath the now smoking hangars a battery of ours was spitting shells into the night. Headquarters was somewhere in the farm cellar. We followed up a chink of light to its source and found a row of officers lying on wooden beds of rabbit netting, a signaller squatting on a reel of wire in the corner over a guttering candle, the concrete roof dripping moisture upon them. It was 3 a.m.

Orders were to come into action at once and open fire on a certain main-road junction.

The Scot and I went out and scoured ploughed fields waist-deep in drifting mist, looking for a position, found a belt of turf on the edge of a road and fetched the guns up. Locating the position on the map, working out the angle of the line of fire and the range with protractors took us back to the cellar where those lucky devils who were not commanding batteries were lying stertorous. Horses and men sweated their heart’s blood in getting the guns into position on the spongy ground and within an hour the first ear-splitting cracks joined in the chorus of screaming resistance put up by the other two batteries, with gunners who lost their balance at the weight of a shell and fell upon their faces, picking themselves up without even an oath and loading up again in a stupor by a process of sub-conscious reflex energy.

What are the limits of human endurance? Are there any? We had three more days and nights of it and still those men went on.

25

Sometime or other the Babe, the Stand-by and the other lad got some tea down in the cellar and fell asleep over their cups. Sometime or other I too got some tea, closed my eyes and fell off the box on which I was sitting. Sometime or other we got the order to cease fire and seek covered positions for the day’s work. Time, as one ordinarily recognizes it, had ceased. There was no night, marked by rest, nor day divided off into duties and meals. Time was all one, a blurry mixture of dark and cold; light, which hurt one’s eyes, and sweat. Sleep and rest were not. What was happening we did not know. It might have been the end of the world and we shouldn’t have known till we were in the next. There were just guns to be fired at given points for ever and ever, always and always, world with or without end, amen. Guns, guns and nothing but guns, in front, behind, right and left, narrowing down to those of mine which grew hot and were sponged out and went on again and still on, unhurriedly, remorselessly into the German advance, and would go on long and long after I was dead.

One’s mind refused to focus anything but angles and ranges and ammunition supply. There was nothing of importance in the world but those three things, whether we moved on or stayed where we were, whether we walked or whether we rode, whether we ate or whether we starved. In a sort of detached fog one asked questions and gave orders about food and forage and in the same fog food eventually appeared while one stared at the map and whispered another range which the Stand-by shouted down the line of guns.

With spades we cut a gap in a hedge which shut off an orchard from the road. The ditch was filled with stones and bricks from the farm. The horses took the guns in one by one, and other gaps were cut in the front hedge for the gun muzzles. Platforms were dug and trail beds, and ammunition began to pile up beside each gun as the sun came out and thinned the fog.

A telephone line ran away across the fields and a new voice came through the receiver, tickling one’s ear,—that of an uncaptured Colonel of a captured brigade who honoured us by taking command of our brigade. With a shaven face and washed hands he had looked upon our bearded chins and foul appearance and talked of the condition of our horses.

In front of the guns a long line of French machine gunners had dug themselves in and we were on the top of a high ridge. Below us the ground sloped immediately away to a beautiful green valley which rose up again to a feathery wood about to burst into green and ran past it in undulations like the green rollers of the Atlantic. Away in the distance were the great bulbous ever-watching eyes of the enemy,—balloons, which as the sun came up, advanced steadily, hypnotically, many of them strung out in a long line. Presently from the wood below came trickling streams of men, like brown insects coming from a dead horse. The sun glinted on their rifles. Steadily they came, unhurriedly, plodding up to the ridge, hundreds of them, heedless of the enemy barrage which began climbing too in great hundred-yard jumps.

“What news?” said I, as one trickle reached me. It was led by a Colonel.

He shook his head. “We’ve been relieved by the French,” said he, not stopping.

“Relieved? But God’s truth, isn’t there a war on?”

“Who the hell are you talking to?” He flung it over his shoulder and his men followed him away.

Somehow it didn’t seem credible. And yet there all along the ridge and the valley was the entire British infantry, or what looked like it, leisurely going back, while the French machine gunners looked at them and chattered. I got on the ’phone to Brigade about it. The Colonel said, “Yes, I know.”

We went on firing at long range. The teams were just behind the guns, each one under an apple tree, the drivers lying beside their horses. The planes which came over didn’t see us. The other batteries were in the open behind the crest tucked into folds of the ground, all the wagon lines clinging to a farmhouse about a mile back where the headquarters was. The Hun barrage was quickly coming nearer.

A troop of cavalry trotted down into it and took cover under one end of the wood. They had only one casualty. A shell struck a tree and brought it crashing down on top of a horse and rider. The last of our infantry had passed behind us and the wood was empty again. The opposite ridge was unoccupied; glasses showed no one in the country that stretched away on the left. Only the balloons seemed almost on top of us. The cavalry left the wood and trotted over the ridge in a long snake of half sections, and then the fringe of the barrage reached us. It splashed into the orchard. Drivers leaped to the horses’ heads. No man or animal was touched. Again one heard it coming, instinctively crouching at its shriek. Again it left us untouched as with an inattentive eye I saw the cavalry come trotting quietly back. It was followed by a chattering of the French. The reason was obvious. Out of the wood other streams came trickling, blue this time, in little parties of four and five, momentarily increasing in number and pace.

The first lot reached the battery and said they were the second line. The Boche was a “sale race, b’en zut alors!” and hitching their packs they passed on.

The machine gunners began to get ready. The battery began to look at me. The Stand-by gave them another salvo for luck and then ordered ten rounds per gun to be set at fuse 6—the edge of the wood was about fifteen hundred.

The next stream of poilus was hotter. They sweated much all among the orchard and told me with a laugh that the Boche would be here in five minutes. But when I suggested that they should stay and see what we could do together they shrugged their shoulders, spat, said, “En route!” and en routed.

The gunners had finished setting the fuses and were talking earnestly together. The machine gunners weren’t showing much above ground. The barrage had passed over to our rear.

I called up the Colonel again and told him. He told me I could drop the range to three thousand.

The Stand-by passed the order. It got about as far as the first gun and there died of inanition. The battery was so busy talking about the expected arrival of the Boche that orders faded into insignificance. The Stand-by repeated the order. Again it was not passed. I tried a string of curses but nothing more than a whisper would leave my throat. The impotence of it was the last straw. I whispered to the Stand-by to repeat word for word what I said. He megaphoned his hands and you could have heard him across the Channel,—a lovely voice, a bull of Bashan, that rose above the crash of shells and reached the last man at the other end of the line of guns. What he repeated was totally unprintable. If voice failed me, vocabulary hadn’t. I rose to heights undreamed of by even the Tidworth sergeant-major.

At the end of two minutes we began a series which for smartness, jump, drive, passing and execution of orders would have put a Salisbury depot battery into the waste-paper basket. Never in my life have I seen such gunnery as those fellows put up. Salvos went over like one pistol shot. Six rounds battery fire one second were like the ticking of a stop watch. Gun fire was like the stoking of the fires of hell by demons on hot cinders.

One forgot to be tired, one forgot to look out for the Hun in the joy of that masterly performance, a fortissima cantata on a six pipe organ of death and hate. Five minutes, ten minutes? I don’t know, but the pile of empty shell cases became a mountain behind each gun.

A signaller tugged at my arm and I went to the ’phone.

“Retire immediately! Rendezvous at Buchoire!”

I was still caught up with the glory of that shooting.

“What the hell for?” said I. “I can hang on here for ages yet.”

“Retire immediately!” repeated the Colonel.

I came to earth with a bang and began to apologize. Somehow it doesn’t do to talk like that to one’s Colonel even in moments of spiritual exaltation.

We ceased fire and packed up and got mounted and hooked in like six bits of black ginger, but the trouble was that we had to leave the comparative safety of our orchard and go out into the barrage which was churning up the fields the other side of the hedge. I collected the Stand-by and gave him the plan of campaign. They were to follow me in column of route at a trot, with twenty yards between guns,—that is, at right angles to the barrage, so as to form a smaller target. No man can have failed to hear his voice but for some unknown reason they failed to carry out the order. The leading gun followed me over the ditch on to the field, shells bursting on every side. About sixty yards across the field I looked over my shoulder and saw that they were all out of the orchard but wheeling to form line, broadside on to the barrage.

The leading gun, which the Stand-by took on, was the only one that got safely away. The five others all stuck with horses dead and men wounded, and still that barrage dropped like hail.

We cut out the dead horses and shot the badly wounded ones and somehow managed a four-horse team for each gun. The wounded who couldn’t walk were lifted on to limbers and held there by the others, and the four-horse teams nearly broke their hearts before we got the guns off that devilish bit of ploughed land on to a road, and after another twenty minutes had got out of the shell fire. Three sergeants were wounded, a couple of drivers and a gunner. The road was one solid mass of moving troops, French and English, infantry, gunners and transport. There was no means of going cross-country with four-horse teams. One had to follow the stream. Fortunately there were some R.A.M.C. people with stretchers and there was a motor ambulance. Between the two we got all our casualties bandaged and away. The other batteries had been gone already three quarters of an hour. There was no sign of them anywhere.

My own battery was scattered along a mile of traffic; one gun here, another there, divided by field kitchens and French mitrailleuse carts, marching infantry and limbered G.S. wagons. Where the sergeant-major was with the wagon line was beyond the bounds of conjecture. One hoped to find him at the rendezvous at Buchoire. There was nothing with us in the way of rations or forage and we only had the limbers full of ammunition. Fortunately the men had had a midday ration issued in the orchard, and the horses had been watered and fed during the morning. In the way of personnel I had the Quartermaster-sergeant, and two sergeants. The rest were bombardiers, gunners, and drivers,—about three men per gun all told. The outlook was not very optimistic.

The view itself did not tend to lighten one’s depression. We climbed a fairly steep slope which gave a view of the country for miles on either side. The main roads and every little crossroad as far as the eye could carry were all massed with moving troops going back. It looked like the Allied armies in full retreat, quite orderly but none the less routed. Where would it end? From rumours which ran about we were almost surrounded. The only way out was south. We were inside a bottle which we could not break, all aiming for the neck.

And yet everywhere on that slope French infantry had dug themselves in, each man in a little hole about knee-deep with a tiny bank of mud in front of him, separated from the next man by a few yards. They sat and smoked in their holes, so like half-dug graves, waiting for the enemy, watching us go back with a look in their eyes that seemed to be of scorn. Now and again they laughed. It was difficult to meet those quiet eyes without a surge of rage and shame. How much longer were we going to retreat? Where were our reinforcements? Why had our infantry been “relieved” that morning? Why weren’t we standing shoulder to shoulder with those blue-clad poilus? What was the brain at the back of it all? Who was giving the orders? Was this the end of the war? Were we really beaten? Could it be possible that somewhere there was not a line of defence which we could take up and hold, hold for ever? Surely with magnificent men like ours who fought till they dropped and then picked themselves up and fought again, surely something could be done to stop this appalling dÉbÂcle!

26

The tide of traffic took us into Guiscard where we were able to pull out of the stream one by one and collect as a battery,—or at least the gun part of it. While studying the map a mounted orderly came up and saluted.

“Are you the —— Brigade, sir?” he said.

I said yes.

“The orders are to rendezvous at Muiraucourt instead of Buchoire.”

To this day that man remains a mystery. The rest of the brigade did rendezvous at Buchoire and fought twice again that day. The Colonel never gave any order about Muiraucourt and had never heard of the place. Where the orderly came from, who he was, or how he knew the number of the brigade are unsolved problems. I never saw him again. Having given the message he disappeared into the stream of traffic, and I, finding the new rendezvous to be only about three kilometres away in a different direction to Buchoire and out of the traffic road led on again at once.

We passed French gunners of all calibres firing at extreme range and came to Muiraucourt to find it absolutely empty and silent. While the horses were being watered and the wounded ones bandaged I scouted on ahead and had the luck to find an A.S.C. officer with forage for us and a possibility of rations if we waited an hour. It was manna in the wilderness.

We drew the forage and fed the starving horses. At the end of the hour an A.S.C. sergeant rode in to say that the ration wagons had been blown up.—We took up an extra hole in our Sam Brownes. It appeared that he had seen our headquarters and the other batteries marching along the main road in the direction of Noyon, to which place they were undoubtedly going.

The Quartermaster whispered something about bread and tea. So we withdrew from the village and halted on a field just off the road and started a fire. The bread ration was a snare and a delusion. It worked out at about one slice per every other man. He confided this to me sadly while the men were spread-eagled on the bank at the roadside, enjoying all the anticipation of a full stomach. We decided that it wasn’t a large enough quantity to split up so I went over and put the position to them, telling them that on arrival at Noyon we hoped to find the brigade looking out for us with a meal for everybody ready. Meanwhile there wasn’t enough to go round. What about tossing for it?... The ayes had it. They tossed as if they were going to a football match, the winners sending up a cheer, and even the losers sitting down again with a grin.

I decided to ride on into Noyon and locate the brigade and find out where to get rations. So I handed the battery to the Stand-by to bring on when ready, left him the Babe and the other lad, and took the Quartermaster on with me.

It was a nightmare of a ride through miles and miles of empty villages and deserted country, blown-up bridges like stricken giants blocking every way, not a vehicle on the roads, no one in sight, the spirit of desertion overhanging it all, with the light failing rapidly and Noyon apparently as far off as ever. The horses were so done that it was difficult to spur them out of a walk, we ourselves so done that we could hardly raise the energy to spur them. At last after hours of riding we came to the main Roye-Noyon road but didn’t recognize it in the dark and turned the wrong way, going at least half an hour before we discovered our mistake! It was the last straw.

A thing that added to our anxiety was the sight of big guns on caterpillars all coming away from the place we were going to and as we got nearer the town the roar of bursting shells seemed to be very near. One didn’t quite know that streams of the enemy would not pour over the crest at any minute. Deep in one’s brain a vague anxiety formed. The whole country was so empty, the bridges so well destroyed. Were we the last—had we been cut off? Was the Hun between us and Noyon? Suppose the battery were captured? I began to wish that I hadn’t ridden on but had sent the Stand-by in my place. For the first time since the show began, a sense of utter loneliness overwhelmed me, a bitter despair at the uselessness of individual effort in this gigantic tragedy of apocalyptic destruction. Was it a shadow of such loneliness as Christ knew upon the Cross when He looked out upon a storm-riven world and cried, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” All the evil in the world was gathered here in shrieking orgy, crushing one to such mental and physical tiredness that death would only have been a welcome rest.

Unaided I should not have regretted that way out, God knows. But two voices came to me through the night,—one from a little cottage among the pine trees in England, the other calling across the Atlantic with the mute notes of a violin.

“Your men look to you,” they whispered. “We look to you....”

We came to Noyon!

It was as though the town were a magnet which had attracted all the small traffic from that empty countryside, letting only the big guns on caterpillars escape. The centre of the town, like a great octopus, has seven roads which reach out in every direction. Each of these was banked and double-banked with an interlocked mass of guns and wagons. Here and there frantic officers tried to extricate the tangle but for the most part men sat silent and inert upon their horses and vehicles beyond effort and beyond care.

Army Headquarters told me that Noyon would begin to be shelled in an hour’s time and gave me maps and a chit to draw food from the station, but they had never heard of the brigade and thought the Corps had been wiped out. As I left, the new lad came up and reported that the battery had halted on the outskirts of the town. We went back to it and collected the limbers and tried to take them with us to the station, with hearts beating high at the thought of food. It was impossible, so we left them on the pavement and dodged single file between wagon wheels and horses’ legs. After an hour’s fighting every yard of the way we got to the station to find a screaming mob of civilians carrying bundles, treading on each other in their efforts to enter a train, weeping, praying, cursing, out of all control.

The R.S.O. had gone. There was no food.

We fought our way back to Army Headquarters where we learned that a bombardier with two wagons of rations destined to feed stray units like us had gone to Porquericourt, five kilometres out. If we found him we could help ourselves. If we didn’t find him—a charming smile, and a shrug of the shoulders.

I decided to try the hotel where I had spent a night with my brother only three weeks ago. Three weeks, was it possible? I felt years older. The place was bolted and barred and no amount of hammering or shouting drew an answer. The thought of going back empty-handed to my hungry battery was an agony. The chances of finding that bombardier were about one in a million, so small that he didn’t even represent a last hope. In utter despair one called aloud upon Christ and started to walk back. In a narrow unlit street we passed a black doorway in which stood a soldier.

“Can you give me a drink of water?” said I.

“Yes,” said he. “Come in, sir. This is the officers’ club.”

Was it luck? Or did Christ hear? You may think what you like but I am convinced that it was Christ.

We went in. In one room were sleeping officers all over the floor. The next was full of dinner tables uncleared, one electric light burning. It was long after midnight. We helped ourselves to bits of bread from each table and drank the leavings of milk which had been served with the coffee. Then a waiter came. He said he would cook us some tea and try and find a cold tongue or some ham. I told him that I had a starving battery down the road and wanted more than tea and ham. I wanted food in a sack, two sacks, everything he could rake up, anything.

He blinked at me through his glasses. “I’ll see what I can do, sir,” he said and went away.

We had our tea and tongue and he brought a huge sack with loaves and tins of jam and bits of cheese and biscuits and packets of cigarettes and tins of bully. Furthermore he refused all payment except two francs for what we had eaten.

“That’s all right, sir,” he said. “I spent three days in a shell hole outside Wipers on one tin o’ bully.—That’s the best I can do for you.”

I wrung him by the hand and told him he was a brother and a pal, and between us the lad and I shouldered the sack and went out again, thanking God that at least we had got something for the men to eat.

On returning to the battery I found that they had been joined by six wagons which had got cut off from the sergeant-major’s lot and the entire wagon line of the Scots Captain’s battery with two of his subalterns in charge. They, too, were starving.

The sack didn’t go very far. It only took a minute or so before the lot was eaten. Then we started out, now a column about a mile long, to find Porquericourt, a tiny village some two kilometres off the main road, the gunners sleeping as they walked, the drivers rocking in the saddle, the horses stumbling along at a snail’s pace. None of us had shaved or washed since the 21st. We were a hollow-eyed, draggled mob, but we got there at last to be challenged by sentries who guarded sleeping bits of units who had dropped where they stood all over the place. While my two units fixed up a wagon line I took the Quartermaster with me and woke up every man under a wagon or near one asking him if he were Bombardier So and So,—the man with the food. How they cursed me. It took me an hour to go the rounds and there was no bombardier with food. The men received the news without comment and dropped down beside the wagons. The Babe had collected a wagon cover for us to sleep under and spread it under a tree. The four of us lay on it side by side and folded the end over ourselves. There was a heavy dew. But my job wasn’t over. There was to-morrow to be considered. I had given orders to be ready to move off at six o’clock unless the Hun arrived before that. It was then 3 a.m.

The Army had told me that if our Corps was not completely wiped out, their line of retreat was Buchoire, Crissolles and so back in the direction of Lassigny. They advised me to go to Crissolles. But one look at the map convinced me that Crissolles would be German by six o’clock in the morning. So I decided on Lagny by the secondary road which went straight to it from Porquericourt. If the brigade was not there, surely there would be some fighting unit who would have heard of them, or who might at least be able to spare us rations, or tell us where we could get some. Fighting on scraps of bread was all right but could not be prolonged indefinitely.

At six o’clock we set out as a squadron of cavalry with slung lances trotted like ghosts across the turf. We had only been on the march five minutes when a yell from the rear of the battery was passed quickly up to me as I walked in the lead.

“Halt! Action rear!”

My heart stood still. Were the Germans streaming up in the mist? Were we caught at last like rats in a trap? It couldn’t be. It was some fool mistake. The Babe was riding just behind me. I called him up. “Canter back and find out who gave that order and bring him here.—You, lead driver! Keep on walking till I give you the order to do anything else.”

We went on steadily. From moment to moment nothing seemed to happen, no rifle or machine-gun fire.—The Babe came back with a grin. “The order was ‘All correct in rear,’ sir.”

Can you get the feeling of relief? We were not prisoners or fighting to the last man with clubbed rifles in that cold grey dawn on empty stomachs.

I obeyed the natural instinct of all mothers who see their child snatched from destruction,—to slap the infant. “Find out the man who passed it up wrongly and damn his soul to hell?”

“Right, sir,” said the Babe cheerily, and went back. Good Babe, he couldn’t damn even a mosquito properly!

The road was the most ungodly track imaginable, blocked here and there by 60-pounders coming into action. But somehow the horses encompassed the impossible and we halted in the lane outside the village at about seven o’clock. The Stand-by remained in charge of the battery while the Babe and I went across gardens to get to the village square. There was an old man standing at a door. He gazed at us motionless. I gave him bon jour and asked him for news of British troops, gunners. Yes, the village was full. Would we care for some cider? Wouldn’t we! He produced jugfuls of the most perfect cider I’ve ever drunk and told us the story of his life. He was a veteran of 1870 and wept all down himself in the telling. We thanked him profusely, shook his trembling hand and went out of his front door into the main street.

There were wagons with the brigade mark! I could have wept with joy.

In a couple of minutes we had found Headquarters. The man I’d dosed with champagne on the road corner two days before fell on my neck with strong oaths. It appeared that I’d been given up as wiped out with the whole battery, or at least captured. He looked upon me as back from the dead.

The Colonel had a different point of view. He was no longer shaved and washed, and threatened to put me under arrest for not having rendezvoused at Buchoire! Relations between us were strained, but everybody was in the act of getting mounted to reconnoitre positions so there was no time for explanations or recriminations. Within three-quarters of an hour the battery was in action, but the Quartermaster had found the sergeant-major, who, splendid fellow, had our rations. He functioned mightily with cooks. Tea and bacon, bread and butter,—what could the “Carlton” have done better than that?

And later, when the sun came out, there was no firing to be done, and we slept beside the gun wheels under an apple tree, slept like the dead for nearly a whole hour.

28

The Hun was indeed at Crissolles, for the brigade had fought there the previous evening. So much for Army advice.

The day was marked by two outstanding events; one, the return of the Major of the Scots Captain’s battery, his wound healed, full of bloodthirst and cheeriness; the other, that I got a shave and wash. We advanced during the morning to cover a village called Bussy. We covered it,—with gun fire and salvos, the signal for each salvo being a wave from my shaving brush. There was a hell of a battle in Bussy, street fighting with bayonets and bombs. The brigade dropped a curtain of fire on the outer fringe of the village and caught the enemy in full tide. Four batteries sending over between them a hundred rounds a minute of high explosive and shrapnel can make a nasty mess of a pin-point. The infantry gloated,—our infantry.

On our right Noyon was the centre of a whirlwind of Hun shells. We were not out any too soon. The thought added zest to our gun fire. Considering the amount of work those guns had done in the last five days and nights it was amazing how they remained in action without even breaking down. The fitter worked like a nigger and nursed them like infants. Later the Army took him from me to go and drive rivets in ships!

We pulled out of action again as dusk was falling, and the word was passed that we had been relieved and were going out of the line. The brigade rendezvoused at Cuy in a field off the road while the traffic crept forward a yard and halted, waited an hour and advanced another yard, every sort of gun, wagon, lorry, ambulance and car, crawling back, blocked at every crossroads, stuck in ditches, sometimes abandoned.

All round the sky glared redly. Hour after hour we sat in that cup of ground waiting for orders, shivering with cold, sleeping in uneasy snatches, smoking tobacco that ceased to taste, nibbling ration biscuits until the night became filled with an eerie strained silence. Jerky sentences stopped. Faint in the distance came the crunch of wheels, a vague undercurrent of sound. The guns had stopped. Now and again the chink of a horse mumbling his bit. The tail end of the traffic on the road below us was silent, waiting, the men huddled, asleep. And through it all one’s ear listened for a new sound, the sound of marching feet, or trotting horses which might mean an Uhlan patrol. Bussy was not far.

Suddenly one voice, far away, distinct, pierced the darkness like a thin but blinding ray. “Les Boches!—Les Boches!”

A sort of shivering rustle ran over the whole brigade. Men stirred, sat up, muttered. Horses raised their heads with a rattle of harness. Hands crept to revolvers. Every breath was held and every head stared in the direction of the voice.

For a moment the silence was spellbound.

Then the voice came again, “A gauche! A gauche! Nom de Dieu!” and the crunch of wheels came again.

The brigade relaxed. There came a laugh or two, a mumbled remark, a settling down, a muttered curse and then silence once more.

Eventually came a stir, an order. Voices were raised. Sleeping figures rolled over stiffly, staggered up. Officers came forward. The order “Get mounted!” galvanized everybody.

Wagon by wagon we pulled out of the field. My battery was the last. No sooner on the road, with our noses against the tailboard of the last vehicle of the battery in front, than we had to halt again and wait endlessly, the drivers sleeping in their saddles until pulled out by the N.C.O.’s, the gunners flinging themselves into the ditch. At last on again, kicking the sleepers awake,—the only method of rousing them. It was very cold. To halt was as great an agony as to march, whether mounted or on foot. For five days and nights one had had one’s boots on. The condition of feet was indescribable. In places the road was blocked by abandoned motor lorries. We had to extemporize bridges over the ditch with rocks and tins and whatever was in the lorries with a tailboard placed on top, to unhook lead horses from a four-horse gun team and hook them into a loaded wagon to make a six-horse team, to rouse the drivers sufficiently to make them drive properly and get the full team to work together, and at last, having reached a good metalled road, to follow the battery in front, limping and blind, hour after hour. From time to time the gunners and drivers changed places. For the most part no word was spoken. We halted when the teams bumped their noses on the wagon in front, went on again when those in front did. At one halt I sat on a gun seat, the unforgivable sin for a gunner on the line of march,—and I was the Battery Commander. Sprawled over the breech of the gun in a stupor I knew no more for an indefinite period when I woke again to find us still marching. The sergeant-major confided to me afterwards that he was so far my accomplice in that lack of discipline that he posted a gunner on either side to see that I didn’t fall off. We had started the march about five o’clock in the afternoon.

We didn’t reach our destination till nine o’clock next morning. The destination consisted of halting in the road outside a village already full of troops, Chevrincourt. The horses were unhooked and taken off the road, watered, and tied to lines run up between the trees. Breakfast was cooked, and having ascertained that we were not going to move for the rest of the day we spread our valises, and got into pyjamas, not caring if it snowed ink.

29

We stayed there two days, doing nothing but water and feed the horses and sleep. I succeeded in getting letters home the first morning, having the luck to meet a junior Brass Hat who had done the retreat in a motor-car. It was good to be able to put an end to their anxiety. Considering all things we had been extraordinarily lucky. The number of our dead, wounded and missing was comparatively slight and the missing rolled up later, most of them. On the second night at about two in the morning, Battery Commanders were summoned urgently to Brigade Headquarters. The Colonel had gone, leaving the bloodthirsty Major in command. It transpired that a Divisional brigade plus one battery of ours was to go back into the line. They would take our best guns, some of our best teams and our best sergeants. The exchanges were to be carried out at once. They were.

We marched away that day, leaving one battery behind. As it happened, it didn’t go into the line again but rejoined us a week later.

The third phase of the retreat, marching back to the British area—we were far south into the French area at Chevrincourt, which is near CompiÈgne, and all its signboards showed Paris so many kilometres away—gave us an impression of the backwash of war. The roads were full, not of troops, but of refugees, women, old men, girls and children, with what possessions they could load into a farm wagon piled sky high. They pulled their cattle along by chains or ropes tied round their horns. Some of them pushed perambulators full of packages and carried their babies. Others staggered under bundles. Grief marked their faces. The hope of return kept them going. The French have deeper roots in the soil than we. To them their “patelin” is the world and all the beauty thereof. It was a terrible sight to see those poor women trudging the endless roads, void of a goal as long as they kept away from the pursuing death, half starved, sleeping unwashed in leaky barns, regardless of sex, begging milk from the inhabited villages they passed through to satisfy their unhappy babies, managing somehow to help the aged and infirm who mumbled bitter curses at the “sale Boche” and “soixante-dix.” I heard one woman say “Nous savons c’qu c’est que la guerre! Nous avons tout fait exceptÉ les tranchÉes.” “We know what war is. We have done everything except the trenches.” Bombarded with gas and long-range guns, bombed by aeroplanes, homeless, half starved, the graves of their dead pillaged by ghoul-like Huns, their sons, husbands, and lovers killed, indeed they knew the meaning of war.

England has been left in merciful ignorance of this side of war, but woe unto her if she ever forgets that these women of France are her blood-sisters, these peasant women who later gave food to the emaciated Tommies who staggered back starving after the armistice, food of which they denied themselves and their children.

On the third day we reached Poix where only three months previously we had spent a merry Christmas and drunk the New Year in, the third day of ceaseless marching and finding billets in the middle of the night in villages crowded with refugees. The whole area was full, British and French elbowing each other, the unfortunate refugees being compelled to move on.

Here we exchanged old guns for new, received reinforcements of men and horses, drew new equipment in place of that which was destroyed and lost, found time to ride over to Bergicourt to pay our respects to the little AbbÉ, still unshaved, who was now billeting Moroccan troops, and who kissed us on both cheeks before all the world, and in three more days were on our way to their firing line again.

It was here that the runaway servants were dealt with; here, too, that my brother came rolling up in his car to satisfy himself that I was still this side of eternity or capture. And very good it was to see him. He gave us the number of divisions engaged against us, and we marvelled again that any of us were still alive.

We went north this time for the defence of Amiens, having been joined by our fourth battery, and relieved a brigade in action behind the village of Gentelles. The Anzacs were in the line from Villers Brettoneux to Hangard where their flank touched the French. The spire of Amiens cathedral peeped up behind us and all day long-range shells whizzed over our heads into the stricken city.

Some one was dissatisfied with our positions behind the village. The range was considered too long. Accordingly we were ordered to go forward and relieve some other batteries down the slope in front of Gentelles. The weather had broken. It rained ceaselessly. The whole area was a mud patch broken by shell holes. The Major, who had remained behind at Chevrincourt, and I went forward together to locate the forward batteries. Dead horses everywhere, and fresh graves of men marked our path. Never have I seen such joy on any faces as on those of the officers whom we were coming to relieve.

On our return we reported unfavourably, urging strongly that we should remain where we were. The order was inexorable. That night we went in.

We stayed there three days, at the end of which time we were withdrawn behind the village again. Our dead were three officers—one of whom was the Babe—half the gunners, and several drivers. Our wounded were one officer and half the remaining gunners. Of the guns themselves about six in the brigade were knocked out by direct hits.

Who was that dissatisfied “some one” who, having looked at a map from the safety of a back area, would not listen to the report of two Majors, one a regular, who had visited the ground and spoke from their bitterly-earned experience? Do the ghosts of those officers and men, unnecessarily dead, disturb his rest o’ nights, or is he proudly wearing another ribbon for distinguished service? Even from the map he ought to have known better. It was the only place where a fool would have put guns. The German artillery judged him well.

Poor Babe, to be thrown away at the beginning of his manhood at the dictate of some ignorant and cowardly Brass Hat!

“Young, unmarried men, your King and country need you!”

30

So we crawled out of the valley of death. With what remained of us in men and guns we formed three batteries, two of which went back to their original positions behind the village and in disproof of their uselessness fired four thousand rounds a day per battery, fifty-six wagon-loads of ammunition. The third battery tucked itself into a corner of the village and remained there till its last gun had been knocked out. One S.O.S. lasted thirty-six hours. One lived with a telephone and a map. Sleep was unknown. Food was just food, eaten when the servants chose to bring it. The brain reeled under the stupendousness of the strain and the firing. For cover we lived in a hole in the ground, some four feet deep with a tarpaulin to keep the rain out. It was just big enough to hold us all. The wings of the angel of death brushed our faces continuously. Letters from home were read without being understood. One watched men burned to death in the battery in front, as the result of a direct hit, without any emotion. If there be a hell such as the Church talks about, then indeed we had reached it.

We got a new Colonel here, and the bloodthirsty Major returned to his battery, the Scots Captain having been one of the wounded. My own Captain rolled up again too, having been doing all sorts of weird fighting up and down the line. It was only now that we learned the full extent of the retreat and received an order of the day from the Commander in Chief to the effect that England had its back up against the wall. In other words the Hun was only to pass over our dead bodies. He attempted it at every hour of the day and night. The Anzacs lost and retook Villers Brettoneux. The enemy got to Cachy, five hundred yards in front of the guns, and was driven back again. The French Colonials filled Hangard Wood with their own and German dead, the wounded leaving a trail of blood day and night past our hole in the ground. The Anzacs revelled in it. They had never killed so many men in their lives. Their General, a great tall man of mighty few words, was round the outpost line every day. He was much loved. Every officer and man would gladly have stopped a shell for him.

At last we were pulled out of the line, at half an hour’s notice. Just before hooking in—the teams were on the position—there was a small S.O.S. lasting five minutes. My battery fired four hundred rounds in that time,—pretty good going for men who had come through such an inferno practically without sleep for fifteen days.

We sat under a haystack in the rain for forty-eight hours and the Colonel gave us lectures on calibration. Most interesting!

I confess to having been done in completely. The Babe’s death had been a frightful shock. His shoulder was touching mine as he got it and I had carried him spouting blood to the shelter of a bank. I wanted to get away and hide. I was afraid, not of death, but of going on in that living hell. I was unable to concentrate sufficiently to dictate the battery orders. I was unable to face the nine o’clock parade and left it to the Orderly Officer. The day’s routine made me so jumpy that I couldn’t go near the lines or the horses. The sight of a gun filled me with physical sickness. The effort of giving a definite order left me trembling all over.

The greatest comfort I knew was to lie on my valise in the wet straw with closed eyes and listen to “Caprice Viennois” on the gramophone. It lifted one’s soul with gentle hands and bore it away into infinite space where all was quiet and full of eternal rest and beauty. It summed up the youth of the world, the springtime of love in all its fresh cleanness, like the sun after an April shower transforms the universe into magic colours.

I think the subalterns guessed something of my trouble for they went out of their way to help me in little things.

We marched north and went into the line again behind Albert, a murdered city whose skeleton melted before one’s eyes under the ceaseless rain of shells from our heavy artillery.

During and since the retreat the cry on all sides was “Where the devil are the Americans?”—those mysterious Americans who were reported to be landing at the rate of seven a minute. What became of them after landing? They seemed to disappear. Some had seen them buying up Marseilles, and then painting Paris all colours of the rainbow, but no one had yet heard of them doing any fighting. The attitude was not very bright, until Pershing’s offer to Foch. Then everybody said, “Ah! Now we shall see something.” Our own recruits seemed to be the dregs of England, untrained, weedy specimens who had never seen a gun and were incapable of learning. Yet we held the Hun all right. One looked for the huskies from U.S.A., however, with some anxiety.

At Albert we found them, specimens of them, wedged in the line with our infantry, learning the game. Their one desire was to go out into No Man’s Land and get to close quarters. They brought Brother Boche or bits of him every time. One overheard talk on one’s way along the trenches to the O.P. “Danger?” queried one sarcastically, “Say, I ain’t bin shot at yet.” And another time when two officers and I had been shelled out of the O.P. by a pip-squeak battery to our extreme discomfort and danger, we came upon a great beefy American standing on the fire step watching the shells burst on the place we had just succeeded in leaving. “If that guy don’t quit foolin’ around with that gun,” he said thoughtfully, “some one’ll likely get hurt in a minute.”

Which was all to the good. They shaped well. The trouble apparently was that they had no guns and no rifles.

Our own positions were another instance of the criminal folly of ignorance,—great obvious white gashes in a green field, badly camouflaged, photographed and registered by the Hun, so placed that the lowest range to clear the crest was 3,500 and the S.O.S. was 3,550. It meant that if the Germans advanced only fifty yards we could not bring fire to bear on them.

The dawn of our getting in was enlivened by an hour’s bombardment with gas and four-twos. Every succeeding dawn was the same.

Fortunately it proved to be a peace sector, comparatively speaking, and I moved out of that unsavoury spot with no more delay than was required in getting the Colonel’s consent. It only took the death of one man to prove my point. He was a mere gunner, not even on proficiency pay, so presumably it was cheap knowledge. We buried him at midnight in pouring rain, the padre reading the service by the light of my electric torch. But the Colonel wasn’t there.

From the new position so reluctantly agreed to, we fired many hundreds of rounds, as did our successors, and not a single man became a casualty.

What is the psychology of this system of insisting on going into childishly unsuitable positions? Do they think the Battery Commander a coward who balks at a strafed emplacement? Isn’t the idea of field gunners to put their guns in such a place as will permit them to remain in action effectively for the longest possible time in a show? Why, therefore, occupy a position already accurately registered by the enemy, which he can silence at any given moment? Do they think that a Major of two years’ experience in command of a battery in the line has not learned at least the rudiments of choosing positions for his guns? Do they think it is an attempt to resent authority, or to assert their own importance? Do they think that the difference of one pip and a foot of braid is the boundary between omniscience and crass stupidity?

In civil life if the senior partner insists on doing the junior’s job and bungles it, the junior can resign,—and say things.

While we were outside Albert we got our first leave allotment and the ranks were permitted to return to their wives and families for fourteen days, provided always that they had been duly vaccinated, inoculated, and declared free from vermin and venereal disease by the medical officer.

A delightful game, the inoculation business. Army orders are careful not to make it compulsory, but if any man refuses to be done his commanding officer is expected to argue with him politely, and, if that fails, to hound him to the needle. If he shies at the needle’s point then his leave is stopped,—although he has sweated blood for King and country for eighteen months or so, on a weekly pay with which a munitioneer daily tips the waiter at the “Carlton.” If he has been unlucky enough to get venereal disease then his leave is stopped for a year.

In the next war every Tommy will be a munition maker.

31

The desire to get out of it, to hide, refused to leave me.

I wrote to my brother and asked him if he could help me to become an R.T.O. or an M.L.O.; failing that, a cushy liaison job miles away from shambles and responsibility and spit and polish. He knew of the very thing, and I was duly nominated for liaison. The weeks went by and the nomination papers became a mass of illegible recommendations and signatures up to the highest Generals of the English Army and a MarÉchal of France. But the ultimate reply was that I was a Battery Commander and therefore far too important to be allowed to go. Considering that I was half dead and not even allowed an opinion in the choosing of a position for my own battery, Gilbert and Sullivan could have conceived no more priceless paradox.

Somewhere about the end of May we were relieved and went to a rest camp outside Abbeville which was being bombed every night. A special week’s leave to England was granted to “war-weary officers.” I sent a subaltern and, prepared to pawn my own soul to see England again, asked if I might go too.

The reply is worthy of quotation. “You don’t seem to understand that this is a rest camp, the time when you are supposed to train your battery. You’ll get your leave in the line.”

The camp was on turf at the edge of a deep lake. All day the horses roamed free grazing, and the men splashed about in the water whenever they felt inclined. The sun shone and footballs appeared from nowhere and there were shops in the village where they could spend money, and Abbeville was only about a mile and a half away. In the morning we did a little gun drill and cleaned vehicles and harness. Concerts took place in the evenings. Leslie Henson came with a theatrical company and gave an excellent show. The battery enjoyed its time of training.

Most of those officers who weren’t sufficiently war-weary for the week in England, went for a couple of days to TrÉport or Paris-Plage. For myself I got forty-eight hours in Etaples with my best pal, who was giving shows to troops about to go up the line, feeding train-loads of refugees and helping to bandage wounded; and somehow or other keeping out of the way of the bombs which wrecked the hospital and drove the reinforcement camps to sleep in the woods on the other side of the river. We drove out to Paris-Plage and lunched and dined and watched the golden sea sparkling and walked back in a moonlight filled with the droning of Gothas, the crashing of bombs and the impotent rage of an Archie barrage.

Not only were there no horses to look after nor men to handle but there was a kindred spirit to talk with when one felt like it, or with whom to remain silent when one didn’t. Blessed be pals, for they are few and far between, and their value is above rubies.

Our rest camp came to an end with an inspection from Field-Marshal Sir Douglas Haig and once more we took the trail. The battery’s adventures from then until the first day of the attack which was to end the war can be briefly summed up, as we saw hardly any fighting. We went back to Albert and checked calibrations, then entrained and went off to Flanders where we remained in reserve near St. Omer for a fortnight or so. Then we entrained once more and returned to Albert, but this time south of it, behind Morlancourt.

There was an unusual excitement in the air and a touch of optimism. Foch was said to have something up his sleeve. The Hun was reported to be evacuating Albert. The Americans had been blooded and had come up to expectations. There was a different atmosphere about the whole thing. On our own sector the Hun was offensive. The night we came in he made a raid, took two thousand yards of front line on our right, and plastered us with gas and four-twos for several hours. No one was hurt or gassed except myself. I got a dose of gas. The doctor advised me to go down to the wagon line for a couple of days, but the barrage was already in for our attack and the Captain was in England on the Overseas Course. The show started about 4 p.m. right along the front.

It was like the 21st of March with the positions reversed. South of us the whole line broke through and moved forward. At Morlancourt the Hun fought to the death. It was a sort of pivot, and for a couple of days we pounded him. By that time the line had ceased to bulge and was practically north and south. Then our infantry took Morlancourt and pushed the Hun back on to the Fricourt ridge and in wild excitement we got the order to advance. It was about seven o’clock at night. All Battery Commanders and the Colonel dashed up in a car to the old front line to reconnoitre positions. The car was missed by about twelve yards with high explosive and we advanced in the dark, falling over barbed wire, tumbling into shell holes, jumping trenches and treading on corpses through a most unpleasant barrage. The Hun had a distinct sting in his tail.

We came into position about three hundred yards north-west of Morlancourt. The village and all the country round stank of festering corpses, mostly German, though now and again one came upon a British pair of boots and puttees with legs in them,—or a whole soldier with a pack on his back, who looked as if he were sleeping until one saw that half his face was blown away. It made one sick, sick with horror, whether it was our own Tommies or a long trench chaotic with rifles, equipment, machine guns and yellow, staring and swollen Germans.

The excitement of advancing died away. The “glory of victory” was just one long butchery, one awful smell, an orgy of appalling destruction unequalled by the barbarians of pre-civilization.

Here was all the brain, energy and science of nineteen hundred years of “progress,” concentrated on lust and slaughter, and we called it glorious bravery and rang church bells! Soldier poets sang their swan songs in praise of dying for their country, their country which gave them a period of hell, and agonizing death, then wept crocodile tears over the Roll of Honour, and finally returned with an easy conscience to its money-grubbing. The gladiators did it better. At least they were permitted a final sarcasm, “Morituri, te salutant!”

Even gentle women at home, who are properly frightened of mice and spank small boys caught ill-treating an animal, even they read the flaming headlines of the papers with a light in their eyes, and said, “How glorious! We are winning!” Would they have said the same if they could have been set down on that reeking battlefield where riddled tanks splashed with blood heaved drunkenly, ambulances continuously drove away with the smashed wrecks of what once were men, leaving a trail of screams in the dust of the road, and always the guns crashed out their pÆan of hate by day and night, ceaselessly, remorselessly, with a terrible trained hunger to kill, and maim and wipe out?

There was no stopping. I was an insignificant cog in that vast machine, but no man could stop the wheels in their mighty revolutions. Fate stepped in, however.

We advanced again to Mametz, and there, mercifully, I got another dose of gas. The effects of the first one, seven days previously, had not worked off. This was the last straw. Three days later it toppled me over. The doctors labelled me and sent me home.

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