The adventures of an ensign

By Vedette

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Title: The adventures of an ensign

Author: Vedette


        
Release date: March 1, 2026 [eBook #78078]

Language: English

Original publication: Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1917

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVENTURES OF AN ENSIGN ***




The Adventures of an Ensign




  _TO
  MY WIFE._




  The Adventures of
  an Ensign

  BY
  VEDETTE

  SECOND IMPRESSION

  William Blackwood and Sons
  Edinburgh and London
  1917

  _ALL RIGHTS RESERVED_




  The
  Adventures of an Ensign.




CHAPTER I.

  “Fair sets the wind for France!”


This story, like so many others in England’s military history, opens
at Waterloo Station. We shall abridge the formalities of introducing
its central figure, for he can only claim attention in connection
with certain military events in which he played a diminutive _rôle_.
Indeed, save for the fact that he is wearing the service uniform of
one of the Guards’ regiments, there is nothing to distinguish him from
the thousands of other second lieutenants, insignificant even as he,
whose share in shaping the destinies of the world on the battlefields
of France and Belgium has likewise begun at one or other of the great
London termini.

Here, then, is our Ensign--a colloquial phrase for referring to a
second lieutenant of the Guards, for the title was dropped many years
ago--in company with a brother ensign, his fellow-traveller, known to
the ante-room at home as “The Lad,” and, like the other, for the first
time “proceeding on active service.” They are going out alone--that is
to say, not as part of a draft--and beyond the known fact that they
are bound for the Guards’ Base Depôt in France, what military writers
call “the fog of war” envelops their future.

“Thank goodness, we’re not conducting a draft!”

Thus our Ensign, as he stood on the platform at Waterloo, to his
fellow-traveller, indicating with a jerk of his head a flushed and
heated youth, heavily laden with pack and equipment, who was chivvying
a party of men to the train.

“Probably we should get up to the Front quicker if we were!” replied
his companion gloomily. Waking and sleeping, The Lad was haunted by the
fear that the war would be over before he could get into the firing
line.

“We shall get there quick enough, don’t you worry!” replied the other;
“there’s something happening in France. I was at Broadstairs yesterday,
and we heard the guns all day!”

For this was in those summer days of 1916, when even in Kent the air
throbbed to the unending tremulo of the guns playing the overture to
the battle of the Somme.

It was a beautiful morning--a Saturday--and the train was very crowded.
The two officers started their journey under the most favourable
auspices. On returning to their compartment of the train, after
purchasing papers at the bookstall, our Ensign found a bearded cleric
seated upon his Wolseley valise on the floor of the carriage, for
every seat was taken. The Lad and our young friend made room for the
ecclesiastic upon the seat between them, and in the conversation which
ensued The Lad identified the stranger as a Bishop travelling down to
Winchester to see a school cricket match.

“In this heat,” said The Lad to our Ensign, after taking leave of the
Bishop at Winchester, “he must have mentally blessed us for coming to
his rescue, so I think we’ve made a pretty good start!”

At the port of embarkation, which the Censor will hardly let me name,
a timely hint recurred to them as they drove down to the docks in an
ancient fly. The advice had been offered by a veteran of Mons and Ypres.

“Don’t go on board the transport too early,” this authority had said,
“or the M.L.O. or one of those fellows will rope you in for the job
of O.C. troops going across. They generally pick on somebody who is
not conducting a draft!” So the two young officers, having ascertained
that the transport would not sail till the late afternoon, dumped
their kits on the quayside and fled back to the town for lunch. Cold
beef and pickles and very stale bread and tired butter laid out on a
stained table-cloth, in a depressing atmosphere of faded victuals,
amid red wall-paper, whisky advertisements, and dyed grasses--truly we
English love to soften the pangs of parting from our native shores!
Nevertheless the travelling companions made an excellent luncheon, and
even professed to recognise feminine allurements in the dingy slattern
who served them.

The transport which was to take them to France was not a prison hulk
such as bore young Colonel Wesley to his first taste of active service
on the West Indies expedition, nor was she verminous like the coffin
ships that conveyed the Guards to Malta in ’54; but when it is noted
that she was clean, nothing remains to be said. There were a few bunks
for officers below; but these were appropriated by the early comers.
Everybody else, officers and men, sprawled about on the decks and in
the bare open spaces made by clearing out the first and second class
saloons--for, in her youth, the transport had been a passenger steamer.

The ship was very crowded. On board were big drafts of the King’s
Royal Rifles, with their black cross badges, of London Territorials,
and of Irish Rifles and Irish Fusiliers, a fine rowdy lot of Irishmen
these two last, as well as some yeomanry and various oddments coming
back from leave. Our Ensign, who possessed to some extent the faculty
of observation, noticed that the leave men did not seem to return to
the prospect before them with that blitheness of heart of which the
lady war writers tell us. On the other hand, the men were by no means
gloomy. They just sat about on their packs and smoked their fags and
chatted about the good time they had had in Blighty, and cracked a
little joke or two about the life to which they were going back.

Our two young Guardsmen walked the upper deck until the transport was
well out in the open sea. Then the prostration became so general that
progress was a sort of egg-dance. So they turned their steps towards
the stairs leading to the lower deck, where they ran into a Grenadier
subaltern. They stopped and chatted. He was going back from leave. They
told him they were going to the Base.

“Do you think they’ll keep us there long?” asked The Lad hastily.

“Can’t say,” answered the other; “things are pretty quiet up Ypres way.”

Then they talked about the amenities of life in the Salient, and about
mutual acquaintances out in France with the Guards’ Division and in the
Brigade at home.

“I believe there’s some kind of restaurant place on board for
officers,” suddenly remarked the Grenadier; “suppose we go and have
something to eat!”

They found a tiny place, literally crammed to the narrow door with
officers, packed as tight as herrings in a barrel, round several small
tables, the napery of which showed signs of the tossing of the vessel
and the rough-and-scramble of the accommodation. Fortunately some one
there espied a submarine through the port-hole, and in the ensuing
rush for the deck the three officers managed to wedge themselves in at
a table. Here, in the course of time, they received successively from
the hands of the perspiring stewards a piece of cold beef, a sardine
in a saucer, a loaf of bread, considerably damaged, a knife, a spoon,
a teapot full of very hot and very strong tea, and a plate. With
these ingredients they contrived to make a very fair supper on the
co-operative system.

After that the trio parted company, and our Ensign and The Lad, after
much scrambling over prostrate forms, found an empty boat into which
they clambered, and slept comfortably till daylight.

Our Ensign awoke to find The Lad shaking him. The rising sun was
daubing the wide stretch of sky with a grand splash of colour. The
transport was lying alongside a quay where lines of khaki figures were
forming up on the greasy planking among cranes, gangways, and stacks of
packing-cases.

“Listen!” said The Lad in a reverent voice.

But our Ensign had already heard it--that steady throb of distant
cannon, an incessant pounding, as it seemed, upon the roof of the sky.

The guns of the Somme!

An officer, the snout of a megaphone to his face, was bawling orders.

“All leave men to come ashore at once. The remainder stay on board!” he
boomed from the quayside.

“H--l!” exclaimed The Lad in a tone which suggested that peace might be
declared before they could disembark.

“H--l!” echoed his companion.

Then they went and searched the vessel for breakfast. A Coldstream
sergeant, whom The Lad had met on a bombing course somewhere at
home, meeting them, volunteered the information that hot cocoa was
going in the cook’s galley. There, sure enough, our heroes found two
grimy-looking privates in their shirt sleeves presiding over dixies of
some dark and scalding liquid. The procedure was simple. You grabbed
a mug from somebody who had finished--officers and men were all mixed
up together in that little place--and had as many dips as you could
contrive in the scrum. Hot cocoa in the chilly dawn is nectar.

Soon after the travelling companions landed, and a very friendly M.L.O.
abbreviated formalities for them and indicated an hotel where breakfast
and a bath might be obtained before they went on to the Guards’ Base
Depôt, the intermediate stage on their journey towards the Front.

The air still vibrated to the throb of distant gun fire. The whole
town was throbbing in sympathy. The morning _communiqué_ was full of
the story of the British successes on the Somme, with a long tale
of prisoners and guns captured. People stood about the docks and at
street corners in the bright sunshine discussing the great news. At
the barber’s where they were shaved, at the hotel where they bathed
and breakfasted, the new-comers heard little else save enthusiastic
comments on the British advance.

Later in the day our Ensign and The Lad found themselves staring
wide-eyed at a broad stretch of hillside, covered, as far as the eye
could see, with a vast and mighty camp--a sea of tents and huts and
sheds all astir with life.

Here, presently, they reported at an office in company with a throng of
officers from every arm of the service, and were directed to proceed
to the portion of the camp set apart for the Guards’ Division. A long,
well-kept road, fringed on either side with tents and huts of all
descriptions, led them through a series of camps, past orderly-rooms
and guard-rooms and cinema sheds and Y.M.C.A. huts and church tents,
with little gardens and regimental crests worked in white and black
stones, to a low slope, dotted with huts and sheds and bell-tents in
orderly rows, with a well-known flag floating from a flagstaff on the
roof of a long low building.

A white star on a red and blue ground--it was the Brigade flag.




CHAPTER II

  “And look ... a thousand Blossoms with the Day
  Woke ... and a thousand scattered into clay.”

                                                         --OMAR KHAYYÁM.


Within the confines of that camp within a camp, the young officers
found themselves at once at home.

In the long pavilion over which floated the Brigade flag, our Ensign
and The Lad found the Officers’ Mess--a long dining-room and an
ante-room, with bright curtains and basket-chairs, and a bridge-table
or two, and the latest papers--rather like a golf pavilion. On the
white distemper of the wall some one with an artist’s hand had executed
a few hasty sketches of the Guards in their uniforms of peace time--an
officer in overalls, a private in white fatigue jacket.

In the Mess the new-comers found assembled officers from every regiment
in the Brigade--youngsters who had just come out from home, veterans
returning to the Front for the second or third time, officers passed
for light duty acting as instructors at the great training-ground where
drafts of all arms waiting at the Depôt underwent a further period
of training before being sent up to the firing line. Here our Ensign
was joyously hailed by officers of his own regiment, who gave him
the latest news from the Front. Here, too, he experienced that first
unforgettable shock--he learnt of the death of a brother officer, one
who had been his friend, killed in the trenches that very morning.

Along one corner of the little “square,” white bell-tents were pitched
in neat array. In these were quartered men from every regiment in the
Brigade of Guards, waiting their turn to be drafted into the firing
line. The long stretch of canvas on the hillside, surrounded on every
side by similar lines of tents stretching far away into the distance,
reminded our Ensign of an old photograph he had seen somewhere of the
Guards’ camp at Scutari in ’54, then, as now, hemmed in all round by
the camps of other Brigades.

The camp was the picture of neatness. The well-metalled road traversing
it was kept scrupulously clean. The officers were quartered in a little
colony of square Armstrong huts, with canvas sides and timber flooring,
set up in mathematically precise rows across from the Mess at the foot
of a delightful little garden, laid out behind rustic fencing enclosing
a Badminton court. The officers’ huts were gay with coloured prints cut
out of ‘La Vie Parisienne’ and ‘The Sketch,’ the little gardens bright
with flowers, the natty paths carefully swept. In short, the whole
place was the perfection of order.

Life at the Guards’ Depôt in France differed from life with the Guards
at home to this extent, that, instead of having their drills on the
“square,” the men were marched up daily to the common training-ground,
situated on a plateau overlooking the camp. Each day one or two
officers per regiment were detailed for the uncongenial duty of
marching the men of their regiment up the dusty winding hill to the
training-ground, one of the pipers of the Scots Guards at their head.
The other officers, save the Piquet (or Orderly) Officer who had his
round of duties at the camp to attend to, took a short cut to the
ground, involving a brief but precipitous climb up a steep hillside.

Our Ensign still carries in his memory a picture of the training-ground
as he saw it on that first hot morning. It was a spectacle so
overwhelming that it drove from his mind for the moment all the
impressions he had been absorbing during his months of training with
the Guards. As he gazed at the vast panorama of the plateau, he felt
his heart throb in answer to the patriotic appeal of that picture of
Britain in arms. For, from all sides and by every road, he saw dense
columns of men converging on a great central parade-ground. With brass
band, with drums and fifes, or with pipes and drums at their head,
the thick brown columns poured in by every approach, the men in full
marching order, their rifles slung, the sweat trickling down their
sunburnt faces from their climb up the steep ascent. Cockneys, men of
Kent, men of the Midlands, and men of the West country, “Geordies,”
Lowlanders and Highlanders, Catholics and Orangemen, Australians, New
Zealanders, Canadians ... all were there. You could almost hear the
pulse of Empire beat as they swarmed in their thousands on to the
parade-ground.

Undulating ripples ran here and there along the close ranks of that
vast host as company after company ordered arms and stood at ease.
Commands were shouted: instructors, with yellow arm-bands on their
sleeves, ran hither and thither in the press. Still that endless stream
of khaki deluged forth on to the parade-ground: still the blare of
brass, the squeal of fifes, or the skirl of pipes proclaimed the coming
of fresh legions along the roads of the camp.

“Take a good look at that picture!” said a captain of the Coldstream
at our Ensign’s elbow, “for you’ve never seen so many British soldiers
together before!”

Our Ensign nodded. Truly that place of assembly was an unforgettable
sight, a picture that he knew would never fade from his mind.

The Guards’ officers, our Ensign learnt, were to accompany the men of
their regiments to the different courses of instruction given at the
training-ground--bayonet-fighting, wiring, bombing, and so forth--under
instructors trained in the firing line. Thus he and The Lad presently
found themselves listening to a sun-browned sergeant of the H.L.I.,
whose bonnet looked somewhat incongruous worn with “shorts,” expounding
in the accents of “Glasgie” the whole art of laying out barbed-wire
entanglements. While his men were busy with the prickly rolls of wire,
stakes, pickets, and mallet, our Ensign heard French being spoken
behind him.

He turned and saw a detachment of Canadians, thick-set, sturdy, and
rather swarthy for the most part, drawn up in front of another “wire
lecturer” a dozen yards away. By the instructor’s side stood a Canadian
soldier, a corporal, who, as the lecturer proceeded, translated his
remarks rapidly into French.

It was rather an extraordinary performance. The lecturer was a Cockney.

“You tike the stike, ...” said the lecturer, suiting the action to the
word.

“Alors, vous prenez la broche ... comme ça,” fluently translated the
interpreter, adding shrilly--

“Mais faites donc attention, nom de Dieu, vous, Le Sage!”

“... you measure orf five yards, like this ’ere....”

“Et puis, vous mesurez cinq aunes ... au pas n’est-ce pas?”

Listening with wondering ears, our Ensign realised the strength of the
Empire tie that had sent these French Canadians, who could not speak
our language, across the seas to war.

It was a scene of amazing activity, that training-ground. The brisk
breeze that blew joyfully across the sun-bathed plateau brought with
it the sounds and smells of a great fair, fitful bursts of music,
bugle-calls, shouts and cries, the pungent odour of horses, the acrid
taste of dust, the faint scent of burning wood.

One day a long train of German prisoners wound its melancholy way
through the camp _en route_ for England. Our Ensign stood by the
roadside as they passed and noted how the indifference faded from the
faces of the officers at the head of the _cortège_, how the weary and
mud-stained figures behind them shook themselves free from their apathy
at the scene of busy movement enacted all around them. The columns
marching along the roads, the charging lines of bayonet-fighters, the
endless lines of practice trenches, the bustle, the orderly confusion,
the noise ... all this must have made them realise the giant strength
piling up behind the fierce onslaught before which they had laid down
their arms on the Somme. The sad procession passed our Ensign by with
the dawn of a great enlightenment in the eyes of the prisoners.

The forcefulness of the training at the camp was amazing. Men who
had got a little stale in long months of training at some pleasant
centre at home were shaken up into life by the galvanising vigour of
the instructors’ addresses. There was one sergeant in particular, an
instructor in bayonet-fighting, to whom our young man never tired of
listening.

That sergeant was magnificently built, with the finely developed
physique of the army gymnastic instructor. He was simply attired in a
vest, khaki trousers and gym. shoes, his short-sleeved jumper leaving
open to view a brawny and sunburnt pair of arms that wielded rifle and
bayonet as easily as though they were a swagger-cane.

He was a fine picture of British manhood, that sergeant, as he stood
bareheaded in the sunshine on the parapet of a trench. Behind him
dangled from a long gibbet the sacks of straw upon which presently the
budding warrior would test his skill with the bayonet; before him, a
sea of sunburnt faces, a wide horseshoe of capless, jacketless men,
sleeves rolled up, rifle and bayonet in their hand. In fluent direct
English he would harangue his audience somewhat after this style--

“Now then, lads, just you listen to me for a bit. You all know what you
joined the Army for. You didn’t join just to learn a bit of arm-drill,
nor yet to polish your buttons and look pretty, nor yet to go out
walking with a pack o’ gals ... yes, I can see a lot of you know all
about that too. No! you joined the army _to fight_! That’s what they’ve
brought you out here for! _To fight, to kill Germans_, ... that’s your
job out here. You’ve left the gals and the pictures and the pubs behind
in England. This here is WAR! D’you know what WAR means? I’ll tell you.
War means that if you don’t kill the other feller first, he’ll blooming
well kill YOU! Now you just get that into your thick heads.

“Listen here again! This little friend here” (patting the bayonet),
“this little friend o’ mine on my arm ... some of you lads have had
plenty of little friends on your arms in your time; I can see that with
half an eye, ... this little sticker here is going to help you to get
back home alive to the gals and the pictures and all the rest of it.
Shells are all right, the rifle’s all right, but it’s what’s on the end
of the rifle that’s going to save your life when it’s man to man in a
stand-up fight.

“When a great hulking Hun sees one of you chaps coming for him close in
with the bayonet, what does he do? Does he send a messenger with his
compliments to Fritz at the battery behind him and ask him, please,
for a barrage? Does he lower his sights and take careful aim with his
rifle? Not on your life. For why? Because there isn’t time. The old Hun
blooming well knows that if he don’t stick YOU, you’ll stick HIM!

“Now you’ve learnt your bayonet practice, and I could teach you here
by the book, so that you’d do it all so pretty you’d make a Guardsman
blush. But I can’t teach you quickness: I can’t put the ginger into
you so as you’ll go hell for leather for the Huns first time you see
them, and through them and their blooming trench before they can say
‘Potsdam.’ You don’t want to use your brains, you don’t want to reason
it all out nicely; _you’ve all, every one of you, got to be the man
that sticks first_!

“There’s lots of fellers been out here who thought they’d take it
easy, and trot up to Fritz and give him a gentle prod and watch him
surrender. Do you know where most of those fellers are, lads? Under the
ground, that’s where they are, with a nice little wooden cross, and a
bit of writing atop to say what fine chaps they were. Ah! a dead man’s
always a hero. But you don’t want to be dead, lads! A wooden cross is
not the sort of cross you’ve come out here after. You want to live, and
go home to the gals and tell ’em all what a hero you are.

“Now we’ll try a little bit of assaulting....”

Thus he would run on, the very incarnation of the soldier spirit, erect
and manly, the sunshine playing round his light-brown hair and the
polished steel of his “little friend.”

Despite the manifold interests of the training-ground, time hung rather
heavy on the hands of our young man. Every day the very firmament
quivered to the distant thunder of the guns; sometimes in the night,
particularly towards dawn, the throbbing of the air was so marked
as to awaken the officers in their airy huts. There is something
uncontrollably unsettling about gun fire. It upset our young man
sadly, and he chafed at his detention at the base. As for The Lad, he
positively raged.

Sometimes our Ensign marched the party for the training-ground up
the hill behind the piper with his kilt of Royal Stuart tartan.
Notwithstanding the dusty climb, our Ensign rather liked these marches
up the hill and back. The weather was beautifully fine, and the men
were always in excellent fettle, so laughter and chaff flew from mouth
to mouth. Nothing sharpens wits so well as throwing a few battalions
of different regiments together. The humour was generally pointed, but
often decidedly witty, and the jokes were always taken in good part.
One morning the young officer, plodding along in the dust at the head
of the training-ground party, heard a voice behind him exclaim--

“Eyes right to the Welsh Guards, lads!”

The officer instinctively glanced to the right, and saw a gentle
nanny-goat gazing sad-eyed from behind the hedge at the column as
it passed. This sally at the expense of the regimental pet of the
Welsh Guards elicited roars of laughter, in which--in justice, be it
said--the Welshmen of the party also joined.

Thus the summer days rolled on, and with every day our Ensign grew
browner and fitter for the fray. One evening at the bridge-table the
Adjutant of the Guards’ Base Depôt, after opening a message brought in
by an orderly, said to our Ensign who was his partner--

“You’re for the Guards’ Division to-morrow evening, and,” turning round
to The Lad who was writing a letter at the window behind him, “you too!”

That night the two young officers went to bed with a joyful heart.
To-morrow they were going to the Front.

       *       *       *       *       *

The guns of the Somme are throbbing more frantically than ever. Time
flies: time presses sorely when the blood runs hotly in the veins.
Let us hasten, then, over the ceremony of departure, and pause but
for a moment to watch the group at the door of the Mess waving a last
farewell to the two figures, girt on with all the panoply of war,
stalking into the mellow dusk of a perfect summer evening down the
road to the Camp Commandant’s office, where a motor-lorry is waiting to
take them to the train.

“Now we shan’t be long!” murmured The Lad as the lorry whirled them
away through the white dust. He spoke true. Ere three months had run
their course that eager spirit was swallowed up and lost in the mirk
and reek of those very guns to whose summons he had so impatiently
listened.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was The Lad who did the trick that secured our young friends a
compartment to themselves through both stages of their long journey up
to the Front. In the gloomy yard in which their train--of prodigious
length, it seemed to be--was drawn up The Lad produced a piece of chalk
from his pocket.

“Watch me!” he said with his merry smile.

On the door of the first-class coupé which they had selected for
themselves he wrote in chalk--

“O.C. Troops.”

“Infallible!” replied The Lad to his sceptical companion. “A fellow I
met at the machine-gun course at Chelsea put me up to the dodge. It
scares ’em all away. You see? We shan’t be disturbed!”

Nor were they, though at various times before the train started heavily
laden young officers approached the carriage. At the sight of that
forbidding inscription, however, they bolted precipitately. And so our
young friends journeyed through the night in much comfort to the old
French town where they were to change trains and spend the day.

After a shave, a bath, and breakfast, they set out together on a
pious pilgrimage to the grave of a friend who for a twelvemonth had
lain buried in the British Military Cemetery beyond the racecourse on
the outskirts of the city. Without difficulty they found the simple
grave at the foot of its big white cross, with many newer and whiter
crosses all around. After consultation with the Corporal Gardener, a
First-Gravedigger kind of person with lugubrious mien and Yorkshire
accent, they purchased from a genial Frenchwoman at the lodge of the
cemetery a number of plants to be put on the grave.

“A’ll tell ’er A’ll put un in!” said the Corporal Gardener, and,
raising his voice to a shout, he bawled at the woman--

“Moa ... fleurs ... tombo ... arpray!”

“Vous allez les planter vous-même?” replied the woman with perfect
comprehension--“bon, bon.”

And thus, our Ensign reflected, a British graveyard forms a tiny link
in the chain of the Entente to bring Normandy and the East Riding
together.

After that came an interminable railway journey lasting from after
luncheon that day until far into the next afternoon. But for a tiny
break _en route_ it would have passed altogether out of our Ensign’s
mind, that snail-like progress from Normandy to Belgium. Somewhere
about the hour of 7 in the morning the long train halted in what seemed
to be a tract of flat and barren country. Alighting, our heroes found
themselves opposite a long low shed with open doors, giving a glimpse
of gleaming urns and piles of bread-and-butter, towards which everybody
in the train seemed to be flocking. Behind this wayside canteen our
travellers found a small and cheery room, with a bright red-tiled
floor, natty curtains, and old-fashioned furniture, where two or
three ladies were dispensing breakfast to the officers. In comparison
with the boon of breakfast in that barren place, after a long, cold
night journey, the charges were outrageously low. But better than the
steaming tea, the delicious sandwiches, the tempting fruit, was that
little glimpse of England--the pretty English room, the warm welcome of
those devoted Englishwomen in their pleasant English voices.

Nothing more happened to break the tedium of their journey until
actually they had set foot to the ground on alighting at their
destination.

At that moment, the ears of our heroes were affrighted by a sound, the
like of which neither had ever heard before.




CHAPTER III.


Whee ... ee ... ee ... oo ... oo ... PLUNK!

A rushing noise as of great wings beating the air, a reverberating
crash, like the slamming of an iron door, blended with the sound of
jangling glass, of splintering wood; then an unfamiliar, high-pitched
cry, “A ... a ... ah!” followed by a mechanical chant on a rising key,
as it passed from mouth to mouth--

“Stretcher-bearER!”

The platform of the station was deserted. A very familiar name stared
down upon our heroes from the lamps. Their fellow-travellers by the
train ... a handful of all sorts, officers, Australian privates, some
R.A.M.C. orderlies, a couple of Belgian interpreters ... had long since
vanished into safety.

The sky seemed full of odd noises. Every minute or so the new arrivals
heard the long-drawn-out whistle of a shell, cut short on its rising
note by the crash of the explosion. The first shell they had heard had
seemed to strike very close at hand: the succeeding crashes, though
equally loud, appeared to be farther away.

Everybody knows the sound of a shell, even when he hears it for the
first time. Concerned mainly with the fear lest the other should notice
that he “had the wind up,” our two young Guardsmen hastily pulled
their kits out of the train, and leaving them where they fell on the
platform, made for the station-hall.

There they saw two men on their knees beside a stretcher. To the right
of them a notice painted in white on a blackboard announced the office
of the R.T.O. or Railway Transport Officer, where our young men had to
report.

In the R.T.O.’s office, installed in what had probably been a lamp-room
or something of the sort, they found most of their fellow-passengers
assembled. Under the influence of their original welcome, everybody was
conversing in whispers.

The R.T.O. was shortish in his manner. (It is not easy to be polite
under shell fire.)

“Report at Headquarters of Guards’ Division!” he said curtly to our
Ensign and his companion when they had given in their names and
regiment.

“Where is that?” said our Ensign promptly.

Resignedly the officer explained. Yes, it was a goodish way; no, there
was no conveyance of any kind; yes, they would have to go through the
town; no, it was not safe; the town was being shelled. Had they not
heard the shell fall outside the station a minute ago?

“Next! Australian Light Horse?”

The R.T.O. turned to the next man.

“We’ll just have to foot it,” said our hero to The Lad as they made
their way outside, “unless we can get a lift of some kind. We’d better
leave our kits here in charge of some one!”

Outside in the station-hall our Ensign heard a stamp and a click beside
him, a familiar sound, the sound of a Guardsman saluting. Our Ensign
turned and saw a private in breeches and spurs, a well-known crest in
his cap, an old sleeveless rain-coat flying out behind him like a pair
of wings.

“I have a horse for you, sir,” he said, “to take you up to the
transport. I couldn’t get here before on account of the shelling.”

Our Ensign and The Lad were going to different battalions. The moment
of parting had come.

“Your mess-cart has come for you, sir,” said the groom to The Lad, “but
the driver waited outside until the shelling had stopped. If you will
come along with my officer, I can show you where I left him.”

On a long country road lined by tall poplars our Ensign found a couple
of horses and a little Maltese cart. He and The Lad shook hands; the
latter climbed into the cart, while our Ensign mounted a small brown
mare. Then the cart rattled off towards the centre of the town, while
our Ensign trotted down the road, the groom behind him.

Presently our young man drew rein to allow the groom to come up level.
The Ensign began to talk to the soldier.

“They,” said the groom, with a jerk of his head in the direction which
the mess-cart had taken, “are in rest, sir. Our Battalion is in the
line. The Transport Officer thought you would dine with the Transport,
and then go up along of him and the rations after dark to-night.”

The groom was a veteran of the original Expeditionary Force. So was the
little mare which our Ensign was riding, the man told him.

“Many’s the fine officer that little mare’s carried, sir,” he said,
scanning her affectionately: “there was Captain X., him as was killed
back at Soupeers, and Captain Y.--it was on the Zillebeke Ridge where
he got it, sir--and Captain Z., him as was shot by a sniper in the
trenches at Givenchy. Ah! I’ve seen some grand gentlemen go, sir!”

He shook his head mournfully.

“Maybe you’ll want this little switch of mine, sir,” the groom added,
handing our Ensign a small ash plant; “one or two draws o’ this won’t
be after hurting that little mare, she’s that idle!”

Our Ensign welcomed this change in the conversation. The groom’s train
of thought made him slightly uncomfortable in the circumstances.

For a mile or so along the road out of the town the noises still
resounded from the sky. The shells came “whooshing” over so loudly
above their heads that our Ensign felt an irrepressible titillation in
the neck--a strong inclination to duck. To distract his thoughts, he
looked about him.

It was a flat and uninteresting country, but well wooded and very
green. Every house they passed was wrecked by shell fire, more or less
completely; but he noticed that there were still some civilians about.
Practically all the soldiers they met, he observed, were Guardsmen,
and, though their cap-stars and buttons were dull and unpolished, their
uniforms stained and often badly worn, the men were all well shaved and
well brushed, with puttees neatly tied and boots well greased. They
were taking their ease in the cool of the evening, standing gossiping
in the streets of the villages through which our Ensign passed, or
sitting on the benches outside the estaminets.

A ride of more than an hour brought our hero and the groom to a muddy
side-track which led into a pleasant green field. Here a number of
tents were pitched. From a field in rear a prodigious squealing of
fifes and beating of drums resounded in a hopeless cacophony. “The
Drums” (by which generic term, in the Guards, the fife and drum band is
understood) of two battalions were practising in separate groups under
the trees.

The Transport Officer and the Quartermaster made our Ensign welcome
in the mess-tent, gave him a drink and a cigarette, informed him
that he was to dine with them, and eventually showed him into the
Interpreter’s tent, where our hero was much astonished to find his kit
lying. It had apparently been wafted there by some supernatural means
from the platform at the railway station. This was, of course, the
Quartermaster’s doing, but our Ensign was as yet too ignorant of usages
in the field to appreciate that heaven-sent boon, a good Quartermaster.
So he accepted it all as a matter of course, and proceeded to change
his clothes and don warmer things in anticipation of his first night in
the trenches.

The Belgian interpreter was sitting on the bed in his tent, warbling
a little air to himself. After our Ensign had disabused him of his
first impression--namely, that the new-comer proposed to take forcible
occupation of his sleeping apartment--he became extremely affable, and
produced water and soap and a towel. He was a sunny-natured person with
remarkable fluency in English, and made the young officer free of his
every possession with unbounded hospitality.

Then our Ensign dined in the mess-tent off an enamel plate, and drank
innocuous Belgian beer out of a tin mug. A captain of the Coldstream,
who turned out to be the Transport Officer of his battalion, dined
with the party. Outside the daylight was failing and a few pale stars
had begun to twinkle. The drums had ceased their practice, but the
crickets and the frogs supplied the table-music in their place.

“I hope you can ride,” said the Transport Officer to our Ensign, with a
note of warning in his voice.

Our Ensign pleaded guilty to a slight familiarity with that gentlemanly
accomplishment.

“... because,” the Transport Officer went on, “we have a good eight
miles to go, and the limbers with the rations started an hour ago. So
we shall have to ride fairly hard for the first part of the way to
catch ’em up.”

Our Ensign smiled in a superior fashion, as much as to say the other
could not ride hard enough for him. “Unconscious of his doom, the
little victim plays!” Our young man was to have a rude awakening.

By the time the groom had announced that the horses were waiting, our
Ensign was ready for the road. He had to carry on his person his whole
panoply of war--revolver, glasses, compass, gas-helmet, ammunition
pouch, and lamp--all slung on his belt, which he was wearing outside
his rain-coat. He felt like a trussed fowl, and it required a helping
hand from the groom to get him into the saddle. When he was up, the
Quartermaster handed him a steel helmet, which the groom slung on the
saddle for him. Then the Transport Officer led the way out along the
muddy side-track on to a better road, and immediately spurred his
powerful horse into a fast trot.

Several thoughts passed through our Ensign’s mind in rapid succession.
The first was that, if he did not shake “The Fat Lady” (for such was
the mare’s name) out of her contented amble, he would be left behind
in the dark, and irretrievably lost. The second was that, if he went
any faster, he must certainly part company with one or other article of
his equipment, which was dancing a merry jig round his waist. The third
was that he would take an early opportunity of verifying a suspicion
which had crossed his mind at dinner, from certain allusions in the
conversation--namely, that the Transport Officer man had acquired his
familiarity with horses in the hunting-field in Ireland!

Our young man had retained the ash plant, and, under the influence of
half a dozen “dhraws” applied to her flanks at regular intervals, the
mare bestirred itself, albeit protesting.

Thus our Ensign rode forth unto battle, in the Ethiopian blackness of
a close muggy night, sorely shaken, jingling like a jester, drenched
with perspiration, with a feverish eye on the dim figure of the rider
jogging briskly through the darkness ahead of him.

Far away in the distance, vivid white lights spouted continually into
the sky. Of gun fire there was little. It seemed a quiet night. By the
roadside, from time to time, the jagged silhouette of a broken wall,
a tottering chimney, a devastated church tower, stood out against
a patch of lighter cloud. Figures took shape suddenly out of the
gloom, marching in silence through the night, filling the empty road
with the acrid smell of hot and dirty men, filling the air with the
crunch-crunch of their feet. Guns jingled past them at the trot, with
cursing drivers plucking at their horses’ heads to keep their teams to
the road.

Presently, a continuous rumbling echoed out of the patch of blackness
enveloping the road ahead. Low voices came back with snatches of
conversation. The dark outline of a long string of tossing limbers
loomed out of the gloom. The Transport Officer galloped off up to the
head of the column. A whistle sounded. The rumbling ceased. The limbers
stopped. The Transport Officer’s voice spoke out of the darkness; our
Ensign could not see the speaker.

“We send our horses back here,”--our Ensign heard him spring to the
ground,--“better put your helmet on now! We are going to walk, and we
generally get shelled to blazes over this next bit that’s coming!”

Stiffly, our Ensign slipped his foot out of the stirrup and
precipitated himself from the saddle. He was wondering to himself
whether all wars were as uncomfortable as this one. He had only thought
of death on active service as a quick finish in the midst of an
exhilarating charge at the head of an excited band--not of a death that
came screaming suddenly at you out of the dark, when you were clammy
and stiff and tired, and generally uncomfortable!

The young man doffed his cap, and carried it in his hand. He put on his
helmet. It was heavy, and hideously unwieldy. He felt it would topple
over on his nose with very little provocation.

They plodded on in silence at the head of the rumbling limbers. After
an hour’s walk through the blackness (our Ensign had not the remotest
idea where they were), the blurr of many figures sitting about the
grass of the roadside bulked out in the gloom. The Transport Officer
switched on his light. The familiar features of the Drill Sergeant who
had initiated our hero into the intricacies of squad drill at home
stood revealed in the bright beam. About him, in silent groups, were
the ration parties, who, without delay or confusion, set about the work
of unloading the limbers.

The night was singularly quiet. Not a gun spoke. Never a shell came
to justify the Transport Officer’s gloomy forebodings. Only from the
higher ground ahead, the never-ceasing fountain of white lights showed
that the opposing lines of trenches were unremitting in their vigilance.

Darkness not only obscures the eyes,--it also clouds the memory. The
next thing our Ensign remembers was coming to what looked like a row
of ancient _tumuli_ in a field and a gap in a hedge which seemed to be
shaken by a violent wind, though the night was perfectly still. There
was a loud “swish ... swish ...” in the air and a quick “patter ...
patter ...” all around. Then a voice said very distinctly out of the
darkness--

“Blast that machine-gun!”

The swishing sounds ceased, our Ensign turned on his lamp and saw an
officer in a Burberry with a revolver hung on his belt worn outside.
The new arrival instantly recognised him as one of the most joyous
spirits of the ante-room at home. He was known to all and sundry as
“Peter.”

“Hullo!” said the other, switching on his light, “there you are! I
didn’t know if you’d be up to-night or not. I believe you’re coming to
our company. I suppose you are going to see the Commanding Officer now.
He’s in the dug-out. I’m out with a carrying party. See you later.
Where the devil’s that orderly gone?”

He turned off his light and was swallowed up in the dark amid a
shuffling throng of men. Our Ensign found the Commanding Officer in
a small dug-out with a very low entrance. Candles in white metal
candlesticks threw a yellow light over a roughly carpentered table,
where maps were spread out amid the remains of a meal. In the corner an
officer was bending over a telephone.

“This is the Adjutant speaking,” he was saying, “... oh, that is Mr
Barnard ... right.... Minnies were they ... yes, it sounded like them
... not in the trench ... good ... right ... we’ll get retaliation!”

“Four Minnies into No. 1 Company, sir,” he said, putting down the
receiver and addressing the Commanding Officer; “Barnard thinks he’d
like some retaliation. Shall I ask for it?”

The Commanding Officer nodded and offered the Transport Officer and
our Ensign a drink. Then he told our Ensign that he would be attached
to No. 2--Peter’s company,--the latter was commanding in the absence
of the regular company commander who was on leave. The company was
at present in support in trenches close at hand. The battalion was
coming out of the line the next night. Then they talked of the general
situation, the advance on the Somme, the situation in the Salient, what
the Russians were doing, whether the Rumanians would come in. Finally,
our Ensign took his leave, and the Transport Officer escorted him along
the trench to a small and extremely evil-smelling dug-out, where they
found a Grenadier subaltern working out chess-problems on a travelling
chess-board, by the light of a candle stuck in its own grease on the
table. He explained to the Transport Officer that he was in command of
two platoons left behind to help with the carrying work at night.

That night our Ensign slept in a low narrow hole, scraped out of the
parados of the trench. On turning in, he found that his servant, whom
he had brought up with him from the Base, had spread the dug-out with
nice clean sandbags. With his haversack for a pillow, and his rain-coat
spread over him as a wrap, the new-comer, who had never spent a night
out of bed in his life before, slept solidly for eight hours. When he
awoke the trenches were flooded with sunshine, and a most comfortable
smell of hot bacon stole across the clear morning air.

       *       *       *       *       *

The company was not in the firing line, so that the men could move
pretty freely in and about the trenches. The weather was very fine
and warm, and the existence was not strenuous. The following evening
Peter marched half the company away into reserve, on relief by another
battalion, leaving our Ensign behind, with two platoons to help with
the carrying. In two days’ time our hero would rejoin his battalion in
reserve.

The new arrivals in the company Mess in the dirty little dug-out were
genial souls. Our Ensign took his meals and played chess with them,
and discussed the papers which came up with the utmost regularity in
company with the letters every afternoon. After dark our young man
slung his lamp and his revolver on his belt and went round the trenches
and the outposts, his orderly at his heels, a Celtic type of youth,
MacFinnigan by name.

The two days passed pleasantly enough. There was a little sporadic
shelling, generally after the passage of a Hun aeroplane, glittering
aloft, with black crosses on the under-surface of its planes, amid
little puffs of shrapnel and the “peugh ... peugh ... peugh” of the
anti-aircraft guns. The first afternoon--it was at tea--two sharp
salvoes of whizz-bangs rang out from farther up the trench. Our
Ensign sallied forth to review the situation. Up the trench he found
a big Grenadier lying on his face motionless in a great welter of
blood, while round the traverse an Irish Guardsman was flat on his
back on the trench-boards, a little rosary between his fingers, with a
stretcher-bearer ripping up one of his puttees, which was soaked with
blood.

The wounded man lifted a pallid face to the officer as he came up. The
stretcher-bearer was soothing him gently as he worked.

“Be asy now,” he was saying, “a little skelp like that won’t kill yez.
I’ll put yez in the dug-out beyond ... ye’ll be grand and snug there
till it’s dark, and then we’ll take yez down.”

“The others is all right, sir,” the stretcher-bearer added to our
Ensign; “him round the traverse was killed on the spot, but there’s
nobody else touched barrin’ this chap here!”

The wounded man said nothing, but his breath came heavily. His face was
very pale. The officer saw him tucked away into the dug-out, and went
back to tea with a heavy heart. It was his first casualty....

The next night our Ensign led his two platoons out of the trenches in
the wake of a guide sent up to meet them. He was a little disappointed
to find how lightly his responsibility as an officer rested upon him.
He had not the least idea of where they were going as they followed the
guide out into the darkness.

Their journey came to its finish on a timbered walk, leading past a
long array of shelters dug out of a bank and protected by layers of
neatly built-up sandbags. Everybody had gone to bed, for it was after
2 A.M.--that is, everybody save our Ensign’s servant, who, after our
hero had seen his men safely into their quarters, led the officer
into a fine roomy dug-out with a wooden door and wooden flooring.
There, on a bed made of sacking stretched over a framework, he
found his sleeping-sack spread, with his pyjamas on top; his canvas
washing-bucket, full of hot water, smoked on a primitive-looking
washstand; while a complete change of clothes was laid out on a
soap-box beside the bed.

“And what time will I call you in the morning, sir?” said Johnson--such
was the name of our Ensign’s servant--at the door.

“What time is parade?” asked the officer.

“There’s no parade for you, sir,--only rifle inspection at eleven.
Perhaps you’d care for a bath in the morning, sir!”

Our Ensign jumped at the suggestion and ordered a hot bath for
half-past nine. He crept gratefully into his sleeping-bag, his mind
bewildered by the sudden contrasts in his new and remarkable life....




CHAPTER IV.


The period in reserve had brought the whole battalion together once
more. The companies were no longer separated as they had been in the
trenches. Our Ensign found the officers established in regular messes
in the sand-bagged shelters of this pleasantly rural retreat, and the
whole routine of the Guards running smoothly on very similar lines to
the life in barracks at home.

Life was not at all strenuous in reserve--at any rate not in the
day-time. In the trenches the men get short commons in the way of
sleep, so during the period in reserve they are not worked very hard.
At night, however, fatigue parties were generally sent up to the
support or front lines on various digging undertakings. Otherwise,
a rifle inspection in the morning, and sometimes, additionally, an
inspection of feet (an army may fight on its stomach, but it marches on
its feet) or of gas helmets, was the only parade of the day.

Each company took it in turn to be “in waiting”--that is to say, to
be in readiness for any emergency. The company in waiting furnished
the guards and fatigue parties for any special jobs about the camp.
During the period in waiting, which lasted twenty-four hours, from
one afternoon to the afternoon of the following day, the officers
of the company in waiting were not supposed to leave the precincts
of the camp, and, the company commander excepted, they took it in
turns, during the period “in waiting,” to act as Piquet Officer, whose
functions in reserve were practically confined to stamping the letters
with the battalion censor stamp in the Orderly Room (a sand-bagged
shelter), before the post corporal collected the mail in the afternoons.

Our Ensign slipped very easily, almost imperceptibly, into his place
as a tiny cog in the great wheelwork of the army in France. He came
out prepared to have a roughish time in very congenial company--and
in neither respect was he disappointed. The Mess in which he found
himself had all the attraction of a cosmopolitan club in miniature.
His fellow-officers in the company to which he had been posted--No.
2--had what was known as a double-company mess with the officers of
No. 1 Company. At the quarters in reserve the mess was located in an
ambitious sort of sand-bagged shelter, with stain-glass windows, timber
floor and walls, a white deal sideboard (home-made), and a long table
and chairs. Here our Ensign met his company commander, a serene and
placid person, with a somewhat judicial manner, who, for that reason,
answered to the name of “The Beak.” Most of the other officers our
Ensign had known at home, so that he did not feel so much an intruder
as he had feared he would.

The double-company mess was a very happy family. In every stratum of
society type balances type. It is this easy counter-poise that makes
the world revolve. That great leveller, the War, has thrown together
in officers’ messes for a spell of intimate association a number of
men whose pursuits in other circumstances would all have radiated
in different directions. In that mess there were, amongst others, a
brace of budding diplomats, two Balliol undergraduates, a rancher, a
“literary gent.,” and an engineer. Some of the officers had decided to
adopt the Army as their profession, and to remain on in the regiment
after the war, but others would simply return to their pursuits and
professions on the proclamation of peace. The pleasant _cameraderie_
which reigned in the double-company mess must be based, our Ensign
decided, on the equilibrium of all these different temperaments and
mental outlooks balanced one against the other. So far as regimental
duties were concerned, every type was tempered down to the average
consistency given by the identical training which every Guards’ officer
receives on the square at home.

Therefore, though many and furious were the arguments on every
conceivable topic with which the young lions of the double-company
mess whiled away their leisure hours, there was perfect accord in the
general realisation by each of his duties and responsibilities as an
officer. In the privacy of the mess there might be heated wrangles
regarding the respective merits of No. 1 and No. 2 Companies; but
the whole mess presented a solid front in backing the two companies
against the rest of the battalion, the battalion against the rest of
the Brigade, and the regiment against every other regiment in the
Brigade of Guards.

Our Ensign had two or three spells in reserve at this peaceful spot,
and always looked forward to returning to it after the battalion’s turn
of duty in the trenches. There was practically no shelling; any German
shells that came over mostly fell in a more exposed position several
hundred yards away. All around them lay spread out the fair garb in
which summer dresses the Belgian countryside, and not even the ruined
farms or the shell-scored roads could detract from the beauty of the
poppies and corn-flowers running wild among the neglected fields, or
the roses and the hollyhocks and the snapdragon that bloomed in the
little gardens of the ravaged farms.

The men revelled in the snatch of quiet, in the pleasant surroundings,
in the beautiful summer weather. When their day’s work was done they
sat about in the shade, writing letters home, reading the newspapers,
or idly watching the afternoon spectacle of German _v._ British
aeroplanes. Some spent every moment of their leisure in dragging one of
the canals in which Belgium abounds for fish. The drag-net was a marvel
of ingenuity, constructed as it was out of rabbit netting, barbed wire,
bits of string, sandbags, and branches, towed along by eager hands
on either bank. Incredible as it may seem, the fishermen made quite
respectable catches of pike and eels, which they cooked for supper over
wood-fires, and consumed with relish,--all heedless of dark allusions
by their less enterprising comrades to the fabled discovery of portions
of a German helmet in the maw of one of these aquarian monsters.

The officers went for walks in the neighbourhood, extending their
rambles, with the perversity of youth, to the ruined city of Ypres,
still the shell-trap _par excellence_ of the countryside for miles
around. One afternoon, a subaltern in our Ensign’s mess who went by the
name of Apollo, from his statuesque appearance, and who was a perfect
Baedeker of information about the local attractions wherever the
battalion went, took Peter and our Ensign and one of the Balliol men,
known as The Don, to a certain field where, among various shell-holes
and felled apple-trees, a few rows of depressed currant bushes yet
lingered. The currants were red and scanty and abominably sour, and
an unusually large number of “dud” shells were falling in dangerous
proximity to the party from an “Archie” or anti-aircraft gun that was
vigorously shelling a German raider. There was plenty of fresh fruit in
the mess where the young men could have sat in the cool of the shelter
and eaten their fill, but they preferred to stand in the hot afternoon
sun and munch unripe currants at imminent risk of their necks. Truly
youth is a wonderful thing!

Another day a band of them strolled out over the fields to a certain
billet, where previously the battalion and other Guards’ battalions
had been quartered for some time. There they visited the pretty
garden which the Guards had laid out with wonderful centre-pieces,
representing the different regimental crests of the Guards in coloured
stones. But, while the Guards had been away, the heathen had raged.
There were shell-holes in the garden, and the rains had begun to gnaw
at the centre-pieces.... In the Salient everything, living and dead,
seems vowed to destruction.

The night fatigues were dull, dangerous, and depressing. Night after
night parties sallied forth with pick and spade, often in gum-boots,
if there was work to be done on a wet trench, and plodded through the
darkness to a more or less apocryphal rendezvous.

All the open ground close up to the Front in the Salient is sprayed by
machine-gun fire at night, and a brisk burst of shell fire in addition
was no uncommon experience for the nightly fatigue parties. Sometimes
the sapper folk would be late at the trysting-place, and the men would
stand huddled up together like a flock of sheep on a moor, while the
officers would fret and fume and mutter dire menaces about “reporting
the fellow to the Brigade.” Then the sapper would arrive, and the
officer, about to deliver himself of a few weighty and well-considered
remarks on punctuality, which is the politeness of soldiers as well as
of kings, would find himself confronted by an obsequious R.E. corporal
protesting that the “orficer” was “jest over there.”

Translated into the plain language of fact, this indication might mean
anything from 300 yards to a mile; but at length the sapper officer
would appear, silencing with honeyed words and profuse apology the
torrent of reproach bubbling at the Guardsman’s lips. After that the
sapper officer would take charge, and the Guards’ officer would find
his _rôle_ restricted to walking up and down for anything up to three
or four hours, bored to tears, unable even to smoke, because smoking
on these night fatigues is forbidden to the men. He had not even the
mental occupation of keeping the men to their task. They knew that they
could not go home to bed until the job was finished, whatever it was,
and therefore every man worked with a will, jackets discarded, sleeves
rolled up.

Everybody who has been up in the Salient knows what the “trenches”
there are like. The Hun holds the high ground everywhere: he has the
dry soil, the observation. In the British lines the ground is so wet
that a foot below the surface you strike water ... and probably a
dead man as well, so thick do they lie in this blood-drenched region.
Therefore the parapets are for the most part built up, and indeed
the whole defences--parapet, traverses, and parados--have to be built
up with sandbags, which, under the influence of shell fire and the
weather, have to be continually renewed and repaired.

A parapet that will shelter a platoon of the line will not do for a
platoon of Guardsmen. It is a question of inches. When the Gurkhas
relieved the Guards in the trenches in the Béthune region early in
the war, the Guards had to put a double tier of sandbags along the
fire-step so that the little hillmen could look over the top of the
parapet. Therefore, in the Salient, it often happened that the Guards
found themselves sheltering in the open behind a thin parapet in bad
repair, behind which they had to kneel in order to protect themselves
against the enemy snipers.

Work, with a capital “W,” loomed large in the orders of every company
commander of the Guards in the Salient. In truth, there was much to
be done. In places, the trench lines were not connected, parapets were
low and by no means bullet-proof, parados were distinguished mainly by
their absence. Thus, when one battalion of Guards relieved another in
the Salient, it took over not only the trench but a vast programme of
“improvements,” as the house-builders say.

The first night our Ensign went up to the front line with the company,
the Guards’ battalion which they were relieving had a big scheme of
work to hand over. As junior officer, our Ensign was given charge of
the men in the front line, for the first half of their turn “in,”
whilst The Beak and Peter remained, according to usage, in the company
headquarters in the support line. For the second half, Peter was to
relieve our Ensign.

While the relief was being effected, an ensign of the outgoing
company took our young man round the trench, and, with the air of a
Commissioner of the Office of Works, showed the new-comer the work
which had been begun, which the incoming company was to finish. The
barbed wire was probably defective and would have to be inspected and
possibly repaired; here they had put in three new traverses; here they
had repaired the parapet that had been blown in by an enemy trench
mortar; there they had started to build a parados; this part of the
parapet was not bullet-proof ... they had had a man wounded passing
there the previous day; and so on, and so forth. The officer explained
everything with admirable lucidity, and then, his men having all filed
out, trotted away, leaving our Ensign, rather bewildered, standing
on a precarious trench-board, half immersed in yellow water, with an
overpowering odour of death in his nostrils.

Both The Beak and Peter presently came up to help him over his
difficulties at his first taste of trench warfare, and together they
mapped out a scheme to spread the work remaining to be done over the
time they were to spend in the front line. The platoon sergeants were
called into consultation: they had already got the sentries posted in
the fire-bays, and the rest of the men they set at the task of filling
sandbags. It was agreed that our Ensign should go out and have a look
at the wire, and also the outside of the parapet, to see how it could
best be made bullet-proof.

A little later the officer, in company with his orderly, his rifle
slung at his back, a handsome and self-possessed young man, who was
introduced as the wiring corporal, and a rugged Irish sergeant called
Kinole, slung his leg over the parapet and dropped out into the open on
the other side.

It was a dark windy night. In front of them the German star-shells were
soaring aloft, and the night was alive with noises reverberating in the
darkness. Machine-guns on both sides coughed their harsh “tack-tack ...
tack-tack-tack.” Rifle shots rang out here and there; and every now
and then, with a bang and a whizz, a Verey light whirred up into the
dark sky from the trenches behind the little party. Somewhere on the
right a mighty British _strafe_ was in progress: our Ensign could hear
the steady racket of the shells and see their orange flicker in the sky
as they burst against the surrounding blackness.

The chinking of tools resounded very faintly out of the dark in front
of them.

“’Tis Fritz out workin’,” muttered Sergeant Kinole hoarsely. “Iv’ry
night ’tis the same, sir.... He works like anny ould mole.”

The party crossed a very wet ditch and came to the wire. Here the
wiring corporal took the lead and they all crawled along behind him,
bending their heads low, as he did, to examine the strands of wire
against the sky. In places the wire was broken and would have to be
replaced.

Then our Ensign took a look at the parapet from the outside. There was
no room to strengthen it from within, and outside the trench the ground
sloped away into a morass. The only thing would be to lay an earth
foundation and build it up on that. The sergeant hopped back into the
trench, and presently returned with a horde of bulky figures with pick
and shovel who scrambled over the parapet, and, dropping on the other
side, started shovelling dry earth on to the wet ground at the foot of
the parapet.

All night they worked and shovelled and built, inside and outside the
trench, while the star-shells spouted and the machine-guns rapped
loudly. With the first flicker of dawn they trooped in, and then, while
the dawn was breaking sullenly, the men stood to on the fire-step all
along the trench, while our Ensign, empty and cold and dreadfully
sleepy, wondered why the trench smells were so overpoweringly
accentuated in the early morning.

With the coming of dawn the men stood down, our Ensign inspected
rifles, the Commanding Officer, on his daily round of the trenches,
appeared and asked him a question or two, and after that, amid a
general sizzling of bacon all along the trench, the officer made for
the earthen cave which had been pointed out to him as his quarters.
There was the faithful Johnson with a mug of hot cocoa; there was our
Ensign’s blanket and his air-pillow arranged on a carpet of clean
sandbags.

Our young man slept until ten o’clock, and then rose to find his
washing things spread out in the sunshine, Johnson close by boiling his
shaving water in a mess tin. He made a leisurely toilet, then sauntered
down the communication trench to the company headquarters, where he
breakfasted joyously with The Beak and Peter off eggs and bacon and tea
and bread-and-butter and strawberry jam. Of course the double-company
mess was broken up when the battalion was in the line, so, by mutual
arrangement, No. 1 Company took the mess cook, and No. 2 the mess
waiter. It was the latter, rather more dishevelled than his wont, who
served the three officers at breakfast in a tiny dug-out four feet
square.

One turn in the trenches is very much like another. Sometimes they got
shelled, and on the first occasion, our Ensign, emerging rather hastily
from his cubby-hole to find out what the noise was about, was shamed
into complete nonchalance by the unshakable phlegm of the men. He soon
learned to adopt the prescribed air of indifference to such attentions
from the enemy, but, like most people, he never got used to shelling.
Once or twice he went out patrolling with his orderly, a completely
fearless, wholly unsqueamish, and eminently practical young man. It
was a messy business, crawling through the wet grass in the dark, and
rather trying to the nerves. But, as a sage friend of our Ensign’s used
to say, “If you can’t see the Hun, he can’t see you,” and our young
man more than once drew comfort from this practical maxim as he and
MacFinnigan crawled through No Man’s Land with eyes and ears strained
for sight or sound of the enemy.

Letters and newspapers arrived with unfailing regularity in the front
line every afternoon at tea-time. So they knew all about the great
events that were happening on the Somme, especially as the latest
bulletins came up daily from the army headquarters, and were stuck up
(by means of a cartridge driven into the sandbag walls) outside the
company headquarters. Everybody speculated endlessly as to the moment
when the Guards would be hurled into that boiling cauldron in the
south. Rumours of all kinds were rife: everybody had his own theories
and “information,” especially the men. Our Ensign used to hear them
gossiping round their breakfast fires in the trenches, where every
cookhouse rumour was thoroughly examined.

At last one day, when the Battalion was expecting to go out of the
trenches altogether for several weeks’ rest, it was reported that the
Somme was its next destination. This time rumour spoke true. About one
o’clock A.M., on a mellow summer night, the Battalion marched quietly
by companies across the market-place of an old Belgian town, where it
would in a day or two entrain for the Unknown.




CHAPTER V.


And now the scene changes. The stage is set afresh for another act
of the great drama in which our hero plays the leading part or the
tiniest of _rôles_, according as we take his conception or history’s
of the great events amongst which his life is running its course.
For, by analysis, war is found to be made up of millions of little
dramas in which the “lead” is played by every single combatant, in
which the greatest actors may have but the shadowiest of _rôles_, in
which the most portentous moments of history are but “noises of.”
It is only the historian, coldly surveying the stage through the
lorgnette of posterity, who can disentangle the myriad threads of
these subsidiary incidents and weave them into the mighty drama, in
which the great actors are seen in their proper _rôles_, where such
pygmies as our Ensign are but blurred figures in a vast stage crowd,
a moving background, as it were,--after the Meiningen school of the
drama,--against which the events of history are enacted.

The scene shifts, then, from Belgium to France. Gone are the flat
plains, the ugly red-brick houses, uglier than ever now that war has
stripped them from roof to cellar; gone the dull, straight roads
with their strip of uneven, red-hot _pavé_ in the centre; gone that
everlasting ragged silhouette of Ypres’ ravaged towers, seen from every
angle of the salient; gone the stagnant canals, the dirty estaminets.
Slow and protesting, with many halts, the train bearing the Battalion
southward, through the heat and dust of a blazing summer day, leaves
the Belgian scene of war behind. It carries them deep into the fair
land of France, among the green hills and undulating valleys, the
long white roads, the pretty and prosperous villages, the old-world
chateaux with their seigneurial dove-cots and weather-stained towers
peering forth from the summer foliage, the natty _auberges_ with their
white-curtained windows and little tables before the door. This is all
but the “front cloth,” however, behind which the stage is being set for
the drama in which the Battalion is yet to play its part. This fair
picture of France, spread out in the warm afternoon sunshine, is only
the foreground. Behind it somewhere, where the guns are growling dully,
lies the Unknown, the Land of Adventure for which they are ultimately
bound.

Motor-lorries met them at the railhead where their train journey ended,
and whirled them, in a long procession of white dust-clouds, to a large
and comfortable village where already other Guards’ battalions were
lodged. As the men, white as masons with the dust, descended from the
lorries, our Ensign looked about him. There was the Billeting Officer,
perspiring and protesting (as is the way of the Billeting Officer),
the quartermaster-sergeants, his accomplices, beside him. On every
door stood the traces of their handiwork. “2 Platoons, No. 1 Coy.,” “1
Platoon, No. 4 Coy.,” “Pioneers,” “2 officers,”--these were some of the
inscriptions our Ensign saw scrawled in chalk on the doors of houses
and sheds and on the posts of the farmyard gates.

Three platoons of his company, our young man discovered, were billeted
in the buildings of a big yard behind an estaminet, a number of large
sheds and outhouses, some of red brick, others with merely wattle
walls, running round three sides of the yard. Our Ensign ardently
desired a wash and also a drink, but he found that all the officers
were busy looking after the comfort of their men, seeing that their
quarters were reasonably clean, and inquiring from the dispassionate
French peasants as to facilities for water. That is the rule of the
army,--the men first, the officers afterwards.

So our young man lost no time in following the example of The Beak and
Peter, and visited his platoon in their billet. They were very well
off, for their lodging was in a large, dry, clean loft, with a cement
floor, above the stables. He and his brother officers between them were
successful in begging some straw off the lady of the estaminet, whose
sole concern appeared to be for her fowls.... _Ah, Monsieur, il y avait
des Anglais chez nous qui out volé mes poules.... Oh, la, la, qu’ils
ont volé!_...

But our Ensign soothed her fears by clinching on the spot a contract
for eggs for the double-company Mess, as long as the Battalion should
be there, and by paying down five francs on account. Quite mollified,
the lady showed them a horse-pond near by where the men might wash, and
the village well, where (after due analysis of the water by the doctor,
in accordance with the Brigade order) the men might draw drinking water.

Leaving the men, stripped to the waist, carrying in their hands little
ends of soap and rather dingy towels, swarming about the horse-pond,
our Ensign and his brother officers fared forth to locate their own
quarters. In the village street they found the Billeting Officer the
centre of an indignant group. In the whole of B----, he announced,
wiping his damp brow, there were but four beds for officers--the
company commanders were to have these,--the rest must forage for
themselves. The double-company Mess was quartered in the estaminet
behind which the greater part of our Ensign’s company was billeted.
There might be some tents for officers later....

There was a chorus of obloquy. What slackness on the part of the
Billeting Officer! Had one ever heard the like? Why, the place was full
of comfortable-looking houses where, for a franc or two, one might get
a clean and comfortable bed! One wouldn’t mind paying....

The discussion lasted whilst the young lions of the double-company
Mess lapped up white wine and soda in the dark and filthy back-room
of the estaminet where the mess was situated. Poultry walked between
their legs: there were millions of flies: a dishevelled wench stirred a
saucepan over a red-hot stove, and ancient, gnarled peasants, murmuring
“_Bien le bon jour, m’sieurs!_” entered and sat down with them at the
table. Apparently the back-room was a kind of village club. In the
front room of the estaminet, judging by the trampling of feet and the
frantic cries of “Doo beer, Ma!” the greater part of the Battalion was
refreshing itself after the heat of the day.

Peter had a servant, a prodigy among men, and a pearl among servants,
which his name was Cardwell. Even our Ensign lowered before the
Admirable Cardwell the banner he bore so proudly aloft on behalf of the
faithful Johnson. For Cardwell spoke French: Cardwell knew the ways of
the peasants: Cardwell had been known to extract a meal and a bed out
of the dourest old harridan who ever bolted her door with the cry--“_Je
ne veux pas des soldats chez moi!_”

So Peter drew our Ensign aside, and whispered--

“Cardwell will find us something: leave it to Cardwell!”

But even Cardwell drew a blank in B----; he returned to the estaminet,
where his “master,” as the soldier servants say, was sitting hopefully
among the flies and the poultry and the peasants, and ruefully
announced his failure. The village was overflowing with refugees from
the occupied territory (under the French Government relief scheme):
the Billeting Officer had spoken true,--there was not a bed in the
place. But then the faithful Johnson came to the rescue. In the
courtyard of the estaminet he had laid out soap and water and a towel
for our Ensign to have that much-needed wash; and he informed his
“master” that tents were to be had, and if our Ensign would furnish the
men to draw the tent from the Quartermaster, and indicate a spot where
it should be pitched, he would attend to it at once. There was a clean
garden behind the estaminet which might do, the man added.

Peter and our Ensign inspected the spot, and decided that it would do:
the needful authority was obtained from The Beak, the tent was pitched
behind the estaminet, and the two officers had their kits deposited
therein, thereby inaugurating a tent partnership which lasted through
the summer.

That evening a select party consisting of our Ensign, Peter, Apollo,
The Don, and a tall and serious-minded subaltern of their Mess, whom
everybody called Roderick, dined in state at a hotel in a neighbouring
town, to which they were conveyed through the kindly offices of a
motor-ambulance driver. There, among all kinds of big-wigs of the
Guards’ Division, they ate a thoroughly bad dinner, at an extortionate
price, washed down by utterly spurious _Château Laffitte_, and
professed themselves hugely delighted with their evening. It was a
glorious summer night, and when they got back to their billet Peter and
our Ensign pulled their valises out of the tent and slept beneath the
stars.

As the result of an argument on the art of foraging on active service,
springing from severe strictures on the paucity of the fare at the
double-company Mess, Peter and our Ensign were bidden to dinner the
next night with a brother officer, who professed, after experience of
active service in half a dozen wars, to be able to get an epicurean
meal in any village, no matter how short local supplies were--and B----
was very short. The troops going through on their way to the Somme had
seen to that!

The veteran acted as his own cook, and the four--for one of the company
commanders made up the _parti carré_--dined under an apple-tree,
beneath the stars, off three young ducks and two young chickens, with
delicious fresh peas and new potatoes. The guests contributed, as
their share of the repast, two bottles of _Roederer_ purchased in the
neighbouring town.

As a dinner it was a _tour de force_, for heaven alone knows what
blandishments these succulent dishes represented: as a meal, it was
a frankly gluttonous performance. Our Ensign, who was Piquet Officer
that day, felt that he could scarcely walk, so gorged was he with food,
when he rose from the table under the apple-tree to go and turn out
the guards. But in war you learn to be thankful for what you can get
to-day, for the morrow is ever uncertain.

The Battalion arrived at B---- on a Sunday, and at six o’clock on the
following Tuesday morning it was on the road again. It rendezvoused
with the rest of the Brigade at a given point _en route_, from which
the whole Brigade marched to its destination at V----, some seventeen
or eighteen miles distant.

The day was a regular “scorcher.” Even at the early hour of their
departure there was a touch of fiery heat in the sun’s rays. There
was not a cloud in the sky, and already the heat was shimmering among
the corn-stooks in the stubble. The road was deep in dust, and every
wayside leaf was powdered white.

The country was terribly hilly, and the men--who were in marching
order, their steel helmets strapped on the back of their packs--were
sweating freely even at the end of the first mile of the march. Trench
warfare gives the men scant opportunity for exercise, and a long march
in the summer heat over hilly roads with a heavy load is a strain on
the fittest of troops.

But the men made light of the heat and the dust as they trudged along,
marching at ease with their rifles slung, with the drums crashing out
in front of them. When soldiers are standing a march well, there is a
constant ripple of conversation, of chaff, and little snatches of song
running up and down the ranks. The men were frankly delighted with the
pretty French countryside, the cows in the fields, the sheep on the
uplands, the geese and ducks and cocks and hens in the villages--all
these were reminders of their country homes, reminders such as they had
seldom seen in the mournful land of death from which they had come. A
donkey braying behind a hedge, a drove of pigs on the road, set them
all a-laughing. Like children, they commented in a running vein of
criticism upon everything they saw.

“Och!” said a voice behind our Ensign, “’tis kilt I am wid the heat
intoirely. Did ye ever see the like o’ thim lads in front? Sure,
they’re runnin’ us off our legs!”

“’Tis the same old game,” declaimed disdainfully Sergeant Kinole,
plodding along at the head of the platoon; “I know them lads in front
of the company! One, two--left, right--keepin’ the step with the
Company Commander’s horse. I declare to God we’ll all be goin’ on our
hands and knees be the time we get in!”

This flight of fancy elicited a general laugh. Then the running
commentary broke out afresh. A venerable-looking old peasant was
digging in a field.

“Bon jour, Daddy!” cried a voice.

“Is ut diggin’ spuds ye are?” asked another.

“Arrah, let him be,” said a deep voice. “’Tis diggin’ his own grave he
is, th’ ould rascal!”

The “ould rascal” looked up from his digging with a sheepish,
toothless grin, and the Battalion tramped by in a cloud of dust and a
ripple of jests and laughter.

They joined up with the Brigade and marched on, drums beating gaily in
front, baggage-limbers and carts and cookers trailing out to the rear,
through the torrid heat. The passing of the Brigade was an event in the
little town where our Ensign and his friends had dined. The streets
were crowded, every window had its frieze of faces, every shop-door its
knot of gossips, to see the column go by. It was the first time for a
century that the Guards had been in those parts.

The heat was truly terrific. The sun beat down fiercely out of a
brazen sky. The dust was choking: the hills merciless. The chatter and
the chaff gradually died away, and when the whistles sounded for the
regulation halt at the end of each hour of marching, the men fell out,
dragged off their packs and dropped heavily on the grass.

At last, when the sun was high in the sky, they reached their
destination. V---- was a straggling little village built on either side
of the slope of the white high-road, smothered in dust, shaken to its
very foundations by the incessant rumbling of motor-lorries passing
through, with a soporific and neglected-looking château, where ducks
promenaded solemnly in the courtyard, a wisp of river and a camp of
huts.

The men were lodged in the huts,--regular cauldrons of heat they were,
too, infested by flies,--pitched on an unprotected slope of sun-baked
earth from which every blade of grass had been trodden. Huts had been
set apart for the officers, but they would have none of them. Some
one, with a taste for epigram, said the place looked like a dismantled
poultry show. The officers, one and all, voted for quarters in the open
air, as the weather was so beautifully fine.

After various negotiations, in which Apollo, who had the gift of
tongues, played a leading _rôle_, permission was obtained from the
local _châtelain_, who was henceforth known and is referred to
in this narrative as The Baron, to pitch tents on the grass in a
pleasant old apple orchard across the road from the huts. In this
picturesque old-world _verger_ the officers of the Battalion were
lodged. Headquarters’ tents were ranged at one end of the orchard, the
officers’ tents pitched all round its edge, and the different company
messes installed in the open air.

For ten delightful days the Battalion spent a peaceful routine
existence. The order went forth that cap-stars and buttons would be
polished, and once more, at the morning inspection, our Ensign found
himself, as in bygone days in barracks at home, scrutinising the men
of his platoon for any signs that might betray a hasty or indifferent
toilet. The Division or the Brigade--anyhow, the authority that
governs these things--decided that the village streets were unduly
dirty, and the supervision of a daily scavenging party was added to
the duties of the Piquet Officer. Rubbish and dirt lying about the
camp were collected and burnt, the village streets were picked clear
of empty Woodbine cases and sardine tins and matches and bits of
newspaper, and swept and garnished, so that when the Brigade marched
out of V---- it left a clean village behind.

Three times within a hundred years had the high tide of war swept
across the village and the little château where The Baron and three
generations of his family before him had been born. On a window-pane
of his house was still to be seen the name “JULIE,” scratched with a
diamond on the glass by the wife of a Cossack officer quartered at the
château in 1812, while Europe was breathing again after the departure
of The Ogre to Elba. In 1870 The Baron, while yet a lad, had seen
the Prussians, most insolent of conquerors, lodging at the château;
forty-four years after, in the heyday of their victorious advance,
he had watched their cavalry passing through the village before the
Battle of the Marne had sent them to the right-about and shattered all
their hopes. Since those black August days of 1914 The Baron had seen
all manner of fighting-men in and about his ancient home, _poilus_
and cuirassiers and Spahis and _goumiers_, at first, and then, after
a little time, the British,--English and Scots and Welsh and Irish,
and Indians and Australians and Canadians and South Africans. From the
windows of his château he had seen the whole flood of battle flowing
down to the Somme--and he was a little shy of soldiers.

For in war, he told our Ensign over a glass of home-brewed cider,
poultry goes a-missing from the farmyards, and the game vanishes from
the woods, and the orchards are bereft of fruit, and young trees
unaccountably hacked down.... “One does not grudge it, ... enfin, c’est
la guerre!”

But when The Baron found that the new-comers did not loot his chickens
or poach his rabbits or break down his trees, his heart warmed to his
guests in the orchard. He sent the officers, as a present, a hamper of
his delicious home-brewed cider; he plundered his kitchen-garden to
supply them with vegetables at a very moderate price--_les affaires
sont les affaires, n’est-ce pas?_--(and vegetables are hard to come by
where the locust hosts of the Somme have passed), and he sold them his
ducklings. One night he dined with the double-company Mess beneath the
apple-trees in the orchard, and made himself as charming as a well-bred
Frenchman can. Of the Guards he said: “_On voit bien ce sont des gens
qui savent se conduire!_”

It was The Baron who told the double-company Mess of the little river
in which they enjoyed many bathes in the hot summer afternoons. It was
a few miles distant, an ice-cold, crystal-clear stream with a chalky
bottom, that emptied itself into a deep and surging mill-pond at the
foot of a ruined mill. Our Ensign and his brother officers used to
ride over after tea, and, passing by the mill-pond, where the men of
the Coldstream and Grenadiers quartered in the neighbourhood used to
disport themselves, would ascend the stream a little and plunge in off
the grassy banks. They often had a silent spectator of these bathes--a
grey-haired man who sat for hours, a dog beside him, fishing in the
stream. One day they spoke to him, and discovered that he was a citizen
of Lille, a _réfugié_, waiting in a quiet spot for the day of victory.
Patting his dog, he used to say in his mournful way, “_Lui, aussi, est
Lillois: c’est tout ce qu’il me reste de ma famille!_”

Thus the summer days went by very pleasantly. Routine duties filled
in their mornings, short route-marches to keep the men fit, parades,
company drill, and, of course, daily “orders”; in the afternoons there
was bathing or rides out to other Guards’ battalions quartered about
the place, or a concert by the Irish Guards’ band, which had come out
in its turn from London to spend a few weeks with the Guards’ Division.
One afternoon The Lad, whom our Ensign had not seen again since their
rather hasty parting under shell fire, came over with one or two others
from his battalion and stayed to dinner in the orchard. Our Ensign
and some of the others returned this visit, and dined with the other
battalion in a camp of huts in a wood, and, after a very merry dinner,
wobbled perilously home on bicycles in the dark, over an execrable road.

The weather remained magnificent. Every night the majority of the
officers slept outside their tents in the orchard, under a velvety
sky spangled with a vast array of stars, sometimes with the moon hung
like a great lamp among the trees. The awakening in the freshness of
dawn was a sheer delight, with the birds chirruping in the apple-trees,
the sky benign and blue in the gentle light of the newly-risen sun,
the grass which formed their _descente du lit_ glittering with the
morning dews. The men also, in their camp, dragged forth their packs at
nightfall from the huts and lay down to sleep _à la belle étoile_.

On Sundays there was Brigade Divine Service in an orchard behind
the château. On one or two occasions the band was in attendance
and accompanied the old English hymns with fine effect. It was an
unforgettable scene--the lines of tall, well-knit figures in khaki,
bare-headed, standing on the grass in the sunshine or in the shade of
the fruit trees, the Brigade Chaplain in his white surplice in the
centre, close to him the little group of officers, a few patients with
bandaged heads or arms from a local casualty clearing station, a knot
of wide-eyed French youngsters, and the deep tones of the men’s voices
blending with the solemn strains of the band.

No less impressive was the Irish Guards’ Mass held on the same spot
every Sunday at an earlier hour, the R.C. Chaplain to the Battalion,
his leggings protruding unexpectedly below his sacerdotal vestments,
celebrating at a portable altar surrounded by the kneeling figures
of the big Irishmen--a wonderful and deeply impressive sight. Mass
invariably concluded with an Irish hymn--

  “O glorious Saint Patrick,
  Dear Saint of our Isle!”

which the Irishmen used to sing with immense religious feeling and with
a volume of sound that must have made the château windows tremble.

Every day came news of further successes on the Somme: every day our
Ensign and his friends discussed the Battalion’s chances of an early
share in the great push: every day there were fresh rumours of great
tasks supposedly awaiting the Guards on the Somme; but nothing ever
came of them.

On the last day of their stay, the King, who was visiting the Army in
France, came to see the Brigade, and walked into the orchard where the
officers of our Ensign’s Battalion were quartered and where they were
waiting to be presented. The double-company Mess had ransacked the
village for flowers to put on the mess-table in honour of the occasion,
and had procured some beautiful La France roses which, placed in
soda-water bottles, lent a nice touch of colour to the table. It was at
the mess-table under the trees where they were presented to the King,
so they felt that their labours had not been in vain.

The Battalion left V---- with many regrets on a dull steamy day, and
marched to a dirty fly-ridden camp in the woods of M----, where it
rained mercilessly and life was squalid and drear. There they stayed
for two days and a half, a wonderful night bombardment of the Hun
lines by the British artillery the only diversion, and then received
unexpected orders to leave. Everybody believed that the Battalion was
going straight into the fight, and some of the young officers summoned
the Battalion barber to their tents and got their hair cut on the
strength of the rumour.

But their hour had not yet struck. The village of L---- was their next
destination. Here they spent two days, and were then informed that they
were going into the trenches again for a short spell. This rumour was
at first received with incredulity. Nevertheless it was true.

By the following evening the Battalion was once more in the front line.




CHAPTER VI.


Inscrutable appear the ways of the Staff to the young lions of our
army in France. For a month the Battalion had been fondly nursing
the idea of going into action, yet here they were back again in the
old routine of trench warfare. True, they were on the battlefield of
the Somme, though that singularly diminutive stream was away to the
southward of them; but there was no sign of immediate action in their
neighbourhood--the traces were all of the fighting which had been.

A modern battle is run very much on the lines of a railway time-table.
The attack is entrusted to certain armies, and the corps of which
these armies are composed send their divisions and brigades “over the
top” in due course and duly take them out of the line, whereupon fresh
troops take their places. Each corps has its own billeting area, towns
and villages and camps, where its troops are billeted on the way to
or from battle. As one division or brigade moves out of one billet,
the successor moves in by schedule, just as, on the railway, one train
follows another on the same set of metals. This disposition of troops
in a vast battle, over widely devastated country, is a very important
feature of the operations; for nothing must be left to chance, and,
with the tide of battle ebbing and flowing, success or failure may
depend on the accessibility of the reserves.

But the hot blood of our young officers does not always comprehend
these strategical considerations, and our Ensign’s Battalion groused
mightily at the way the Guards were being “shunted about,” while the
rest of the British army were busily collecting laurels on the Somme.

The Battalion took over from some very cheery “Kitchener chaps,” and
the officers of the company which our Ensign’s company relieved in
the support position--a bowl-shaped chalk quarry with some excellent
dug-outs--provided our Ensign and his brother officers with a very
good luncheon. As No. 2 Company had been in the front line on the last
occasion, it was now their turn to be in support, where their only
duties were fetching rations and water for themselves and the companies
in the front line. During their wanderings the double-company Mess
had received some fresh members, including one Bryan, who went to our
Ensign’s company, and one Duke, who went to No. 1,--our Ensign had been
friends with both men in barracks at home, and their coming in no wise
disturbed but only increased the _cameraderie_ of the double-company
Mess.

The principal duty of the Guards in these trenches, as far as the
front-line companies were concerned, was to “clean up.” This part of
the line had been the scene of a holding attack in the earlier stages
of the Somme battle. The troops concerned had done their work, but had
not been able to hold the ground gained, and had fallen back to their
front line, which had had a regular pounding from the German artillery.
The trenches were badly battered and required a lot of repair, the dead
bodies were scattered thickly about, and the atmosphere, especially in
the warm showery weather then prevalent, was very bad.

So every night parties sallied forth, some to wire, others to repair
the parapet, others again to bury the dead and salve the equipment
lying about, both British and German. The burial parties had the worst
time: you wanted strong nerves to stomach the sights about those
trenches. Our Ensign used to see the fruits of these midnight salvage
enterprises laid out afterwards in the trench--pay-books and identity
discs and rifles and boxes of ammunition and helmets--ready to be sent
down to the Brigade. Altogether, during the few days they were in that
part of the line, the Battalion buried several hundred bodies and
brought in a very large amount of salvage, for which good service they
subsequently received the thanks of their Brigadier.

Life was pretty quiet in those trenches. The Hun was having such a
desperate struggle to keep his line together where the sledge-hammer
blows were being dealt, that in the quieter spots he was only too glad
to live and let live. The daily Intelligence Summary showed clearly, on
the plain testimony of German army orders, letters found on the dead,
and the less reliable statements of prisoners, that not only was the
invincibility of the German army exploded amongst the very men who had
most sedulously spread the myth, but that the German Higher Commands
were seriously concerned at the growing demoralisation of the troops,
as shown by such significant symptoms as desertions, slackness in
patrolling, and the like.

As a scrupulous chronicler of the adventures of our Ensign, I must not
overlook a curious experience that befell him one morning in these
trenches. Lured by the promise of a perfect dawn, he ventured forth
before breakfast to visit the officers in the front line, foolishly
omitting to take his Burberry with him. As he was walking down to have
breakfast with The Beak and Bryan in the chalk quarry, he was surprised
by a drenching downpour of rain. The approach to the front line was
very simple--any one of four communication trenches would take you
there--but, in his haste to get home out of the wet, our Ensign took
a wrong turn and presently found himself in a part of the front line
which seemed unfamiliar to him.

Now, out in France, one trench looks very much like another. It was
daylight, and the sentries had stood down, and in that downpour every
man who was not on duty would naturally take shelter in the dug-outs.
So our Ensign was not surprised to find the trench deserted, thinking
that presently he would come to a sentry who would tell him where he
was. He noticed rifles leaning against the fire-steps, and boxes of
bombs in shelves cut in the parados, and here and there a pack or a
mess-tin left outside a dug-out. In fact, the trench looked very much
as most trenches do in the early morning, after the men have had their
breakfast and are snatching a few hours’ sleep.

In places the trench was very battered: at one point a huge gap had
been blown clean away, so that he found himself in full view of the
German lines. Presently, as he hurried along, with his head down before
the driving rain, he began to notice that the trench showed signs of
most unusual untidiness. Picks and shovels were lying about all over
the place: here a greatcoat had been trodden down into the mud, there a
box of small-arms ammunition lay gaping on the ground. Then, even as he
realised that the broken fire-bays were void of sentries, and that the
trench was deserted, he came to a dead stop. For there, in the bottom
of the trench, half a dozen yards from him, a khaki-clad figure lay
face downwards in the mud.

An eerie sensation crept over our young man. He felt like the hero
of that stirring tale of old Clark Russell’s when he boards _The
Frozen Pirate_ and finds himself in the midst of an arrested life.
For, after stepping gingerly over the prone figure in the mud, he
came to a dug-out before which a stretcher stood. On the stretcher
lay a man with head swathed in bandages, and he was dead. So was
the stretcher-bearer on the ground beside him, amid a litter of
field-dressings. And there were many other dead bodies, besides these
two, in that abandoned trench.

Our Ensign faced round and retraced his steps the way he had come, for
he was fearful lest he should walk into the German lines if he went any
farther. On his return he noticed many little signs that had escaped
him in his previous haste,--remains of food spread out on tables in
the silent dug-outs, old books and newspapers, sodden and mud-stained,
some gum-boots lying in a pile behind the trench, a woollen waistcoat
hanging on a nail in a ruined shelter; it was a desolate, uncanny
place, and our Ensign was glad when he heard the sizzle of bacon and
walked into a bombing-post of the Welsh Guards, who were holding the
right of his Battalion, and was put on his road for home.

The Battalion came out of the line on a chilly Sunday afternoon--the
approach trenches were so good that reliefs could be effected by
daylight--and marched to a camp in a forest, charmingly situated on
high ground outside a large village. The forest had not been touched
by shell fire; only the trees had been thinned a little to make room
for the huts and tents. The ground was clean, not fouled like their
last sylvan camping-ground in the wood of M----, and the green moss
made a soft carpet under their feet. There was a series of camps where
the whole Brigade was lodged, and the black-roofed huts and the white
bell-tents made a pretty picture spread out among the trees, the blue
smoke from the wood fires curling up between, and vistas of forest
glades on every hand.

The Brigade spent a very agreeable two days in the forest. The weather
completely reformed itself. A fine warm burst set in, bringing out all
the healthy, resinous odours of the woods. The men exulted in their
surroundings--a wholesome change, in truth, from their long nights
burying the dead in the rain. When their day’s work was done, they sat
about in groups on the mossy ground under the trees and smoked and
yarned. And (tell it not in Gath!) they sometimes contrived to have
rabbit for supper.

There were a lot of Guards in and about the forest. Our Ensign,
route-marching with the company, used to meet them on the road. Such
encounters generally started the men on anecdotes and reminiscences
of the old 4th (Guards’) Brigade, extending back to the days of the
Retreat from Mons. In conversation with each other the men always
referred to the Guards by their different nicknames, most Guards’
battalions having a sobriquet of some sort. Thus the Coldstream are
“the Coalies,” the Scots Guards, “the Jocks,” and the Irish Guards,
“the Micks.”

Every morning the drums of the different Guards’ battalions in the
camps roused the echoes of the forest (and everybody generally) with
the stirring strains of the _Grand Réveille_: every evening at Retreat,
in the dying sunshine, they made the woods resound to their music until
that pause came, bringing every man instinctively and by anticipation
to his feet, after which the fifes squealed and the drums rolled out
the National Anthem.

The company messes, which were all lodged in one long hut, had a
great dinner to celebrate their coming out of the Line. Ah! those
first dinners when the Battalion comes out of the trenches! Will
the future--that dim “After the War,” which is the great European
query-mark to-day--ever see their like? I doubt it.

How mind and body exult when you have had a hot bath, and there is
the cool caress of fresh linen next your skin, and you have cast
off your soiled uniform and heavy boots and changed into another
jacket and comfortable trousers and shoes, and the port has come from
Christopher’s, and the mess-sergeant has procured a melon! The past is
shoved behind you, with its blood and mud and evil odours; the present
is all high spirits and grateful relaxation; and as for the future,
you give it not a thought. Yet the future was there, though the Guards
in their forest camp did not realise it--somewhere out there beneath
that patch of starry sky framed in the low mess door, somewhere in the
Unknown where the guns throbbed faintly in the night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Their next halting-place in their wanderings was no less pleasant--a
large comfortable village which had almost escaped the flow of humanity
towards the Somme. The barns where the men were billeted were spacious
and clean and dry; milk and butter and eggs and vegetables were
obtainable in plenty; and there were beds for all the officers. The
whole Brigade was billeted in the village, and made its entry down a
long slope leading to the main street, with drums beating at the head
of each long column of dusty, sun-browned men--a brave show.

Peter and our Ensign had a knotty point of military law to settle
with respect to their billet. Is an estaminet _consigné à la
troupe_--that is to say, put out of bounds for troops by the Assistant
Provost-Marshal for some contravention of the regulations--likewise
out of bounds as a billet for officers? For they were not using the
estaminet part of the establishment--they were merely to sleep in a
bedroom above it.

Madam and a mild-mannered old gentleman, who turned out to be her
husband, together with three or four peasants, seized upon this
tortuous point of law, when Madam very frankly stated her case to the
two officers and debated it ardently.

“_Ce sont les artilleurs_,” Madam sighed, “_qui sont venus comme ça
boire de la bière à la porte du derrière ... on est seule, n’est-ce
pas? On ne fait pas attention, n’est-ce pas? Et puis voilà, le
Prévôt-Maréchal qui vous consigne pour quinze jours! Mon Dieu, c’est
dur!_”

The husband echoed--

“_Sapristi, c’est dur!_”

And the peasants, removing their pipes to spit, chanted in chorus--

“_Bien sûr que c’est dur!_”

The upshot of it was that Peter and our Ensign, deciding that the
bedroom was not the estaminet within the meaning of the Act, passed
a very comfortable night on good beds in Madam’s exceptionally clean
room. They likewise purchased for a five-franc note two very plump
white and grey lop-eared rabbits, which the _patron_ carried grimly
into a back-yard and brought back neatly and expeditiously slain. The
mess waiter fetched them across to the mess, and they formed the
_pièce de résistance_ at dinner that evening.

When troops arrive in a village out at the Front they swamp it: they
make it their own. Within an hour or two of the Guards’ arrival in this
comfortable French hamlet, neat little boards or flags hung outside the
different billets clearly indicating who lodged there, the Headquarters
and billet guards were mounted, and, with their clothes brushed and
their faces shining with the recent vigorous application of yellow soap
and water, the men strolled out in groups to see what refreshment local
establishments could offer, and also to buy those sentimental picture
post-cards in which all soldiers delight.

The main street simply overflowed with troops, big and brown and
tranquil; and for an officer to pass along was to run the gauntlet of a
never-ceasing fire of salutes.

That evening Operation Orders announced that on the following morning
the Battalion would march on. And our Ensign found himself entrusted
with the duties of Billeting Officer.




CHAPTER VII.


Just contemplate the Billeting Officer’s parlous position. The briefest
period of grace is conceded to him, in which he and his accomplices
cycle furiously ahead of the Battalion to distribute the billets
in the area allotted to them. Even as the Billeting Officer, dusty
and damp-browed, receives, on arriving at his destination, from the
Staff Captain of the Brigade, the list of billets set apart for his
Battalion, he can hear, with the ears of his mind, the Battalion
marching towards him with the leaden feet of inexorable destiny. Every
minute brings them nearer; every minute shortens that brief breathing
space in which he must complete all his arrangements and present
himself, calm and unruffled, with a complete map of the locality in his
mind, at the entrance of the village, to lead the incoming troops to
their quarters.

The Billeting Officer must combine the organising genius of a William
Whiteley with the quickness of decision of a Napoleon. He must be
gentle as the dove, cunning as the serpent. He must be all things
to all men--firm with recalcitrant peasants, persuasive with fussy
beldames, glib with weary and fractious officers who look for beds when
there are no beds.

The Billeting Officer must be an optimist, unfailing and
uncompromising. He must survey the world through the rosy spectacles of
the house agent. As in the house advertisements in the newspapers, so
to him all residences must be “stately” or “well-appointed,” all villas
“pretty” or “charming,” all rooms “lofty,” all barns “spacious.”

He and every man of his Billeting Party are cold and calculating
egoists. The four Quartermaster-Sergeants of the Battalion who
accompany him are, each and individually, solely concerned with
securing the best billet for their own companies. The Pioneer Sergeant
has come forth to seek the largest and roomiest barn in sight for the
housing of the Quartermaster’s stores; the Drill-Sergeant is heart and
soul devoted to the interests of the Orderly Room, the Guard Room, the
Medical Inspection Room, and quarters for the signallers and the Drums;
as for the poor Billeting Officer, tossed to and fro like a shuttlecock
between all these conflicting currents, his dominant idea is to find
some kind of decent billet for the Commanding Officer and Headquarters.
Nor must he ever lose sight of the fact that, if he gives the officers
of his own company anything like good quarters, he will unload upon his
own devoted head all the lightnings of the other company messes.

The Billeting Party, headed by our Ensign, set off on bicycles on a
delicious summer morning for the village of F----, the next half of
the Brigade, on what some one called its “one night stands” about the
country. The faithful Johnson had procured for his “master” from the
Signalling Sergeant a bicycle, which, in consideration of a little
cleaning and oiling, ran somewhat better than army machines generally
do. On the road they fell in with billeting parties from the other
battalions of the Brigade, and on the face of each Billeting Officer
dull care had graven a deep furrow.

Outside the church of F----, an ugly bogus Gothic structure, red
and staring, like the picture on a child’s box of bricks, the Staff
Captain met them by appointment, and handed each Billeting Officer
a list setting forth the numbers of the different billets at the
disposal of the Battalion. Every house in the war zone in France bears
a number stencilled on the door, and underneath, an entirely fabulous
computation of the numbers of “Hommes” or “Chevaux” that can be lodged
there.

Billeting at F---- was unusually easy. The barns were large and in
good repair, and the local inhabitants, while somewhat resigned, were
friendly. The four companies were allotted billets without difficulty,
and even the Drill-Sergeant found quarters for all his different
charges. But accommodation for the officers was a different matter. Our
Ensign found lodgings for the four company commanders, _tant bien que
mal_; the Interpreter, who was of the party, arranged with the local
curé to put up the Chaplain; and our Ensign kept in his mind’s eye a
certain _coquet_ little red-brick villa, marked down on his list as
affording accommodation for five officers, for the Headquarters billet.

But at the very door of the villa disaster was lurking. Two dragoon
officers met them in the garden.

“Is this billet free?” asked our Ensign with fear in his heart.

“No,” said one of the dragoons promptly; “there are five of us in
here--Corps cavalry--been here for weeks.”

“But it’s down on my list as our billet,” objected our Ensign.

“I know,” was the calm reply; “we’ve had about six fellows before you
after it--I’ve told the Mayor to scratch it off!”

Our Ensign looked at the list again. Then he saw a tiny smudge, which
on closer investigation proved to be an asterisk. “Probably occupied”
was the note he read at the foot of the page.

The list was exhausted--none of the rooms they had seen would do for
Headquarters; so our Ensign, with the optimism of the Billeting Officer
nascent in his breast, started to look for a clean bivouac where
Headquarters might be accommodated in tents. They presently found a
large grassy orchard which seemed suitable for the purpose. It lay
behind a farm, where our Ensign duly demanded the requisite permission.

An extremely dirty, red-eyed old woman was the _propriétaire_. She
had a large, bare, and very dilapidated room, swarming with flies,
which she offered; but she resolutely set her face against letting the
orchard be used.

She wagged her old head stubbornly.

“_Non, non, non!_” she croaked, “_j’n’veux pas! La dernière fois les
soldats ont joué au ballon dans le verger ... ils ont tout abimé ...
j’n’veux pas!_”

Our Ensign explained with much persuasiveness, but with a horrid fear
in his mind that the Battalion would arrive any instant, that only
officers would be lodged there who never played football, and who, by
their very presence, would prevent the irruption of _ballon_-kicking
soldiery.

Then the Interpreter took a hand and drew a superb word-picture of the
innate courtliness and good behaviour of every British officer--of
these officers in particular--and of the Commanding Officer most of all.

The old harridan began to yield.

“_Mais, bien sûr_,” she muttered irresolutely, “_ils vont casser mes
arbres...._”

The Interpreter spoke again. These officers were rich and generous.
They would do no damage, but any damage they might do would be paid
for: of that she might rest assured. The officers would buy her
chickens, her butter, her eggs: the noble young man at his side was
even at that moment ready to invest five francs in the produce of the
farm (this on a whispered suggestion from our Ensign). She would be
reasonable; she would not regret it.

Then, at last, the old lady gave way.

“_Je veux bien, alors_,” she said, “_pourvu qu’on ne va pas jouer au
ballon!_”

Thus it was settled, the double-company mess was installed in the old
lady’s room in consideration of a _douceur_ of 2 francs 50 a day, and
our Ensign rushed away to the entrance of the village to await the
coming of the Brigade.

The Brigade arrived with its usual punctuality in a cloud of dust
behind the Drums, each Battalion being taken charge of by its Billeting
Officer as it marched in, the quartermaster-sergeants leading the
different companies into their billets. The men swarmed into the
farmyards and dumped their packs and rifles in the barns, then lined
up in the yards of their billets for the customary foot inspection--in
bare feet, their boots and socks in their hands. The cookers, all
smoking, with their begrimed attendants trudging behind, lumbered into
the billets, the little billet-boards appeared outside gateways and
doors, the guards were mounted, and then the officers, dusty and hot,
came streaming into the messes where the mess servants, surrounded
by dogs and cats and poultry and small children, were unpacking the
mess-boxes and getting lunch.

Our Ensign walked up to the Mess to receive congratulations on the
success of his arrangements. He was given a chilly reception.

“I suppose we have the worst mess in the place,” said Roderick
gloomily; “the cobbler’s children are always the worst shod, and the
Billeting Officer’s mess always gets the rottenest accommodation!”

“I can’t imagine,” said El Capitan, one of the company commanders, “why
you put me to sleep next door to X. I have to go through his room to
get to mine, and you know how he hates being disturbed!”

“I suppose you’ve arranged for tents,” said somebody else darkly; “of
course the simple life is very healthy and all that, but there’s the
devil of a storm blowing up, and what sleeping out in the open in your
beautiful orchard to-night will be like, the Lord only knows!”

Then the mess waiter, entering, informed our Ensign that there were no
potatoes: could he get some anywhere? That Madame would not allow the
cook to make a fire in the courtyard: would he speak to her? That they
had sent up word from the medical inspection room to know whether the
Heavies were entitled to be in the same billet: would the Billeting
Officer mind stepping across there and seeing about it?

Our Ensign put down his drink untasted, and holding his head in his
hands, staggered out into the hot sunshine. In the street he met an
ensign of one of the other companies, dusty, doleful, and dejected.

“Got a good mess?” he asked our Ensign.

Our young man assumed an air of Christian resignation.

“Nobody could have a worse mess than we’ve got,” continued the other,
and added pointedly, “but, _of course_, you’re all right!”

Our Ensign laughed bitterly and went his way. Black is the lot of the
Billeting Officer.

But when he returned to his mess the soothing influence of luncheon
had worked wonders. The gramophone was playing, and the mess beamed at
its late victim over its coffee and cigarettes. The sun was shining
brightly out of the blue sky; the tents were being pitched in the
orchard; altogether life had assumed a fairer hue. The gust had passed.
And our Ensign, eating his lunch, reflected that campaigning is,
after all, but a series of gusts: a gust of pleasant days, a gust of
bad ones; a gust of easy times, a gust of unfortunate incidents and
“strafeing,” when everything seems to go wrong; a gust of peaceful
wanderings like the present, and then a gust of war, of stern reality,
the gust to come.

That afternoon some of them took horses and rode across to visit the
adjacent “Grottoes,” which, according to the Interpreter, were the
principal attraction in the way of sight-seeing in that part of the
country. In the village outside which the Grottoes were situated, our
Ensign came across The Lad, whose Battalion was billeted in the place.
The Lad, with a party of his brother officers, was, to our Ensign’s
intense delight, engaged in heated controversy with his Billeting
Officer. As few things are harder to bear than the annoyance of a good
example, so is nothing more consoling to the victim of injustice than
to see his fellow in the same pass.

The Grottoes consisted of a series of high-roofed caves and narrow
galleries cut out of the soft chalk, and running far into the bowels
of the earth. To the archæologist or geologist they would doubtless
have proved of enthralling interest, for the old gentleman who had made
their exploration his life work had filled case upon case with those
chipped and dusty fragments of flint in which the scientific mind
rejoices. To our Ensign and his companions the main interest of the
Grottoes consisted in the fact that they were beautifully cool, and
also that the Germans were known to have made good use of similar caves
in such fortified villages as Beaumont Hamel and Les Bœufs.

The young French girl who showed them round by the light of a candle
informed them, with all the glib fluency of the professional guide,
that in feudal times the Grottoes had been quarries in which the serfs
quarried the chalk for local lordlings, and that at different periods
of history the caves had afforded refuge to various bands of brigands,
including some jolly fellows rejoicing in the name of the Flayers of
the North. Refugees had found sanctuary there in the French Revolution,
and at the time of the Prussian invasion of 1870 the civil population
had likewise made the caves their hiding-place.

“The Grottoes extend for two kilometres,” wound up the young French
lady; “one franc is the charge for the whole trip: fifty centimes for
the shorter journey.”

“How far did she say?” asked one of the visitors.

“Two kilometres,” replied our Ensign.

“Tell her we’ll give her a franc and take the short trip,” came back
the reply ... and Science hid her head.... “I want my tea!”

As they paid the girl at the entrance, before going away, our Ensign
asked her if she were the regular guide.

“_Avant la guerre_,” she answered, “_c’était mon père qui faisait le
guide. Mais lui et mes deux frères sont partis pour l’armée et depuis,
il n’y a que moi et ma sœur qui restent!_”

“Are they all right, your father and brothers?” somebody asked.

“_Papa est tombé à Verdun_,” she replied; “_un de mes frères est
prisonnier en Allemagne: l’autre est encore là-bas, au front!_” And she
wiped her eyes.

You can’t move far in France to-day without stepping into the shadow of
the people’s mourning.

Then they went back into the blinding sunshine, and, mounting their
horses, clattered back to F----. At the horse-lines, where they left
their horses, they learnt that “Retreat” was to be played in the main
street of the village by the massed Drums of the Brigade. So they all
strolled off to the main street and found retreat in full swing.

It was a good show. The broad street running between the long, low,
white farmhouses, with big gateways opening into the square courtyards,
was thronged with men from the different battalions of the Brigade.
Tall and sunburnt and well brushed, with their cap-stars and buttons
well burnished, they lined the sides of the street, leaving the centre
of the road free for the passage of the Drums.

In F---- was quartered a labour company of Senegalese, extraordinary
nightmare objects, loose-limbed, lanky negroes, with coal-black faces
seamed with tribal cuts, grinning from beneath high yellow tarbooshes,
round the edge of which their thick woolly hair was fuzzed out, huge
pouting lips, and a highly comic attire consisting of voluminous
jebbahs of coarse canvas, snowy white, reaching below the knee,
baggy white trousers, and heavy marching boots. Parties of these
weird-looking creatures were now scattered about among the thick lines
of Guardsmen, jolly as only negroes can be at the sound of music,
grinning with a white flash of teeth, and chattering volubly in their
African lingo. They were an extraordinary company, and their morning
parade with picks and shovels, before going out to work on the roads,
was the most excruciatingly funny thing a man ever saw.

Down the centre alley, between the lines of men, came the Drums,
four drum-majors with their staffs in front. Behind them came the
side-drums, the drummers’ hands raised high and falling together, the
tenor drums, the fifes and the brass drums. On reaching the top or the
bottom of the street, as the case might be, the leading files turned
and marched through the succeeding files, each rank following suit.

It was a great moment for the Drums. The whole Brigade was in the
street, from the Brigadier downwards: every eye was on the Drums, and
the Drums bore themselves right gallantly. They crashed through all the
well-known marches, to which the Brigade had trudged many a weary mile
in France, and then came the crowning moment, the march based on the
regimental airs of the Brigade of Guards.

One after the other the old familiar tunes rang out, amid a roll of
drums that made the very windows rattle,--“The British Grenadiers,”
of the Grenadiers; “Milanello,” that quaint, jingling march which the
Coldstream picked up in Spain, and of which tradition says the original
Spanish words are unprintable; the Scots Guards’ “Hieland Laddie,” the
frankly joyous “St Patrick’s Day” of the Irish Guards, and the sonorous
“Men of Harlech” of the Welsh Guards.

After the fantasia had ended in an abrupt crash, the Senior Drum-Major
marched stiffly across the street to the Brigadier, and, saluting,
asked for permission to dismiss. Then every officer’s right hand went
to his cap and every man stiffened to attention as the Drums played
“God Save the King,” the tones of which, both on land and sea,
announce to the fighting forces the coming of night.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next day the Brigade moved on again.




CHAPTER VIII.


Take a large French village, shell it a little and bomb it a little
from aeroplanes so that all the windows are broken and most of the
roofs damaged, remove the civilian inhabitants, pass several hundred
thousand troops through it, plant horse-lines all round it, so that
every road approaching it is churned into a morass by the horses’
hoofs, make the road running through it one of the main arteries
leading into battle, and choke it--day and night--with marching troops
and motor ambulances and long strings of lorries, smear it alternately
with layers of dust and mud, add several billion flies--horse-, house-,
and bluebottle--pop in a hundred thousand rats or so, bring back a few
score civilians to take possession of the only whole houses remaining,
and serve hot--extremely hot--and stinking. And there you have the
village of M----, the Brigade’s next halting-place, as it presented
itself to our Ensign and his billeting party about the hour of noon on
a blazing hot day.

Behind them they had a twenty-mile cycle ride, under a fierce sun,
against a violent and exhausting head-wind. And now, soaked to the skin
with perspiration, covered with dust, thirsty, tired, and (to speak
for our Ensign only) extremely cross, they pushed their heavy machines
up the long slope of the main street amid a dense mass of traffic and
clouds of petrol-scented dust.

They were early for their rendezvous with the Staff Captain: in
fact, they had more than half an hour to spare. They stacked their
bicycles together outside the Town Major’s office, which was to be
their trysting-place, and forthwith went their several ways in search
of shade and refreshment, to meet again at the appointed time. Our
Ensign was carried off by a billeting Coldstream officer to a Y.M.C.A.
establishment, where, among more flies than our Ensign had ever seen
together before, they quaffed some cold, green liquid, retailed at a
penny a glass as lemonade by a bespectacled Hebe (_masculini generis_)
behind the cake-laden counter. Our Ensign and his brother officer
absorbed several glasses of this refreshing beverage, and then went
forth to find the Town Major.

He was sitting in his office, a large, clean-shaven major of infantry,
urbane and charming. He mopped his brow, and sighed when he saw them
enter.

“Oh dear!” he groaned, “you keep on coming in, and I haven’t the least
idea where you are all to go. I do hope you’re not expecting anything
great in the way of billets: you’ll not get ’em here. Half the place
is in ruins, AND the dirt! AND the smells! You never saw anything like
it! Oh, damn these flies!”

He whisked his handkerchief round his head.

“Well,” he continued, “I think there’s some Perrier left: I believe I
got the last case in this part of the country: and I expect there will
be some whisky, too. Come along into the garden: the rest are there!”

His frankness boded ill: like Billeting Officers, Town Majors are
generally optimists, and chatter gaily about the “unexceptional
advantages” of the billets in their domain. The two officers followed
their host in silence into the garden, where they found the other
Billeting Officers of the Brigade, in various stages of exhaustion,
conversing in gloomy tones over the Town Major’s whisky and Perrier.

The garden was a dirty backyard contrived so as to collect all the
sun’s rays as in a burning-glass. It commanded a view of a flat green
field in which the principal object was an abandoned incinerator.

In due time the Staff Captain appeared and distributed the billeting
lists. He, too, was brutally frank about the accommodation: they had
best expect nothing, he told them. Our Ensign found allocated to his
battalion a short patch of houses in the main street, opposite and
on either side of the Town Major’s office. The list looked promising
enough: several billets were marked down as furnishing accommodation
for as many as a hundred men at a time: one even--as shown on the
list--would take two hundred. But as soon trust a company prospectus as
a billeting list; the element of truth is about the same in both.

It was a quarter to one when our Ensign started his round of the
billets. The billeting parties had come across country on their
bicycles; the Brigade was going to cover part of the journey by rail
and march the rest; they were not expected to arrive before three
o’clock at the earliest, so our Ensign felt that he could take things
fairly easily.

The peasants were not friendly--and why should they be, poor
creatures?--returning, with the French peasant’s fatalistic attachment
to his native soil, to find their houses wrecked, their gardens
ravaged, and their barns and sheds occupied by an ever-changing
succession of foreign soldiers. They came to their house doors and
pointed silently to the barns and outhouses about the yard, then shut
the door in our young man’s face.

Things went all right at first. Everything was filthy and swarming with
flies, everywhere the ground was befouled, and in many of the once trim
gardens, amid the full-blown roses and the straggling and broken lines
of peas and scarlet runners, water-logged and evil-smelling dug-outs
were crumbling into oblivion--mementoes of the days when the German
artillery was close enough up to shell the French troops in their
billets. But our Ensign managed to get billets for three out of the
four companies, though most of the places had holes both in the roof
and in the wattle walls. He intended to put the remaining company in
the billet noted as accommodating 200 men.

This was where the billeting list let him down badly--an act of base
betrayal. For the farmer came out of his house at the officer’s summons
and announced, politely enough but with great firmness, that the
_granges_ were no longer available, for the harvest, which was to be
brought in that afternoon, would fill them to the rafters.

Here was a staggering blow indeed. The whole Battalion was provided for
except the officers; and now, unless the Town Major could allot them
another billet, the whole billeting scheme would have to be rearranged
and a quart crammed into a pint pot--that is to say, a thousand men
packed into billets for 750.

Back to the Town Major’s office our young man went. It was already
half-past two; neither Headquarters nor the messes nor the officers had
yet been provided for. The Town Major was out. He had been carried off
by the Brigade Medical Officer, who was clamouring for a site for the
field ambulance. Sending one of his party to watch the entrance of the
village in case the Brigade should appear before its time, our Ensign
set off feverishly on the track of the Town Major.

It was three o’clock by the time that our young man had found him.
There was no sign of the Brigade as yet. Heedless of the clamouring
throng of petitioners at the Town Major’s heels, our Ensign resolutely
button-holed him and poured his pathetic story into his sympathetic
ear. Our young man’s desperate situation stirred the generous heart of
that Town Major.

“The harvest again!” he groaned, clasping his brow. “I’ll go and see
what I can do with the fellow, but I fear we are undone!” As they
hurried up the street, he explained to our Ensign that, by virtue of
some dark arrangement between the British and French authorities, the
peasants had the right to claim exemption from billeting to make room
for the crops.

The Town Major’s fears were justified: the farmer was in the right; his
position was incontestably sound; they would have to forego the billet.

Together, the Major and our Ensign inspected two other
billets--“emergency billets” the Town Major called them, the last
two in the place. One was occupied by an artillery store, but they
contrived to filch from the gunners accommodation for one platoon; the
other was a gaunt barn, open all along one side, with shell-holes in
the further wall, and the corrugated iron roof abundantly perforated by
shrapnel.

Our Ensign shook his head, thanked the Town Major, and fled. The
whole billeting scheme had to be rearranged. He picked up his
billeting party once more and started the round again, reshuffling the
billets, redistributing the men, cramming in half a platoon here and
tucking little packets of men away in there, deaf to expostulation
and entreaty, coldly ignoring the dismay in the faces of his
quartermaster-sergeants.

Half-past three! No Brigade yet: now for the officers ... two or
three in this empty room, with sacking stretched in front of the
paneless windows, and the mess across the entrance-hall in a dirty
apartment, where fat bluebottles hovered greedily about decaying
fragments of bully beef; this silent and forbidding house, to which
they obtained access through a window, with three filthy little rooms,
would accommodate six or seven officers--say, the members of the
double-company mess: some tents could be put up in the garden at the
back; another mess here, the company commanders there ... but where, oh
where, to put Headquarters?

There was nothing suitable under a roof, but our Ensign remembered
the field with the incinerator behind the Town Major’s garden. Four
o’clock: not a drum to be heard: the Brigade was late: back to the
office to obtain from the ever-patient Major a lien on the field. Done!
and three tents promised into the bargain in case it rained that night
and the billets leaked.

It had already started to rain when our Ensign, his appointed task
over, hastened down the village street to the cross-roads by the river
by which the Brigade would come in.

There he found his fellow-billeters in the Brigade, each with his tale
of dirty billets and leaky roofs and swarming flies, each with his
story of the treachery of billeting lists, for the harvest surprise,
our Ensign found, had been sprung on them all.

They waited patiently in the rain for hours. The traffic never ceased
to pour into the village in a double stream, going in both directions
to and from the battlefield, troops and guns and transport and
ambulances and motor-cars. A red-capped sergeant of military police
stood on point duty at the cross-roads, immutably calm and affable amid
the confusion and the din; eternally side-tracking strings of horses,
which were not allowed through the village, and which persevering
grooms, well knowing the prohibition, hoped yet to be able to get
through, patiently answering inquiries from dust-powdered lorry-drivers
who had lost their way.

The shades of evening deepened gently amid a depressing drizzle, but
still the Brigade did not come, still the traffic flowed past without a
moment’s break.

“It looks as if the Brigade were not going to arrive until after
dark!” said one of the Billeting Officers; “and in this squash there’ll
be the most holy confusion--the Lord help us!”

A Grenadier subaltern, who had discovered a wayside café just past the
cross-roads, led some of them to it. None of them had had anything
more substantial than a sandwich since breakfast, and they demanded
food. All that Madame could produce was a box of wafers, very sweet and
sickly, which they ate with some excellent coffee which Madame prepared
over the stove.

Outside night fell, muggy and wet. Then the Brigade transport, which
had come by road, arrived, a long train of rumbling limbers, with the
Transport Officers on horseback. They had no news of the Brigade, but
a little later a staff car, which the Billeting Officers stopped,
reported that it had passed “some Guards or other” on the road about
two miles back.

And then at last they came ... at eight o’clock. The dark and the
traffic notwithstanding, the Guards made their entry to the tap of
drum, and, despite all forebodings, each battalion got safely tucked
away in its billets. When he reached the mess our Ensign found that his
brother officers had so many remarks to offer on the slowness of the
train that had conveyed them, and the general inefficiency of railway
transport in particular, that they altogether omitted to comment on the
nature of the billets which he offered them.

Though the sleeping quarters were indescribably bad, the actual
mess-room proved to be better than might have been expected. It was a
room in a small farmhouse occupied by a Frenchwoman, whose husband was
in the trenches, and who, after the gifted Apollo had talked to her a
little in his most Parisian French, proffered her services as cook. And
so, while the traffic rumbled, and the rain splashed down outside, they
made a good dinner, and eventually repaired to their squalid lodging
in excellent spirits. There they found their sleeping-valises spread on
the dusty floor, and there they laid them down to sleep, promising to
turn every available servant on to swabbing in the morning.

M---- proved itself to be every bit as bad as it had promised. The
billets were positively filthy, and for days the battalions of the
Brigade swept and garnished and burnt, filling in the rubbish pits
which gaped, stinking, in every garden, and leaving a trail of chloride
of lime behind them wherever they went. Fly-papers and fly-swatters
proved illusive against the indomitable breeding energy of the flies,
and only days of unremitting hard work contrived at length to abate
this very disagreeable and very unhygienic pest.

It rained for days on end. In a few hours the deep dust of the road
turned first to a thick morass of mud, and then into a liquid lake
of slime which flowed across the gutters to the very gateways of
the billets. To avoid wading in mud up to the ankles, the men built
little causeways to bridge the gutters, using the bricks from the more
dilapidated houses, and laying branches on top. Nearly all the billets
leaked, and the yards, filthy as they always are abroad with a vast and
sodden midden-heap in the centre, were ankle-deep in slush. What was
possible to do with tarpaulin to stop the gaps in roofs and walls was
done, but while the rain lasted the men had a very thin time, which
they bore, as all men do in France, without grousing, reserving their
grumbling for superficial and insignificant details, as is the way of
the British soldier.

The billets were so bad and the weather continued to be so wet that a
rum issue was ordered, though the season of the daily rum issues had
not yet arrived. An officer superintended the issue of rum to each
company, for the regulation is that each man must drink his tot on the
spot where it is issued, in the presence of an officer--this to prevent
hoarding and its attendant evils.

Accordingly, our Ensign found himself one wet evening attending the
issue of rum to the company. On the floor of the barn stood a lighted
candle, the centre of a number of mess-tins representing the portions
of the different groups in the company. At our Ensign’s side was the
Company Sergeant-Major with the rum-jars. Silent and expectant, the men
stood all around and in the yard without.

The Company Sergeant-Major poured the rum out into the different tins,
announcing as he did so the name of the recipients--“No. 5 Platoon,”
“The Cooks,” “The Pioneers,” and so on. Then, after much shuffling
about in the outer darkness, the men got formed up, mess-tin in hand;
but before the first received his noggin, the Company Sergeant-Major
put to our Ensign that time-honoured question, “Would he try a little
drop?”

Rum on an empty stomach before dinner is not to be recommended, but our
young man knew what was expected of him, and with suitable gratitude
accepted the offer. About a mugful of raw spirit was thereupon poured
out for him, greatly to his dismay, but he picked it up, and crying
“Here’s luck!” drained it. The rum burnt his throat and brought the
tears to his eyes, but he finished off the portion and held the mug
upside down, as the men do, to show that it was empty--all this amid
profound silence, with every man’s eye upon him. Then, one by one,
the men emerged out of the gloom into the yellow circle of light,
with outstretched tin or mug, received their portion, tossed it off,
inverted their drinking vessel, and moved away, wiping their mouths on
the backs of their hands. When every man had been served, the Company
Sergeant-Major picked up the last tin, and, tipping it down for the
officer to see the contents, said--

“For the sergeants and myself.”

This last portion was divided between them and consumed. Then the
C.S.M., shaking the rum jar, said--

“There’s some left yet, sir.”

“Everybody had his tot?” asked our Ensign.

“Yes, sir,” was the reply.

“Right,” answered the officer; “tip the rest out!”

(For such is the inexorable rule of the Army: what is left over from a
rum issue must be spilled. Rum does not keep.)

“Sir!” replied the C.S.M., and in obedience to the order he emptied a
brown gush of the spirit upon the earthen floor under the sorrowful
gaze of the men. Our Ensign would have gladly given them an extra tot
all round, for the night was raw and chill, but an order is an order....

And now the Guards found themselves within measurable distance of the
ultimate goal of all their wanderings, the Battle of the Somme. Day
and night the little village street resounded to the tramp of marching
columns, to the thunder of the jarring, quivering trains of ammunition
lorries. In that cramped and crowded village the only parade-ground
was the dirty courtyards of the different billets, where the most
stentorian word of command would often be lost in the roar of traffic
from the street.

But while the stream of men and munitions flowed unceasingly eastward
towards the Somme, from the battlefield came daily reports of further
successes. Every sign pointed to the imminent participation of the
Guards in the great offensive. There were frequent conferences, and,
day after day, the Guards marched out by platoons, by companies, by
battalions, past the little military cemetery, past the vast camps
stretching away to the horizon, past the gangs of grubby German
prisoners working on the roads, to the training-ground, where the
coming attack was rehearsed in every detail. There were field-days and
night operations and lectures and several false alarms, ... warnings
to be in readiness for immediate departure, which were afterwards
cancelled.

A few days after the arrival of the Brigade at M----, the Guards’
Divisional Canteen turned up and installed itself in the main street,
and was followed shortly afterwards by the Guards’ Divisional Cinema,
which was set up in that very barn with shrapnel-riddled roof which
our Ensign had rejected as a billet. Tarpaulin supplied the missing
wall, a little gas-engine furnished the power, and on the many wet
evenings that the Clerk of the Weather bestowed on the Guards at
M----, “the pictures” proved a great attraction. There, on one of the
rare fine afternoons, our Ensign and a large party of his friends sat
in a stifling atmosphere and saw the Somme battle film. Save for a
few gunners and sappers, the whole audience consisted of Guardsmen,
and their comments on this celebrated series of pictures were
instructive--for they made none. They only cheered and laughed every
time “Fritz” was seen on the screen.

The Guards’ Divisional Baths--a travelling concern this, that plants
itself in any empty building that seems adapted to the purpose, or, in
default of such a building, erects its own premises--happened along
with its array of tubs and heating apparatus and vast supplies of
towels and clean shirts, socks, and underwear. Every day parties of men
were marched down by an officer under a scheme that ensured to every
man one bath a week.

There was much entertaining between the different Messes. Everybody
was always dining out with one or other of the company Messes in the
different battalions, with the Brigade machine-gunners, or with the
Stokes Mortars, who are charming fellows, but whose propinquity in
the trenches is unpopular owing to the disagreeable tendency of their
murderous weapons to draw fire.

In the double-company Mess all went as merry as a wedding bell. Madame,
in whose house the Mess was lodged, proved herself a jewel and cooked
them wonderful omelettes and ragouts, and a _Potage Bonne Femme_ before
which Escoffier himself would have doffed his hat. The Mess raged and
wrangled and argued, as young men do the world over, but the underlying
good fellowship was never disturbed. The past tense is ever a kindlier
critic than the present, but our Ensign, looking back on those pleasant
summer days, cannot recollect that there was a single discordant
element in that little band of men.

But the sand in the hour-glass had all but run out. At last the word
for their departure came. And Battalion Orders that evening closed
with a significant paragraph. Under the heading Dress, it ran--

“The polishing of buttons and cap-stars is discontinued until further
orders.”

_A bon entendeur, salut!_




CHAPTER IX.


From now on, the shadows of the events that stood before began to be
more sharply defined. As the Brigade marched out of M---- behind the
Drums on a dull grey morning, there were many besides our Ensign there
who felt that the moment was close at hand when they would take their
places in the battle-line of the Somme. Indeed, hardly had the men
got shaken down in their new quarters--a bivouac on a bare and dirty
hillside amidst rolling downs covered, as far as the eye could see,
with camps and horse-lines and abandoned trenches,--than a message
arrived--

“The Battalion is on ten minutes’ notice!”

Now they were on the very fringe of the fight. The bivouac was within
the zone of “the heavies.” All that day, with a blinding flash of green
flame, a sickly burst of yellow smoke, and a ponderous roar, the big
guns gave tongue from their positions among the downs. All that day,
down the white road running through the ruined village on the fringe of
the bivouac, snorted and rattled and tramped the vast outgoing traffic
of the battlefield. Motor ambulances whirred by in a constant stream,
slowing up at the end of the village, where in cavernous dug-outs
white-robed surgeons toiled over the human _débris_ of the fight.
Motor-lorries fetching shells, ammunition limbers and water-carts going
down to be filled, baggage carts--all through the morning and afternoon
our Ensign saw them bumping slowly down the hill in the dust.

Between the gaps in the traffic, marching in a dense white haze, came
the remnants of the battalions which had just written Ginchy in
letters of blood upon their colours. Our Ensign had seen that splendid
Irish Division marching into action less than a week before, with pipes
skirling out the old Irish airs and green flags waving, a jaunty,
defiant, deathless band. Not a whit less jaunty, not a whit less
defiant, though the Reaper had been busy in their ranks, our Ensign saw
them again to-day, slow-footed and mud-stained, dirty and unshaven, yet
marching with the gait of victors.

Somewhere down the road the cry rang out--

“’Tis the Dubs.!”

In an instant the road was overflowing with Irish Guardsmen, swarming
forward in the dust-clouds raised by the Dublin Fusiliers in their
passage.

“Jasus! ’tis the Micks!” rang out a voice in the midst of the column.

Cheery salutations were exchanged. Here and there a brown hand
stretched out from the roadside grasped a muddy one thrust forward
from the ranks of marching men in a warm clasp. Chaff was freely
bandied about as the Irishmen trudged past, “Dubs.” and Munsters and
Connaughts and the rest.

“So they didn’t get yez this time, Micky, me boy!” shouted a droll
Irish voice from the roadside.

“True for you, Patsy, true for you!” flashed back the answer from the
ranks. “I’ll be meetin’ yez in Ould Dublin yet!”

“Begob! ye’ll have to get a move on yez, the Micks,” drawled out a rich
brogue from the road, “if ye want to find anny of the Gerboys left! We
didn’t lave manny of thim for yez! Didn’t we an’ the Dubs. knock hell’s
own blazes out of thim?”

There was a roar of laughter and cheers, then brogue and its owner were
swallowed up in the dust....

At tea that afternoon somebody announced that the Welsh Guards up in
the front line had had a very bad shelling, and were probably coming
out that night. Another battalion was to take their places, and
two companies of our Ensign’s battalion were to go up and replace
this battalion in support. After tea our Ensign was sent for by the
Commanding Officer, and told to go on ahead and reconnoitre the route
for the two companies as far as the Headquarters of another Guards’
Brigade, so that they should not lose their way in the dark. From
Brigade Headquarters guides would take the two companies up to the line.

It was getting dusk, and there was no time to lose. Our Ensign sent his
servant to the Signallers to borrow two bicycles; and after beating the
bivouac for his orderly, and failing to find him, he selected a bright
lad in the company to act as orderly, and a little later the pair might
have been seen pushing their bicycles through the dust up the steep
road leading towards the Front.

The experiences of that night lingered long in our Ensign’s memory.
The road was terribly rough; and though, with the coming of evening,
the traffic was less, there was still enough about to make riding in
the half-light distinctly dangerous. Their way led them past miles of
empty trenches, where weather-beaten wooden crosses, hung with withered
flowers, remained to tell of the time when the French were holding
these positions, then the front line. As they drew nearer to the Front,
they passed imperceptibly from the zone of the biggest guns into the
region of the lighter pieces. The guns were waking up. Now and then, as
they pedalled along, a huge shell travelled over their heads, coming
from their rear, “hooshing” and wailing as it sped through the air. Now
from right and now from left of them ear-splitting reports resounded.

The traffic grew heavier as they approached their destination. At the
entrance to a gloomy and shattered village, so wrecked by shell fire
that every house was razed, the press of vehicles and of troops going
up and coming down was so great that our Ensign and his orderly had to
get off and walk their bicycles. Presently all further progress was
hindered; so, after waiting for a spell, our Ensign shouldered his
heavy machine and struck out among the ruins to try and get round the
block in the road. It was very heavy going; but at last, soaked with
perspiration and breathless, our Ensign and his orderly emerged upon
a fairly clear stretch of road, and pedalled off into the gathering
darkness.

Fortunately the way was not difficult to find. At a cross-roads, where
a mass of blackened poles sticking up against the evening sky denoted
the former location of a wood, our travellers branched off to the left
into a small country road.

Guns were firing everywhere now. The stench of their fumes lay heavy on
the air. It was almost dark, and the green glare of their discharges
lit up fitfully the struggling masses that thronged the little road.
Long lines of men in single file, stooping beneath the weight of two
petrol tins filled with water, slung across their shoulders; similar
lines laden with coils of wire, stakes, pickets and shovels; long
columns of troops going to relieve battalions in the line; trains of
mules, with tossing tails, plodding forward amid a hail of curses;
ammunition carts, water-carts, ... all were jumbled up together in
that narrow way. From time to time came the low cry: “Make way!
Stretcher-bearers!” and a stretcher would appear carried shoulder-high
by four sweating bearers. Now and again, by the flash of the guns
of a neighbouring battery, our Ensign caught a glimpse of a form,
motionless, under blood-stained bandages....

A few sand-bagged steps led into a narrow clearing made in the wood
that ran along one side of the road. Over the steps hung the Brigade
flag. The steps led up to a little kind of entrance way, where a number
of officers were standing. Behind them was a heavily sand-bagged
shelter, where by the guttering light of a couple of candles, the
signallers stooped over their telephones.

“Toot-toot! Toot-toot! Toot-toot!”

The telephones shrilled their note clearly above the deafening crash
of the guns all round. The 18-pounders were firing in salvoes now. The
very sandbags shook with the noise. The signallers were shouting down
their telephones. Oblivious of everything, an officer sat at the bench
beside them and wrote.

They were all Guards’ officers in that little place. Our Ensign knew
some of them. He spoke to a Coldstreamer whom he had met up in the
salient, and asked him what the news was. The Coldstreamer said the
Welsh Guards had had a baddish time; the Prince of Wales’ Company, in
particular, had suffered. He mentioned the names of several men who had
been killed. They were all waiting for news of the Grenadiers: they,
too, had been having a roughish handling.

An officer with red tabs turned away from a very weary-looking Scots
Guards captain, and came towards our Ensign. The young man reported
himself, and was told that the guides were ready to take the two
companies up to the line.

Then an orderly, covered with mud, emerged from nowhere, as orderlies
do, with a message.

“Ah! from the Grenadiers!” said the officer in red tabs, and bolted off
towards a deep dug-out in the corner.

Our Ensign bade good-night to the Coldstreamer, and went out again into
the road. A regular whirlwind bombardment was in progress. The din was
ear-splitting. Every gun for miles around seemed to be firing as fast
as it could be loaded.

Our Ensign found his orderly staring open-mouthed at the distant
horizon, where a never-ceasing spout of white lights marked the
winding line of the front trenches. The lad was very young, and he had
not been long in France. As they surveyed the black horizon together
and noted the orange spurts of flame where the shells were bursting
among the Verey lights, a deep auburn glare suddenly lit up the whole
devastation of the landscape, and spread, upwards and outwards, in slow
majesty across the night sky.

“Glory be to God, sir!” exclaimed the orderly, “what’s that?”

Our Ensign shook his head wisely.

“Looks like an ammunition dump going up!” he said, but he didn’t in
the least know. It was an extraordinary spectacle, lasting a full
minute, during which every single projection on the horizon stood out
hard and black against the flaming sky. It reminded our Ensign of the
backgrounds of battle scenes in the portraits of the Generals at the
“Senior.”

Then they started off back to the bivouac in the darkness. When they
reached the main road they halted and waited for the two companies of
the battalion which were marching up. Presently dark shapes loomed up
in the gloom ... the traffic was much lighter on the road now ... and
the second in command of our Ensign’s battalion emerged into the bright
glare of the young man’s electric torch. Our Ensign indicated to the
party the turning off the main road which would bring them to Brigade
Headquarters, where the guides awaited them, imparted to his senior
officer the news of the casualties in the Welsh Guards, and then set
off along that broken road again on his perilous homeward journey.

He crawled into his sleeping-bag at half-past one in the morning,
feeling that he had earned a good night’s rest.




CHAPTER X.


“The Battalion is moving off in an hour’s time, sir!”

Johnson stood over our Ensign, as he lay curled up in his Wolseley
valise on the floor of his tent. A canvas bucket of hot water steamed
in the servant’s hand. Our young man felt as though he had slept but an
hour. Still, there was nothing for it, so he staggered in his pyjamas
out into the sunshine, where The Beak, in similarly airy costume, was
shaving himself at a little mirror propped up against the flap of his
tent.

“Is it over the top for us, Beak?” queried our Ensign of his company
commander.

“Don’t think so yet,” mumbled The Beak under the lather; “it’s fatigues
for to-day, anyhow, ... carrying up stuff for the fellows in the front
line. Have a good time last night?”

“Ensanguined!” retorted our young man with feeling, as he soaped his
face.

Once again he was doomed to travel that dusty road towards the Front,
only this time he footed it at the head of his platoon, and he found
walking to be a good deal easier than cycling. About the hour of 9 A.M.
he led his platoon into the wood, which had been indicated to him as
their destination.

Ravaged by shell fire, seamed by trenches, gashed and blood-drenched
and blackened, that wood had seen some of the fiercest fighting of the
War. Not a tree lived; there was not so much as a green leaf to gladden
the eye; not a bird twittered in the branches. The wood and all in it
were dead, as dead as the mouldering relics of the fight that were
scattered plentifully about in the yawning shell-holes, coffined by
the criss-cross of fallen trunks and torn branches.

The trenches in which the two companies were to live were in places
foot-deep in water, so our Ensign and Bryan, by The Beak’s directions,
got the men to bale them out. By the time they had got the men
comfortably settled it was luncheon time. Apollo invited our Ensign to
accompany him on a tour of discovery round the wood. Our Ensign shook
his head decisively. He thought not, thank you! He had some idea as
to what an examination of that wood might reveal. He wouldn’t mind
going, but he’d have his lunch first. So they agreed to go afterwards,
Roderick accompanying them.

Our Ensign felt glad that he had had his lunch when he looked upon the
horrors which the deeper recesses of the wood contained. Those who
have never seen a modern battlefield can have no idea of its utter and
wanton _untidiness_ ... the extraordinary jumble of arms and equipment
and clothing, and papers and letters and playing-cards and empty
bottles and crumbling remnants of food. The trenches were literally
foot-deep in equipment in some places, with here and there a shapeless,
inert mass of khaki or field-grey, as lax and limp as a sack of straw,
which once had been a man.

One such scene of silent tragedy gave the three an unpleasant shock.
It was in a remoter corner of the wood, where the bare and blackened
tree-trunks stood closer together, where a line of wrecked dug-outs and
a profusion of German equipment lying about showed that the enemy had
made a stand. As our Ensign and his companions plunged in and out of
the fallen tree-trunks and the splintered branches lying athwart the
shell-craters, Apollo, who was leading, came to a sudden halt. He stood
silent with pointing finger.

At his feet, pinned securely to the ground under a massive elm which
had been torn bodily from its roots by a shell, was a skeleton yet
clothed in its mud-stained and mouldy field-grey. It lay on its face,
prone beneath the weight of the tree, its arms outstretched in the form
of a cross.

“Poor devil!” said Roderick.

“I expect it broke his back!” observed Apollo, stooping down to get
a closer view of the grim figure. But our Ensign, who was fresher
than they to these sights of war, said nothing. He was thinking of
the shells screaming about those wrecked dug-outs, the crash of the
falling trees, the reverberating explosions, the reek of sulphur, and
that solitary German felled to the earth as he bolted for shelter, and
pinned down among the chaos....

       *       *       *       *       *

The Beak met them as they sauntered back to tea.

“Sorry, old boy,” he said to our Ensign; “there’s a fatigue to-night.
It’ll be you, as Bryan did the last one!”

“Sir!” quoth the Ensign in his best manner, and proceeded to note
his instructions. He was to take a party of seventy men and proceed
to a certain R.E. Dump, the map reference of which was given to him,
there collect various material, and thence go to a certain Brigade
Headquarters, where he would receive further orders.

It was dark by the time the party started off. It was a black night,
without moon or stars, and, as on the previous evening, the air
trembled to the ear-splitting crash of the guns. The first thing our
Ensign did was to lose his way. There was plenty of traffic on the
roads, but everybody was either going up or coming down, and no one
seemed to have ever heard of an R.E. Dump in those parts. At last the
party met a Sapper officer.

“A Dump?” he said, in reply to a question. “I believe they are forming
one down there ... about a mile along this road.” And he pointed in
the direction from which the party had come.

Our Ensign groaned, then faced about and led his men in the opposite
direction. After marching for about a quarter of an hour, they came to
a place by the roadside where some dark figures were moving about among
large indistinguishable heaps.

“Is that the R.E. Dump?” sung out our Ensign.

“Yes! Is that the Guards’ fatigue party?” came back from the darkness.

“Yes!” shouted our Ensign in return, switching on the lamp fastened to
his belt.

A Staff Officer stepped out of the roadside blackness into the circle
of light.

“Good evening!” he said genially. “They want you to take some of this
stuff up to the Welsh Guards. If you report to them, they’ll tell you
what to do with it. I’ve got a guide here. This Dump was only formed
this morning, so I don’t quite know what there is here; but you just
go ahead, and load up the men with anything you think useful. It’s all
for you fellows when you go over the top ... you will want plenty of
stuff to consolidate with! You’ll be all right then, will you? They
shell a bit as a rule going up, but the guide will lead you off the
road into the open if it gets really dangerous. Good-night!”

He vanished into the night. A Grenadier private loomed up large in the
patch of light.

“Guide, sir!” he said, saluting.

Our Ensign called his senior sergeant, and with him inspected the Dump.
He then divided his men into as many groups as there were heaps of
different material, and got them loaded up with rolls of barbed wire,
pickets, stakes, giant coils of French wire, and so forth. When they
were ready the men fell in in single file, and with the guide and our
Ensign at the head, the party moved off into the darkness.

It was a good two-hours’ march up to the Battalion Headquarters of
the Welsh Guards. The guide led them out on to a narrow track which
wound its solitary way across a bare immensity of plain, in and out of
shell-holes lying so thick that the lip of one crater touched the lip
of the other. It was a dank, raw night, with occasional gusts of rain.
The cold wind blowing down the gentle slope of the plain brought the
evil odour of death from the spouting lights on the horizon where the
trenches lay.

The plain was a place of death. By the roadside, in every shell-hole,
the dead lay thick, British and German--now a solitary corpse, its face
a white patch in the gloom, now a little knoll of men stricken down by
the one shell.

The going was terrible. Under the effect of the thousands of pounds
of high explosive that had worked devastation over the slope the very
earth had lost its binding power and crumbled like sand beneath the
feet. The darkness was intense. The men kept stumbling under their
burdens, and more than one toppled headlong into a shell-hole, often on
to the silent form of its uncoffined occupant. Our Ensign had learned
already that in night marching the tendency of the head of a column is
always to go too fast, yet though he steadied the pace down to a bare
two miles an hour, the tail of the party kept on straggling behind.
With the sweat running down his face, the officer spent the greater
part of the march in stumbling hastily from one end of the long train
to the other.

There was a good deal of sporadic shelling ... principally
“whizz-bangs,” that stank most vilely in the nostrils. Most of the
shells seemed to be falling about the road ahead of them, and presently
the guide led the party off the track into the open, where everybody
had to make the best of his way in and out of the shell-holes. At last
the guide pointed to a dim tangle of bare trees on the skyline to the
right.

“That’s where we shall find the Welsh, sir!” he said.

He brought the party finally up to a white chalky trench, where, in the
yellow light of a lantern, a group of officers were standing about the
entrance to a deep and cavernous dug-out. A regimental aid-post was
somewhere in the vicinity, for the sides of the trench were lined with
stretchers, and the cry of “Make way for the stretcher-bearers!” kept
resounding as fresh cases were brought in. Many of the forms lying on
the stretchers on parapet and parados were field-grey. One of these
figures, with a livid face, opened his eyes, as our Ensign stepped over
him to reach the entrance of the dug-out, and murmured: “Ach! Mutter!”

Our Ensign reported himself to the Adjutant of the Welsh Guards, who
was just emerging from the dug-out while the men of his fatigue party,
their forms looming large against the skyline, sat about and chatted
with the orderlies and stretcher-bearers.

“We’re just going out of this,” said the Welsh Guardsman; “you’d better
report to the Scots Guards. The Adjutant is about somewhere.”

Our young man found the Adjutant, and reported himself again.

“R.E. material, eh?” said the latter. “Good. We shall want you to take
it up to the left company in the front line. I’ve got a good guide
here. He’ll take you along.”

Our Ensign felt a trifle dismayed, for he had imagined his night’s
labours to be over. He glanced at his wrist. It was 11 P.M.

They started off again, past the regimental aid-post, and out on to
a sunken road, where the corpses lay thick. As they plodded on, they
seemed to come to a village, for crumbling bricks lay about the road.
But of houses there was not a sign. Where the tide of battle has passed
on the Somme you will not find stone left upon stone.

The guide, who had been leading them very confidently so far, now began
to flag. He started to look about him. An awful suspicion seized upon
the officer. He knew the symptoms well enough. He guessed what the
guide’s hesitation portended. There are very few officers who have
served in the trenches in this war who have not been led astray by a
guide some time or other.

A shell whizzed noisily overhead, and exploded close by with an
appalling crash. Its orange burst revealed for a brief instant the
devastation in that village of the dead.

“Mind yourself, sir!” called out the guide suddenly. Two figures came
dashing out of the darkness with levelled rifles.

“Hands up!” they yelled.

Our Ensign had pulled out his revolver.

“Stop that infernal noise!” he shouted, and then, heedless of
consequences, he switched on his lamp.

Two figures in khaki were facing him.

“Are you British?” cried one, while the other gasped, panting--

“Oh dear! we’ve just walked into the German lines. Have you seen our
officer, sir?” And they mentioned the name of their regiment.

Our Ensign could not help them, and presently they disappeared into the
darkness. Then the party went plodding on until, once more, dark shapes
loomed out of the night.

A Guards’ officer came towards our Ensign. He took off his cap and
wiped his damp forehead.

“What a night!” he lamented. “My infernal guide walked us plumb into
the Hun lines. All the Huns were yelling, ‘Come on! We’re waiting for
you!’ We made a bolt for it. I can’t make out why they didn’t shoot. I
suppose they weren’t sure that some of their own fellows weren’t out as
well!”

_Woo-oof!_

A shell burst violently behind the group.

“Bad place to gossip in,” said our Ensign. “I suppose you don’t know
where we are, do you?”

“Devil a bit!” was the reply.

“You’ll find two of your men down the path a little way,” said our
Ensign; “they nearly shot us!”

“Right!” answered the other unconcernedly. “Well, cheery-oh! Where the
hell’s that guide?”...

He and his train padded past in the darkness.

Suddenly our Ensign’s guide recognised a landmark.

“I know that dead horse, sir,” he exclaimed; “it’s a little piece along
here! I know the way now!”

Indeed, in a little, he brought the party to the mouth of a trench.
There our Ensign found a Scots Guards subaltern.

“Here we are again!” observed the latter serenely. “Cheerful spot.”

“!!!!!!!!” replied our Ensign. “Where do you want the stuff dumped?”

“What stuff?” returned the other, straining his eyes to peer into the
outer blackness.

“R.E. material for the left company,” said our Ensign.

“Right company here,” answered the officer.

Our Ensign leant back against the parapet and, baring his head to the
night, invoked the vengeance of the powers of darkness on the guide.
Apparently the guide had likewise discovered his mistake, for from the
mirky blackness outside the trench our Ensign heard a voice--the voice
of one in authority--saying sternly--

“What dead horse?”

“The dead horse wot’s lying alongside of two dead Huns!” came the
pathetic voice of the guide.

“The dead horse you wanted, me lad,” answered back the stern voice,
“isn’t alongside of any Huns! It’s at the dead horse by the pond that
you wanted to turn off!”

Our Ensign turned desperately to the officer.

“Look here!” he said firmly, “I’ve had enough of this nonsense. My men
are dead-beat, and we are fed up with being led by a lot of fool guides
into every barrage on this front. I’m going to dump the goods here, and
you can send word along to the other company to come and fetch ’em!”

“My dear fellow,” replied the other, “you can’t do that. The other
company probably wants your stuff urgently.”

“If they want it so badly, they can dam well come and fetch it. I’m
going home. It’s half-past twelve and we’ve been footing it since
seven!”

“Look here,” said the other soothingly, “I’ve got a sergeant of the
left company here with me; he’s just brought a message across. You can
go back with him!”

Our Ensign wavered.

“How far is it?” he asked sullenly.

“Sixteen hundred yards,” replied the other promptly.

Our Ensign reflected that, if this were a prevarication, the other
would have said, “Just over there!” or, “A stone’s-throw!” So he
decided he would have to get those additional 1600 yards out of his
weary men.

The sergeant appeared--a resolute person; the two officers parted,
and once more the fatigue party strung out on its way along the
corpse-strewn path. The men were very tired, so our Ensign marched in
the rear and kept the stragglers together.

A lot of shells were coming over now, exploding noisily in the ruins
of the village. But our Ensign hardly noticed them. He was desperately
concerned lest, while he prevented the tail of his party from being
left behind and lost, the head might be walking straight into the
German lines.

The long train sagged, and finally halted. Our Ensign scrambled,
fuming, to the head.

“Where’s that guide?” he demanded.

“He’s just after going to look for the way, sir!” said a soft Irish
voice, which added: “Wirra, that’s near!” as a shell crashed into the
ground close by.

Our Ensign got all the men into shell craters. The sights in those deep
holes were enough to make a man sick. Then he told his sergeant he
would give the guide five minutes by the watch. If he had not turned up
at the end of that period of grace, they would dump their stuff where
they were and steer for home by the compass.

Those were the longest five minutes our Ensign had ever spent. He was
tormented by the fear lest a shell might fall in the midst of his
party, and he should have twenty or thirty casualties to report on
returning to the Wood. The shells came over fairly thick--about two a
minute,--but they all burst beyond the men in their shell-holes. The
men were magnificently cool. It struck our Ensign that they were more
concerned at not having reached their journey’s end, tired out as they
were, than at the dangers surrounding them.

Then a voice shouted from the darkness--

“Here you are! This way!”

Ten minutes later our Ensign led his party back along the sunken road
and across the brown, shell-scarred slope. Weary though the men were,
they were only too glad to force the pace and leave behind them the
sights and sounds of the night.

“They’re saying behind, sir,” said the senior sergeant to our Ensign,
as the party trudged along, “couldn’t we go a bit faster?”

“Oh! all right!” replied our Ensign carelessly, and quickened his pace.
But he did not tell the sergeant that the same idea had long since
occurred to him.




CHAPTER XI.

  “The present day has no value for me except as the eve of to-morrow:
  it is with to-morrow that my spirit wrestles.”--METTERNICH.


The day was already three hours old by the time that our Ensign reached
the Wood with his weary fatigue party. The trenches were wrapped in
slumber, and from Bryan, upon whose recumbent form our Ensign trampled
as he groped his way into the company dug-out, he learnt that the two
companies which had been in the line had already gone back to the
bivouac on the downs, and that the two companies in the Wood were
expecting momentarily to be relieved. There was no news of future
movements: none of the officers, Bryan said, knew when the Guards were
going to “pop the parapet.”

Two hours later, effectively, the relief turned up, and the two
companies plodded out into the chilly morning back to their bivouac. It
was not until 8 A.M. that the officers got into their sleeping-bags in
the tents.

At noon the faithful Johnson aroused our Ensign with the news that a
conference of officers had been called by the Commanding Officer, and
that they were waiting for him. He splashed some water over himself,
tore into his clothes, crammed his cap on over his tousled hair, and
dashed off with a silent prayer that his unshaven chin might escape
observation. But everybody was too deep in maps and plans to notice
him. He and his brother officers left the conference knowing all there
was for them to know about the impending attack, save only the detail
that interested them all most keenly--the date!

The Battalion was to strike bivouac that evening, and march to a wood
on the fringe of that corpse-strewn plain across which our Ensign
had led his fatigue party the night before. Two companies were to
be quartered in one corner of the wood, the remainder--Nos. 1 and 2
Companies--in a little copse on the eastward edge,--nearest the enemy,
as our Ensign, with the shells of the previous evening in his mind,
reflected sombrely. It was generally expected that the four companies
would not meet again until they assembled for the attack.

There was a little pang of parting in that dirty bivouac among the
rolling downs. As a measure of precaution, such experienced officers
and non-commissioned officers as could be spared were not to accompany
the Battalion into action, so as to leave an executive nucleus to carry
on with, in the event of heavy casualties. Of our Ensign’s mess, Peter
and The Don were of this number. Sadder and more dismal faces never
were seen than the countenances of these two (and of their comrades in
exile also, be it said) as they bade the departing companies God-speed
and prepared to join the Transport.

At dusk that evening, in a drenching downpour of cold rain, the
Battalion moved off into the unknown, our Ensign’s company bringing
up the rear. Truly it is a dismal thing, this marching into action!
One hears an iron curtain clang down behind one, shutting off the
past--and there were fragrant memories in our Ensign’s mind of the
pleasant _cameraderie_ of the vanished summer--while the present glides
imperceptibly away before the doubts and uncertainties of the future.

The rain splashed dismally down, the road was heavy and slippery with
glutinous mud, and all around them the guns crashed out into the
night with a roar that seemed to crack the very tympanum. The men
hunched their waterproof sheets over their packs, and trudged along
in mournful silence; and our Ensign let his mind toy despondently with
the difference between his situation and that of men he knew, spick and
span and spurred and polished these last, holding decorative positions
on the Staff at home.

They plodded along the same old highway of the battlefield, as crowded
as ever, thronged with the same old mass of tired men, and straining,
plunging horses and mules. Plenty of bad language, especially in the
blocks of traffic, which were frequent, came back at them from the
night, while the rain plopped sadly into the puddles of the roadside;
and, with green flash and reek and roar, the shells screamed their way
through the night towards the soaring horizon lights. As they drew
nearer to the front they heard the whistle and crash of German shells
ahead of them in the darkness.

At last they left the road and followed a guide in single file along a
muddy footpath, which brought them into the wet tangle of a devastated
wood. As the men filed off into some crumbling trenches, our Ensign
noticed three forms on the ground covered by waterproof sheets beside
the wreck of a Lewis gun hand-cart.

“It was hard luck,” somebody was saying; “they caught us coming in ...
shrapnel, it was ... got these three at the very end of the line.”

Then there was much groping and slipping about in the dark, as the
officers got the two companies into such accommodation as the broken
trenches and gaping shell-holes afforded--a rum issue, at which our
Ensign found himself compelled to swallow, according to immemorial
usage, nearly a mugful of the spirit, poured out of the stone jars by
the dim light of a carefully-shaded candle; and then the men began
to contrive for themselves all sorts of wonderful shelters for the
night with riddled fragments of corrugated iron sheeting, beams of
wood, splintered branches and withered leaves. The officers left them
to their task, and made their way to the dug-out which the Billeting
Officer had designated to them as their quarters.

It was a great big shelter, as large as a small shed--and a shell-hole
in the roof, which was the only damage, had been stuffed up with those
wicker cases which the German gunners used to carry their live shells
in. The place was constructed rather like a log-cabin, dug half a
dozen feet deep in the ground, with solid timber sides and a roof of
iron girders wattled over. The floor was covered with those wood or
paper shavings which, under the influence of the British blockade, the
Germans use in preference to straw. These shavings furnish bedding that
is fully as clean and comfortable as straw, and certainly far more
economical.

There was a very simple military funeral that night under the drenching
rain, in the shell-ravaged copse. In a shell-hole the three victims
of the night were laid to rest, and covered in. Two of the men were
Catholics, the third Protestant, and both the R.C. and the C. of E.
padres came up through the rain and mud that night to conduct the
obsequies. And the next evening a plain wooden cross, well carpentered
and neat, inscribed in black paint with the names and numbers of the
fallen Guardsmen, arrived with the rations, and was set up over the
little grave, a landmark in that devastated countryside, the place of
the unburied dead.

Like the wood which our Ensign had already explored on a former
occasion, the copse and the wood beyond had been the scene of one of
the Homeric fights of the battle of the Somme. This wood, too, was full
of corpses, both British and German, and strewn with rain-soaked and
rusting relics of the fray, lying amid battered trenches and wrecked
dug-outs. During the days they spent in the copse, the men of the two
companies spent their whole time in clearing the wood, stacking up the
rifles, the bayonets, the equipment, collecting such identity discs as
still remained on the dead before burying them, and bringing in to the
officers’ dug-out German shoulder-straps and letters and papers of all
kinds. These were in due course sent down to the Brigade to be handed
over to the Army Intelligence.

In the copse itself a German battery had been posted. There were
indications that it had had its home there for many months. The
dug-outs had been very well made, deep and comfortable, though the
British heavy shells had played havoc with them now. In one a provision
store was found, with tier upon tier of very mouldy black bread
stacked up to the roof, many tins of canned meat (one ingenious Ensign
introduced a tin of German brawn into the mess and opened it for lunch,
professing to find it delicious), and some tins of sardines. Another
was stored with cordite charges. It was beneath the covered entrance
leading down to this particular dug-out that our Ensign found the mess
cook installed over a large fire, with burst bags of cordite lying all
around. He was sternly bidden to shift his quarters elsewhere--which he
did with an injured air.

Rooting about in the wood with MacFinnigan, our Ensign came upon a
dug-out which had all but collapsed, a dead German, buried, save for
his boots, at the entrance. MacFinnigan, who had no squeamishness about
such matters, wormed his way into the dug-out, and presently began
to hand up newspapers and letters and labels off parcels, brought by
the _Feldpost_ for the two bombardiers who, as the addresses on the
various articles showed, must have lodged there. One was a Jew from
Frankfurt-on-Main, who had a large correspondence with innumerable
Cohns and Abrahams and Levys, mostly of the feminine persuasion; the
other appeared to have been a Bavarian. Among the latter’s letters
was one from his wife, which gave a brief but tragic glimpse of the
misery of everyday life in Germany in war-time--a side of the question
which is rarely illumined in the newspapers. The letter was angry and
bitter. After a long complaint about the growing food difficulties and
appalling price of everything, the woman, who wrote from a Bavarian
village, told of some hitch in the payment of her separation allowance,
and narrated how she had been to the Mayor to get redress, and had
been “flung out” (_hinausgeschmissen_). In a torrent of unpunctuated,
ungrammatical German, with many appeals to the “dear husband,” she
asked if that was the way the wives of brave German “warriors” should
be treated, if “they” expected the people to make the enormous
sacrifices demanded of them, when “they” unjustly deprived the women of
their due.

The husband’s answer was there too ... begun on a field post-card (in
the German army these are issued blank to the men) from the dug-out
in the wood and never finished ... interrupted, maybe, by the shell
that smashed the dug-out and killed the man lying outside--who perhaps
was the writer himself. It began in a torrent of abuse--the language
of a man of the people defending his woman, setting forth the wife’s
complaint, asking how men who skulked at home dared so to treat the
wife of a German “warrior.”... And there the scrawling writing broke
off short. The guns of the Somme had prevented a Bavarian Mayor from
getting a post-card which would probably have momentarily soured the
taste of his dinner beer.

Our Ensign had been given a definite job in the impending attack.
He was told he was not to “go over” with his company, but would
act as Intelligence Officer, and in this capacity accompany the
Second-in-command with a select party. The duties entrusted to him
necessitated a good knowledge of the ground over which the attack was
to be made; so one afternoon, whilst they were waiting in the copse,
our Ensign got leave from The Beak, and, taking MacFinnigan, carrying
a telescope, along with him, he set out to find out some eminence from
which he might survey the scene.

Side by side, officer and orderly traversed the long brown slope which
our Ensign had hitherto only crossed on a famous occasion at night.
Then the darkness had mercifully hidden from their eyes the full horror
of the battlefield which now lay in all its ghastliness before them,
bare and brutal, in the soft light of a mild autumn day. Our Ensign
blessed the name of John Cotton of Edinburgh as he marched along
puffing at his briar. Truly tobacco is the sovereign herb in war: not
only does it calm the nerves--it also dulls the sense of smell.

As they went up the ridge, our Ensign chatted with his orderly.
MacFinnigan had a great thirst for knowledge: a secret was in the air
which he would fain penetrate....

“Is it a fact, sir?... Some of the men in the company were saying,
sir.... They do tell me, sir....”

What was the secret?

Hush, hush!

Wait and see! Whatever it was, it so engrossed our Ensign that it
carried him right over the ridge and to the banks of a sunken road that
ran transversely to his line of advance, where he was brought up short
in his tracks.

Our Ensign had heard of the Germans being mowed down in swathes as
they rushed hurrahing in dense formation to the attack of the forts of
Liège; he had been told of the bridge at Landrecies piled high with
German corpses after the Coldstream had given the Hun a taste of the
Guards’ rapid fire; he had had described to him how the British naval
guns cleaved great furrows in the ranks of Germany’s youthful legions
on the Yser as they went forward hand in hand, singing their soldier
songs, to break through to Calais. He had heard of these things, I say,
and had read of them in the papers like everybody else, but he had yet
to realise what a shock one can get when the mental picture evoked by a
newspaper paragraph comes in contact with the reality.

For he found himself on the high banks of that sunken road looking
down upon piles of German dead, two, three, four, and even five layers
deep. The road had been put into a rough state of defence, and every
embrasure cut out of the bank nearest the British had its ghastly mound
of corpses. Their numbers he could not estimate, what their regiment he
would not venture close enough to determine; he only knew that these
men had died obeying their army order that Ginchy must be held to the
last man ... and the road was full of these gallant dead. By every
embrasure one or two dead British soldiers were lying--probably, our
Ensign thought, the first men to adventure into the trench of that
forlorn German hope: one such khaki-clad figure still had his hands at
the throat of the German across whose body he was lying with another
German on top of him.

Even the unsqueamish MacFinnigan was overcome at the sight.

“How horrible, sir,” he said; and then added, as an afterthought, “but
they were brave men!”

Our Ensign lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. Then he gave one to the
orderly, and they passed on up the slope.




CHAPTER XII.

  “’Twas brillig and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble....”

                                      --_The Slaying of the Jabberwock._


“Did ye hear what that man O’Flanagan was sayin’, him I mane as come up
with the wather party las’ night?”

The speaker was a red-haired Irish Guardsman--what they would call
in Ireland a “foxy man”--who was cleaning his rifle and chatting the
while with a grizzled comrade, who was composedly scraping the mud off
his puttees with a piece of stick preparatory to going on parade for
rifle inspection. Our Ensign, standing in the open watching a British
aeroplane having a thrilling time in and out of Hun shrapnel puffs,
overheard the men talking in the trench behind him.

The elder man, busy with his scraping, only grunted contemptuously.

“Didn’t he see them with his own eyes,” the foxy man continued, tugging
at his pull-through, “leppin’ the ditch and off across the open the
same as they might be a lot of young horses? ‘The Lord save us!’ sez
th’ officer, him as was with the wather party, ‘’tis the cateypillars!’
‘Cateypillars?’ sez O’Flanagan, the chap as was tellin’ us about
it--‘cateypillars is ut?’ sez he. ‘Begob,’ sez he, ‘’tis the first time
ever I see cateypillars lep a ditch!’”

The other flung away his piece of stick, rubbed his hands together to
get rid of the mud, and cast a leisurely glance over his person.

“Some of you young lads,” he said, “do be believin’ all you hears!”

“Amn’t I after tellin’ yez that O’Flanagan see thim himself?” answered
the foxy man heatedly, applying his eye to the barrel of his rifle.
“Like great crockeydiles they are, sez he, with a crew of thirty men in
their inside and machine-guns and bombs and God knows what else, sez
he, and little windies to give the lads inside a blasht of fresh air.
Is ut tellin’ us lies the man was?”

“I wouldn’t be sayin’ that,” the old soldier replied cautiously; “but
some of you young lads has no sinse.”

And with that he stumped off to rifle inspection.

Now you know what our Ensign and his orderly were talking about so
earnestly as they trudged up the ridge in the last chapter. They spoke
of the Tanks, or, as they were then called, the Hush-hushes, which
everybody had heard about and nobody had seen--the mysterious engines
which were to lead the Guards into battle on a date not appointed.

Naturally it was Apollo who saw them first in the flesh, or should one
say more correctly, in the steel plating? He blew into the officers’
dug-out after rifle inspection that morning and said in a tone of
decision--

“I’ve seen ’em!”

“Who?” said our Ensign.

“What?” said Roderick more grammatically.

“Where?” said The Beak, whose forensic mind had already divined to what
Apollo referred.

“Just off the road, about 300 yards from here, ... the Tanks ... a
squadron of them ... charming fellow in charge ... showed me all round
... amazing, wonderful ... come along and I’ll take you down there!”

So they all trooped off behind him down the road, and presently in
a wayside field came upon those monstrously grotesque and ungainly
“ingins,” which everybody has seen in the photographs in the papers,
and which nobody is allowed to describe. A small and rotund Commodore
... or whatever a Tank squadron commander is called, ... who confessed
to having been out of bed for two nights, did the honours very
charmingly, ... but let us tread softly, for we are on censored ground.
Let it suffice to say that a captain, a subaltern, and three ensigns
returned to the officers’ dug-out, and swanked insufferably to their
less fortunate comrades-in-arms who had not been among the first to
see the Tanks, and that MacFinnigan and another orderly, who had been
taken with the party, had the morning of their lives, the centre of an
enthralled group of Guardsmen, all panting for information about “the
crocodiles.”

And for the moment everybody’s mind was taken off the future.

But that afternoon--it was September 14th--the Commanding Officer
came up, and the officers were bidden into the dug-out for a final
conference, at which, among many other equally, but to at least one of
them, less important details, they were informed that they would attack
at 6.20 A.M. in the morning, and that they would move up into position
at 9 o’clock that night.

That afternoon the men sat about in the trenches ... those of them
that were not otherwise employed ... and talked and smoked and read
the curious provincial papers sent out to them from home. Only a
bare handful of letters came in to the dug-out to be censored that
afternoon. The British soldier prefers to do his work first and
write about it afterwards. The men seemed bored by the waiting
about. They yawned, and cocked an eye at the sky, and discussed the
weather prospects for the next day, and argued unendingly about “the
crocodiles,” and the surprise they would be to “Fritz.”

In the course of the afternoon The Don turned up, in full battle array,
beaming with delight. After all, he was to “go over” with the company.
It had been decided that another officer should remain behind in his
place. That officer was one of the party in the dug-out in the copse
... a spirit more ardent for battle never breathed in mortal man ...
and he was stricken dumb, beaten to the ground, with the force of his
disappointment. Our Ensign, seeing the utter abasement of his grief,
reflected on the strange ways that Providence adopts to reveal the pure
metal that gleams in men of the British Army.

While it was still light, some of them went out to have a look at the
positions which they were to take up that evening, and from which they
were to attack in the morning. Night marching across the open, even
when you know the ground, is no joke; but when your direction leads
you across wide trenches running at every imaginable angle, through
tangles of barbed wire and over country that is nothing more or less
than an infinite number of holes connected together by a little loose
earth, why then, much forethought and preparation are required if you
wish to avoid disaster. So the officers who went out reconnoitring took
with them one man per platoon to mark the way and act as guides when
they should go up that evening. To mark the route the guides stuck a
few landmarks about in the shape of rusty rifles, picked up off the
battlefield, inserted in the earth by the bayonet and decorated with a
German helmet or a haversack--anything to catch the eye at night when
seen against the skyline.

The officers dined together in the dug-out at 7.30 that evening, a
very friendly and very business-like party of men. The table-talk was
pure unadulterated shop, the discussion of small details of company
organisation with occasional desultory snatches of debate upon that
fertile theme--the Tanks. But the greater issues of the morrow were
avoided by tacit consent, and a stranger suddenly bidden to that
dinner-table could hardly have supposed (our Ensign says) that his
hosts were preparing for anything more serious than a field-day on a
large scale.

Our Ensign has often since looked back upon that last dinner of Nos. 1
and 2 Company Mess--the last supper of the Girondins somebody called
it,--the long table (cunningly contrived out of trench-boards) covered
with the famous white American cloth cover, the candles stuck in
bottles, the white enamel mess crockery, the familiar faces all round
the board, the background of raincoats and glasses and revolvers and
belts hung on nails hammered into the tree-trunks forming the walls of
the dug-out; and in the chiaroscuro of the upper part of the room the
dimly-seen features of the Mess servants as they passed to and fro.

Some one had stored up a bottle of champagne for this special occasion;
needless to say it had been forgotten, and the Girondins raved at
the thought that their comrades back at the Transport were in all
probability even now toasting them in the goblet that should have
foamed at _their_ lips. So the double-company Mess had to fall back
upon a very moderate supply of a somewhat anæmic claret. They would
have undoubtedly pledged one another in this rare old wine (vintage,
Félix Potin, Amiens), only this formality was unfortunately overlooked
in a furious discussion which arose in the matter of fixing the
responsibilities in the affair of the forgotten bottle of champagne.

All through dinner messages kept arriving, company sergeant-majors
or orderlies bulking large in the low entrance to the dug-out. Here
an officer scribbled a note or an acknowledgment in his notebook
laid flat beside his plate: there a couple of ensigns, amid the
stewed pears in soup-plates, the glasses, the candles in their
bottles, and the white mugs of steaming coffee, pored over their maps
for the hundredth time to fix in their memories a mental picture
of the morrow’s line of advance. Servants crept in with flasks or
water-bottles filled, or with sandwiches wrapped in paper. Many were
the beverages recommended as sovereign for battle by the veterans.
One urged rum-and-water, another neat whisky, a third cold tea, a
fourth tea mixed with brandy. The last recipe appeared to command most
suffrages, and our Ensign accordingly decided for it.

As the hour of departure drew near, one by one, gradually, the officers
rose from the sandbag divan on which they had sat at meat and started
to array themselves for battle, girding on their belts hung with a
manifold collection of apparatus. One by one they clapped their helmets
on their heads and stumped up the little stair into the night.

Thus, imperceptibly, the double-company Mess broke up, and the
partnership of the summer months was dissolved for ever.

It was a cold, clear, starlit night, but still darkish, for the moon
had not yet risen. Once outside the dug-out, our Ensign heard the low
murmur of voices, the clatter of accoutrements from the open space in
front of the trenches where the company was assembling. On the road
in front he could see dim figures slowly advancing up the ridge: he
guessed these to be the other two companies, who had bivouacked in the
other part of the wood, moving up to their positions for the attack.

No smoking or talking was allowed; and it was in the most complete
silence that at length the two companies moved away, a platoon at a
time, each behind its guide. The air was dry and cold, with a touch
of frost: it would be cold sleeping out in the open, but anything was
better than rain.

The guides picked up their landmarks and led the men without trouble
into the segment of trench allotted to them. The trench was crumbling
from the autumn rains that had eaten into its shell-scored sides. In
parts it had a foot of water. There were many corpses in it. There was
no shelling. The night was very still. Only on the horizon, beyond
the ridge which on the morrow the Guards would cross, the star-shells
soared into a brief span of brilliant life, flickered, and died.
Quietly the men slipped into their places in the trench, or, where it
was water-logged, into shell-holes behind.

Now the moon, waning from full, began to rise and to shed its silver
radiance on the muffled forms asleep in shell-hole and in trench amid
the unburied dead. In the cold white light the ruined farm behind the
sleeping figures looked like a bleached skeleton, and the devastation
surrounding them stood out hard and clear. In the distance the
star-shells less brilliant than their wont in the effulgence of the
moon, seemed to beckon....




CHAPTER XIII.

  “One Moment in Annihilation’s Waste,
  One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste--
    The Stars are setting, and the Caravan
  Starts for the Dawn of Nothing--O make haste!”

                                                         --OMAR KHAYYÁM.


Our Ensign awoke with a start. His limbs were stiff and cold. He felt
frozen to the very marrow. The earth of his shell-hole was firm to the
touch under the night’s frost. The sky was tinted like a thrush’s egg,
and in the wide expanse of bluey green the stars were paling to the
rising of the sun.

The air was all astir with movement. It was still the twilight of dawn,
and here and there about the broken trenches and yawning shell-holes,
where the Battalion had passed the night, patches of white mist hung,
like the ghosts of the uncoffined dead that lay so thick upon the
barren slope. The atmosphere was cold and deliciously clear, but the
earth, warming to the sluggish approach of day, exhaled the sweet
and clammy odour of death blended with the scent of freshly-turned
clay,--the smell of the battlefield of the Somme.

As our Ensign struggled to his feet and surveyed the scene from his
shell-hole, he saw all around him men hoisting on their equipment,
talking in low murmurs the while. To restore the circulation to his
frozen limbs he walked briskly over to the left, where the trenches of
his company lay. He was surprised to find how cool and business-like
the men were, as they strapped up their haversacks and struggled into
their equipment. They talked in low tones. They groused about the cold,
about the discomfort of the night; but on every face was seen a look
of relief that the period of waiting was almost over, rather than of
apprehension at the trial that was to come.

The old soldiers were, with their ingrained fatalism, very deliberate
and quite chatty. The young men were quieter and some a little fretful.
But, as our Ensign walked along the trench and exchanged a word or
two with the men of his own platoon, he found that, under all the
superficial calm, something was smouldering into flame that he had
never noticed in them before.

The guns were still barking away steadily. Listening, our Ensign
could distinguish the characteristic notes--the sharp salvoes of the
field-guns, flinging their projectiles, six at a time, into the enemy
wire on the other side of the ridge, the deeper rush of the 6-inch
guns, and the swooping flight, starting far away in the rear, of the
heavy howitzer shells. Here he ran across the officers of his company.
The Beak was as serenely magisterial as ever.

“I wish you were coming with the company, old boy!” he said to our
Ensign, who cordially echoed the wish.

“You fellows will go romping gaily through the demoralised Hun,”
dolefully observed our young man, “and do prodigies of valour, while I
shall get the whole of the German barrage coming over the ridge, and
probably get done in before I have had a chance of displaying those
feats of intelligence which are expected of me!”

“Don’t you worry,” remarked Bryan darkly; “you’ll probably be
commanding the company by breakfast-time!”

Then they wished one another good luck and went their ways, for the men
were forming up, while over the still morning air a most remarkable
sound came floating.

That steady, low throbbing was indescribably exhilarating. The men
pricked up their ears and began pointing excitedly to the crest of the
ridge ahead, where strange, amorphous masses seemed to be crawling
inch by inch through the mists of morning. In a moment the pangs of
waiting, which always increase as the fatal hand casts its shadow upon
the appointed hour, had fled. Every eye was following the snail-like
progress of those strange, humming monsters: every mind was rehearsing
the effect they would produce when they blundered out of the clinging
haze into the enemy’s front line. Thus the Tanks made their _début_ in
the history of warfare, and whatever importance posterity may allot to
their share in the victory of September 15, to their inventors be given
the thanks of the Guards’ Division, for that His Majesty’s Landships
whiled away a _mauvais quart d’heure_ when the Guards were waiting to
attack.

Our Ensign found Headquarters in a shell-hole, the Commanding Officer
talking over some final point with the Adjutant and the Drill-Sergeant.
The sky had changed from pale green to lemon, and the delicate yellow,
where it touched the brown line of the ridge, was burnished to a deeper
gold by the flood of light from the rising sun. The mists were all but
melted. Another day had begun.

So few objects had the tide of battle, sweeping across the undulating
plain, left standing, that their outlines, isolated, bare in the clear
morning light, left their impress for ever on our Ensign’s memory, ...
the blackened tree-trunks dotting the ruined site of the village on
the right of the ridge, with a forest of bare poles marking the wood
behind, the barren ridge between, the confused mass of broken trees to
the left denoting that famous D---- Wood in which the horrors of the
Somme battlefield reached their climax.

6.15. Every one is on his feet now--the officers with their helmets
well strapped on under their chins, stick in one hand, map in the
other, revolver at their belt, their orderly at their elbow; the
men with bayonets fixed, gleaming here and there in the sun, armed
_cap-à-pie_, their big frames leaning on their rifles in such poses of
unconscious grace as would have thrilled the heart of Meissonier or
Détaille.

The throbbing of the Tanks has ceased. Still, the guns pound steadily
on with their appointed task. There is the low humming of an aeroplane
engine somewhere in the sky, but the light is too dazzling for one to
see it.

It is an eerie thing to stand on the threshold of history. Before them
stretched the ridge, blank as the unwritten page. Would victory or
defeat, success or failure, stand inscribed thereon before the sun,
that even now was bathing the shell-scarred earth with light, had sunk
to rest? What hazards awaited them over that low and corrugated crest?
What triumphs, what agony, what tears would the next hours bring?

Then the whistles sounded, and with a roar like the breaking of a
tropical squall, the hurricane was let loose. Amid the most appalling
roar of guns the Guards moved steadily off up the long brown slope,
while from the German lines in the distance rose great spouts of red
and green and white rockets clamouring for a barrage. Those cascades
of coloured lights were frantic in their appeal, bursting high in the
air above the exploding shells and dense pillars of white and black
and yellow smoke, silent amid the furious din of battle, but emphatic
in their cry ... “Help us quickly ... we are being attacked!” ... the
S.O.S. of the battlefield.

The whole line moved forward in a dense irresistible impact, wave
upon wave. The din was indescribable. The rising shriek of the
shells, simultaneous, successive, incessant, formed a vast diapason
accompaniment to the snap and whinny and whistle of the bullets
whirling through the air. Our Ensign, plodding along with a select
party, led by the Second-in-command, in the centre of the attack, felt
his blood boiling to the thrill of that mighty roar of noise. The
sense of power which the guns gave was overwhelmingly exhilarating.
He looked about him, and saw that the men all around were bubbling
with high spirits as they trudged forward in and about and around the
shell-holes. There was no rush about this attack. It was a slow, steady
advance, relentless, irresistible.

It carried every man onward with it in its stride. It carried our
Ensign, new as he was to war, with indifference, as it seemed to him
at the time, past white and flaccid figures lying in curiously bent
positions in or on the edges of the shell-holes, past men moaning and
running with blood, past others shivering with ghastly wounds. In and
out of the line trotted the stretcher-bearers, big stolid men,--they
are chosen for their inches in the Guards, for they have heavy burdens
to carry,--perspiring and blowing and brave, with an utter indifference
to danger that was good to see. As he went forward up the ridge,
glancing continually at the map folded open in his hand, for there was
a tricky turn to make at the top, our Ensign suddenly came upon a white
and silent figure, a young ensign of the Coldstream, lying dead upon
one outflung arm, his face towards the advancing line, his feet towards
the crest of the slope. He was very young, and our Ensign had known
him, as one knows men in the army, from different occasions that had
brought them together in the field. He remembered him as a pleasant,
handsome boy, and our Ensign noticed, as he glanced at him in passing,
that he had not changed in death.

Now they had reached the top of the ridge. The German barrage was in
full blast. From the crest the ridge ran down a little and then mounted
again to the flat horizon. From crest to skyline the whole intervening
space seemed to be flecked with shell-bursts, and in and out of the
white and black smoke-drifts went the long steady lines.

About the crest of the ridge and on either slope the German shells
crashed heavily, with a thud that made the air tremble, with a reek of
sulphur that caught the breath, with sickening clouds of heavy black
smoke. Still, the British guns maintained their ceaseless roar, still
their shell-bursts dotted the horizon, still the air hummed and whirred
with the flying bullets.

The advance had stopped for an instant. The lines of Guardsmen before,
around, and behind our Ensign halted erect upon the skyline. Men wiped
their brows, for the going had been heavy, and passed the time of day
with their friends.

Our Ensign caught a glimpse of many of his friends--The Don, with his
best Balliol manner, the strap of his helmet under the point of his
chin, his eyeglass in his eye; Bruce, one of the company commanders,
was there too, sitting in the shell-hole into which he had been blown,
taking a careful compass bearing; also Apollo, tying up a sergeant who
had been hit.

Then the advance went forward again--steady, slow, relentless as
before, and presently once more it came to a halt. Something stirring
was happening on the lower slope of the ridge. There the lines were
rushing forward. Between the drifts of the smoke there was a glimpse of
charging figures, a glint of the sun on naked bayonets....

As our Ensign stood gazing through the haze of the shell-bursts the
lines enclosing him seemed to go wild. A mad yell--not a cheer, but
the deep-throated battle-cry of an ancient fighting race--rang out
all about him. He glanced around to find himself in the midst of the
Irish Guards, “whorooing” like a thousand souls in torment, laughing,
shouting, yelling. In the centre of the picture was a striking group.
Three Irish Guardsmen stood together, magnificent men all, built as
massive as oaks, their eyes dancing with excitement. One leaned upon
his rifle, his head thrust forward as he gazed enraptured upon that
charge down in the valley; the centre figure was bareheaded, and across
his chest, blown flat by the breeze, was the green flag of Erin with
its golden harp; while the third Guardsman, holding his rifle with its
shining bayonet in his left hand, rested his right upon his comrade’s
shoulder. And the man with the flag was bellowing like a bull--

“Go it, the Coalies! We’re behind yez, me boys! The Micks is on your
heels!”

Below, at the foot of the slope, a sturdy figure, a little silver
hunting-horn to its lips, plodded serenely forward, ... the Commanding
Officer of the Coldstream Guards in his familiar French shrapnel
helmet, with the ridged crown under its khaki cover, in the midst of
the shouting, charging line of the remnants of his battalion who had
rallied to the horn of the Tanatside Harriers.

Then amid a fierce crescendo of yells the Irish Guards went forward
in a rush like a pack of hounds. There was no stopping them. The
killing had begun, and they must be in at the death. As they vanished
tempestuously into the haze our Ensign heard a sharp cry beside him.

“Oh, sir!”

MacFinnigan was on the ground, his left arm limp, the blood gushing
out from his shoulder. Our Ensign plucked his field-dressing from
his pocket in the lining of his jacket, and bound the man up as best
he could. The orderly was very game, for, though he made no sound,
his face showed that he was in pain. Our Ensign gave him a drink out
of his water-bottle ... tea and brandy mixed ... and turned to the
Second-in-command, who was speaking to him.

“They’ve stopped again,” he said. “Isn’t that Bruce over there by the
road? I wonder why they are not going on. I think you’d better go and
ask Bruce, and come back here and tell me, so that we can send back
word to the Commanding Officer.”

Our Ensign marked the spot where he left the party. The
Second-in-command was in a shell-hole beside a blackened stump of a
telegraph pole, MacFinnigan at his feet. On the crest of the ridge,
exposed to the full blast of machine-gun fire and the barrage, there
were many dead and wounded. The air was full of bullets, the shells
were bursting noisily all over the place, and our Ensign frequently
resisted a strong inclination to duck.

Presently he came across two stretcher-bearers of his own battalion.
They were bending over a man who was obviously at the point of death.

“He’s gone,” said the first stretcher-bearer. “Come on now, Michael!”
as our Ensign came up. The officer asked them to attend to his orderly,
pointing to the place with his stick.

“Sir!” said the first stretcher-bearer, straightening himself up.
Our Ensign remembered this little touch of formality afterwards, and
recollected that, at the time, this echo of the “square” had not struck
him as unusual.

He reached the spot where he thought he should find Bruce, but it
turned out to be an officer of another Brigade who had strayed a little
off the line. The Coldstream had been held up, he told our Ensign, by
a couple of unsuspected trenches between them and the first objective,
but the line had gone on now.

Our Ensign hastened back to report. As he had gone over to the right
the advance had passed on in his absence, and the ground was deserted
save for the wounded and the dead. As he hurried over the broken
ground a bullet sang past his ear with a loud crack. A man nursing a
bleeding leg in a shell-hole called out to him--

“They’re sniping from the dug-outs, sir. You’ll want to mind yourself!”

Our Ensign plunged on. Suddenly out of a shell-hole at his very feet
scrambled a tall, wan figure in grey, a blood-stained bandage wound
about his head. Our young man had his revolver out in a second. But the
stranger made no show of resistance. He was repeating to himself in a
sing-song voice--

“Kamerad! Nicht schiessen! Kamerad! Nicht schiessen!”

Our Ensign drove the German on in front of him until he came to a
sunken road where a Grenadier sergeant and half a dozen men were
marshalling a score or so of much-dishevelled German prisoners. He
handed over the German, who was still crooning his song, and pursued
his way towards the shell-hole by the blackened telegraph pole.

He found it deserted. The Second-in-command, MacFinnigan, the rest of
the party, all had vanished. On the ground lay a blood-stained whistle
and some shreds of field-dressing.

The German shell fire had greatly increased in intensity. They were
now laying a barrage over the whole scene of the advance. Our young
man found that walking alone over heavy, shell-swept ground is a very
different thing from sweeping forward with the advancing line, with
courage and resolution running, like an electric fluid, from man to
man. So he bent his head and started to get over the ground and out of
the barrage as hard as he could.

Strange and manifold are the encounters of the battlefield. A brief
half an hour before, the brown and furrowed slope, up which our Ensign
was painfully making his way to the farther ridge beyond which the
Guards had disappeared, had been No Man’s Land--the desolate tract
at which, from the front trenches, one would peer furtively through a
periscope. Now it was the highway of the battlefield, strewn with the
wastage of the fight, traversed by the lagging steps of the wounded.

There is this vision in our Ensign’s memory, ... an officer with half
his tunic torn to ribbons, one bare arm wrapped in bandages protruding
from his shirt, bareheaded, livid of face, besmeared with mud and
blood. He staggered like a drunkard as he walked straight ahead,
falling into shell-holes, heedless of the enemy fire. On one lapel of
his tunic the small grenade of the Royal Engineers had survived intact.

“Blown up with some sappers,” he said thickly to our young man,
“lookin’ for dressin’ station ... terrible ... terrible, ...” and he
reeled onward over the broken earth.

Then came a hurrying, stumbling herd of German prisoners, abject,
dishevelled, hands above their heads, four strapping Guardsmen, each
with a helmet hung to his belt, driving them before them, broad grins
on their faces.

Now our Ensign had reached the first of those hidden trenches which
had brought a burst of unsuspected fire to bear on the advancing
Coldstream. The khaki was pretty thick amid the trampled and riven
wire, but beyond the _Feldgrauen_ lay in heaps, many still wearing the
little round caps and the greatcoats in which they had been sleeping,
their arms outspread, waxen-faced, limp, and where they lay the brown
earth was stained a deeper hue.

A little group came hobbling painfully towards our Ensign as he went
up the slope, two Grenadiers carrying one of their officers on a rifle
slung between them. They stopped in front of our Ensign.

“Are you in pain?” said our young man to the officer.

“Pretty fair,” came from the other’s lips.

“Where are you hit?” asked our Ensign.

“Stomach ... do you know anything about it? These men were going to
take me to an aid-post.”

“I don’t know much about it,” said our young man, “but I think you
ought to lie quiet for a stomach wound. The Huns are barraging pretty
hard back there, and I believe you’d be safer here for a bit in one of
these shell-holes.”

“Got any brandy?” asked the Grenadier.

“Tea and brandy mixed,” replied our Ensign; “but really, you know, you
oughtn’t to drink, though you’re welcome to the lot. Will you have a
cigarette? ... that can’t hurt you.”

The two Grenadiers had very gently deposited their load in a
shell-hole, and one of them, pulling a haversack off a dead man lying
on the lip of the crater, put it under the wounded officer’s head.
Our Ensign gave the wounded man a cigarette, and lit it for him. The
Grenadier puffed for a moment in silence, then said--

“How are things going?”

“Everything looks all right,” replied our young man; “the whole Brigade
seems to have walked off the map. I’m trying to catch ’em up ...
there’s a devil of a lot of dead Huns lying around ... that’s always a
good sign....”

“I suppose you’ll have to be going on,” said the wounded man; “take
care of yourself, and good luck!”

“So long! I hope you’ll be all right,” said our Ensign, and once more
started to clamber up the slope after a glance at his compass to
assure himself that he was bearing in the right direction. He kept a
sharp look-out ahead to see if he could discern any signs of his own
Battalion. He thought he must soon be catching up with them now....

Then, without any warning, he was flung headlong into a shell-hole amid
a foul reek of black smoke and a thick cloud of dust.

“That’s done it! I’m dead!” was his first thought; but he found himself
unwounded at the bottom of the hole, his throat and nose full of dust
and his ears singing.

He scrambled out in a panic and dashed on. He caught up with a Guards
officer, whose face he seemed to know, leading a party of heavily laden
men.

“Are you machine-guns?” he asked the other, as he drew level, ... his
voice sounded very faint in his ears. The other made no reply. Our
Ensign repeated his question, and still he got no response. Our young
man was feeling dazed and rather cross, and was about to shout his
question for the third time, when he observed, greatly to his surprise,
that the other officer was speaking to him--that is to say, his lips
were moving, but our Ensign heard nothing.

Then the officer put his hands to his mouth and bawled: “I’m---- ...
Stokes mortars ... you know me ... you dined with us the other night!”
Our Ensign explained that he had just been blown up ... and realised
that he was almost deaf. Presently their ways parted, and our Ensign
was once more trudging on alone.

He crossed a trench where Guardsmen were digging in furiously among a
lot of German corpses, passed a Tank on the extreme left, apparently
stranded and looking forlorn but intact, met other troops of German
prisoners, each bigger than the last, shuffling along at their brisk,
characteristic amble, reached the top of the ridge, and plunged into
a network of broken barbed wire. There the bullets were humming, and
men were shouting and shooting furiously from a crowded trench just
in front of him, while in the distance he heard the “tack-tack” of
machine-guns and the reverberating explosions of bombs. Bending low our
Ensign pelted through the wire, and sprang into a dense throng of men
in the trench.




CHAPTER XIV.

  “Then was seen with what majesty the British soldier
  fights....”--NAPIER.


Once again our Ensign was in the midst of the Guards--Grenadiers,
Coldstream, Irish, ... remains of half a dozen battalions were there,
intermingled with a good sprinkling of men from all manner of line
regiments. They stood packed close as herrings in a barrel in the
deep and narrow trench, so that it was wellnigh impossible to force a
passage. Of officers, for the moment, there was no trace.

Our Ensign stood for a moment to regain his breath and to take in the
surroundings. The trench was in a hideous mess, showing abundant
traces of the appalling pounding it had received during three days’
incessant artillery fire. The British shells had blown whole segments
bodily out of it, so that here the parapet, there the parados, was
blasted clean away--sometimes both in the same place--leaving a broad
gap void of all protection.

In its time it had been a good specimen of a German fire-trench--in
point of fact it was the German main third line--with a neat fire-step,
solid traverses, and deep, timber-lined dug-outs with many steps
leading sheer down into the bowels of the earth. But now the fire-step
was broken and crumbling, the traverses were nearly all blown in, and
in many of the dug-outs part of the framework had collapsed, leaving
the entrance either sagging or completely blocked up by fallen earth.

The place was a shambles. There were shapeless masses of field-grey
trodden down fast into the soft mud bottom of the trench, and
sprawling forms, both khaki and grey, lay all over the place. In
a yawning rent in the trench, at our Ensign’s very elbow, was the
dead body of a lad wearing the black buttons and badges of a Rifle
regiment,--a mere boy, with a round bullet-hole in the temple. At his
side a figure was sitting, knees drawn up, head resting on the hand, in
an attitude of contemplation. Our Ensign recognised a sergeant of his
own Battalion ... an oldish, steady man whom he had known well.... So
tired and utterly weary was the look on his face, that for the moment
the young officer fancied that the man had fallen asleep. But the waxen
features told a different tale.... Our Ensign’s heart sank a little
within him as he gazed on the two listless figures: all the morning
they remained there, and every time he passed them he felt himself
shrinking with horror.

The trench was strewn with “souvenirs”--German helmets and caps and
rifles and greatcoats and ammunition pouches, boxes of cigars, loaves
of bread, tins of meat and sardines, empty bottles, letters, pay-books,
littered about among the prostrate forms. The men in the trench were
turning these over; many had rank German cigars in their mouths. But
our Ensign had no time to waste in poring over these things--as the
only officer present, he felt that it devolved upon him to try and
bring a little order into the chaos.

Presently he espied a familiar form, gaunt and tall,--it was Sergeant
Jackson, of our Ensign’s company. Briefly, the sergeant gave the
officer the news. All the officers of our Ensign’s company and the
acting company sergeant-major had been knocked out ... none of the
officers were killed, he thought ... he had seen “the captain” being
carried away in all his usual serenity. There were some officers
farther along the trench.

Our Ensign bade the sergeant get the men to work in consolidating
the position. Now that the trench was in British hands, it had to be
reversed, the parapet built up into a parados and a fire-step cut in
the parapet.

“The men will have to work like blazes,” added our young man; “in a few
minutes we shall have every German gun in the place opening on us, and
the men will want all the cover they can get.”

“And, for Heavens sake, Sergeant Jackson,” he went on, “get some of
these bodies put out of the trench!”

Then, with infinite difficulty, our young man started to force himself
along the crowded trench. There was no shelling as yet, but there was
a lot of machine-gun fire and the air was fairly humming with bullets.
He fought his way along desperately hard: the men were willing enough
to let him pass, but your Guardsman in full attacking order is a big
object that, even edgeways, almost blocks an ordinary trench, and our
Ensign had an exhausting time. As he dragged himself round a traverse,
he all but stepped on a German lying on the ground. As he passed him,
the man caught hold of the officer’s legs and shrieked in a broad
Bavarian accent--

“Ach! Herr Leutnant! Ich halt’es nicht aus ... schiessen Sie mich! Ach!
schiessen Sie mich! Ich bitt’ Sie!”

The taking of a man’s life in cold blood had never entered into our
novice’s philosophy, so he shook the man off and passed on, with a
horrid picture in his memory of a livid, grimacing mask.

Our Ensign next came to a broad gap blown clean through parados and
parapet. As he was about to pass, a young Coldstreamer at his elbow
pushed past him into the gap. The next moment the lad cried out “Oh!” a
loud, gasping exclamation of utter astonishment, spun round, and fell
prone at the officer’s feet with a great gush of blood that splashed
the other’s tunic.

“There’s a sniper laying on that gap, sir,” said an Irish Guardsman
standing by; “for the love of God, kape your head down!”

“This is a bloody business,” said our Ensign to himself. These ghastly
sights were beginning to get on his nerves. Then, ducking down, he
darted across the gap and in a minute or two found himself in the
presence of Headquarters. The Commanding Officer told him he was to
take command of No. 2 Company, as the only officer surviving, and asked
for news of the Second-in-command. Our Ensign told his tale.

A group of officers were there: Roderick, tall and quite cool; The Lad,
brimming over with excitement, who had drifted in from his battalion,
together with his Commanding Officer, a Brigade Machine-Gun Officer,
the Doctor, the Padre, a Forward Observation Officer.

Roderick gave our Ensign a brief budget of news. The Don had been shot
through the thigh, crossing the ridge; Apollo had got it through
the shoulder, and had last been seen volubly explaining to the
stretcher-bearers carrying him down the exact nature of his wound in
highly technical language; Duke was all right. Of the officers of the
other companies, two at least were known to be killed--Roderick had
heard the men talking about them.

One of these two officers was a friend of our Ensign’s, yet he heard
of his death quite unmoved. In the heat of battle everything appears
unreal--so much is rumour, so little is fact; and even towards the
concrete realities under his very eyes a man feels that he will wake up
and find it all a dream....

One of the group of officers, who was surveying through his glasses the
low brown horizon with its tangle of rusted wire, suddenly pointed to
the right.

“That communication trench is full of Huns,” he cried; “look! you can
see them in their helmets leaning on the parapet!”

Everybody put up their glasses. There, sure enough, was a long line of
heads in coal-scuttle helmets lining the trench indicated. They had a
machine-gun trained on the trench where the Guards were; they were also
busy sniping into all the gaps.

A Lewis gunner was haled forth from the crowded trench, and he lost no
time in laying his gun on the line of Germans. But the gun jammed at
the first burst of fire. While they were trying another, our Ensign
was ordered to take charge of the left of the line, post sentries, and
set every man to the task of consolidating the trench. He was briefly
told the situation. On the right, the attacking troops had been held
up by the strong position known as The Quadrilateral, bristling with
machine-guns, the same guns which had caught the Guards in enfilade as
they crossed the ridge; what had happened on the left was not clear.

Our Ensign set off back along the way he had come with a light heart.
He rejoiced at having a definite job which would keep him from
thinking about the horrors piling up on every side of him. With him
went the Brigade Machine-Gun Officer and a Grenadier Ensign, from whom
our young man had once taken over in the trenches in the salient. Of
the three officers, only our Ensign was destined to survive the day,
but, of course, he did not know that then.

The German, who had clutched at our Ensign’s leg on his passage, lay
dead in the bottom of the trench. Our Ensign wondered whether the man
had found some one to do the service that he refused him. The dead
Coldstreamer in the gap had now three companions prone on their faces
in the mud.

As they elbowed their way along, the three officers set every man in
the trench to the task of consolidation. The men obeyed willingly
enough, and the sergeants, at the officers’ bidding, posted sentries at
intervals along the trench, with strict injunctions to keep a sharp
look-out, right, left, and centre. Thus the three officers forced their
way down the trench, leaving a trail of busy diggers in their wake.
By mutual arrangement our Ensign pushed on alone to the extreme left,
where he found himself among troops of the line, until he met a very
youthful subaltern of a Rifle regiment, whom our Ensign informed of the
situation, and of the measures they were taking for their protection.
This done, our Ensign toiled his way back again along the trench.

And now the long-expected _strafe_ began. A German battery that had
been shelling over them shortened its range, and the shells, vicious,
black “whizz-bangs,” began dropping uncomfortably close to the
trench. Word had been coming along from the right, “All men of the
such-and-such battalion of the Coldstream to the right,” “All men of
the such-and-such battalion of the Irish Guards to the right,” so the
trench was a little clearer as the different battalions got sifted
out. Some kind of advance was going forward to the extreme right. Our
Ensign saw long lines of men advancing through a tornado of great,
black shell-bursts. Presently a flock of grey figures, hands above
their heads, bolted across the open. Shouts rang out all down the
trench.

“Shoot the dogs! Lend me your rifle, mate! Let them be! Shoot the
----! Ah, leave them alone!” But no shot fell, and the frightened herd
plunged across the broken ground among their own shells, a couple of
phlegmatic figures in khaki driving them before them.

The German shell fire was growing in intensity. A 5.9 battery had
joined in. The cry of “stretcher-bearER!” ran up and down the trench;
here and there men lagged at their digging. Our Ensign had to run up
and down, “speeding up” the laggards like a negro slave-driver. But he
noticed many more limp figures, many more ghastly wounds, and every
dug-out had its pale and blood-stained occupants....

In all his efforts our Ensign was loyally supported by his own
non-commissioned officers and men. The sergeants by word, the men by
deed, gave a splendid lead to the reluctant. It is in battle that
the sterling loyalty of British troops to their officers comes out
strongest.

On his knees at the bottom of the trench, scraping vigorously away with
his entrenching tool at the parapet to fashion a fire-step, our Ensign
found old Lawson, one of the battalion snipers, the sweat glistening
on his face, for by now the sun was shining hotly. By his side stood
Sergeant Jackson, as dispassionate as ever.

“We’re going to catch it hot here, sir,” said the sergeant, with a
shake of his head, to our Ensign, who sat down beside the couple and
wiped his damp brow. Then, with a shrill scream, a salvo of four shells
burst right over the group; some one yelled out loud, and a tangle
of men fell all over our Ensign as he squatted on the ground, driving
his helmet over his eyes. He fought himself clear, and found that all
the men about him had stopped working. Some had taken refuge in a low
dug-out, where three or four wounded men were sheltering.

Our Ensign rooted them out and set them again to their task. Then
he looked about him. Old Lawson, the sniper, lay on his face in the
trench, breathing stertorously. Our Ensign turned him over on his
back, and saw at a glance that the old soldier was hovering on the
brink of eternity. A few yards farther along the trench two men lay
dead; another, with a staring white face, was opening his jacket with
trembling, blood-stained hands. A little movement behind him caught our
Ensign’s ear. He turned and found Sergeant Jackson, his face running
with blood, rocking himself gently two and fro. On the ground beside
him was his helmet, with a great jagged rent in the crown.

Our Ensign tore out his last remaining field-dressing and bound up a
gaping wound in the sergeant’s head. Then he gave him a pull of the
famous tea-and-brandy mixture. The sergeant was conscious, but he spoke
in a curious, thick fashion.

“I’m all right, sir,” he said, “but I don’t quite feel up to duty
somehow; and I’ve got a bit of a brow-ache, too!” And then his head
fell forward, and with a sharp pang our Ensign thought he was dead.
But presently he spoke again, complained that he could not hear, that
his eyes were failing; so our Ensign gave him another pull at the
water-bottle, and offered him a cigarette, which he took and was able
to light alone. The officer left him seated in the trench contentedly
puffing, and set off again to keep the men to their task.

And now our Ensign felt the reaction of the morning’s excitement coming
over him. All the exhilaration he had experienced in the magnificent
opening act of the day seemed to have evaporated. He found himself
dwelling with loathing on the mere thought of war; his mind toyed with
crude pictures he had seen in German papers of Hindenburg, the German
Man of Destiny, striding over mounds of corpses--even such corpses as
those that lay strewn all around.

Our Ensign felt his gorge rising at the horrors besetting him. He found
himself longing fervently for a mad charge, a German attack,--anything
to get away from the shambles, the blood, the mud, the dank smell of
the earth, the hideous painted sky that mocked their sufferings. Of all
the manifold sensations of the day, the hours he spent in that trench
left the deepest impress on our Ensign’s memory, and ran their span
again and again, with horrors intensified, in the battle-dreams that
came to him in many nights subsequently.

In reality, they were not more than three or four hours in the third
German line. To our Ensign the delay seemed endless; the men, too, were
chafing to be away “after the Gers.,” anything rather than to sit there
and be shelled to atoms.

Down the trench our Ensign found the Brigade Machine-Gunner again.
The latter told him that apparently the attacking lines, misled by
the two trenches which had lain, all unsuspected, between them and
their first objective, had believed the trench they were in to be the
third objective, whereas it was in reality only the first objective,
as far as could be ascertained. In a country from which practically
every landmark has been razed, where one trench looks exactly like
another, such an error was easily made. Hence the delay. However, the
Machine-Gunner said, the first lines had gone on now, and probably the
rest would soon follow.

A charming fellow, this Machine-Gunner, practical, conscientious,
and fearless beyond all praise. He and our Ensign found themselves
cordially agreed that the sights in that trench were enough to sicken a
man of war for the rest of his life.

Then our Ensign suddenly saw his Commanding Officer on the parapet
above his head. He ordered our young man to collect all the men he
could and bring them forward. Our Ensign and the Machine-Gunner were
out of the trench in an instant, bawling to the men to follow them.
The men were delighted to get away, and the Machine-Gunner, surrounded
by a knot of his men with guns and tripods and ammunition boxes, led a
big batch forward, whilst our Ensign ran up and down the trench beating
up the rest. And so presently our young Ensign led the way over a wild
chaos of broken wire and shell-ploughed brown earth out into the blue,
turning his back for ever on that sinister place where, as it seemed
to him, years of his life had been spent. On they went, through a few
spasmodic shells, to the top of the low ridge, where an unforgettable
sight burst upon their vision.

A broad green valley lay unfolded before them, a beauteous panorama
as yet unspoiled by war. Mars had not laid a finger on the long green
slopes and smiling valleys. Neat little villages still snuggled intact
amid clumps of bosky trees, between them long white ribbons of roads
bordered by trim rows of poplars. Here was a pretty hamlet with the
glint of red roofs amid the verdant foliage, through which a slender
yellow church tower thrust itself up into the azure sky. As though
protruding right into the foreground--though in reality it was a mile
behind the hamlet--ran a broad white ribbon with a tall fringe of
trees,--one of the great national highways of France.

At the first view the whole countryside appeared to slumber in the
brilliant sunshine of the Indian summer. Birds were singing in the sky,
the trees rustled gently in the breeze, and the pleasant old church
towers dotting the horizon, seen through the shimmering heat haze that
arose off the green fields, seemed to nod drowsily as they kept their
ancient watch over their little villages.

But there, clearly discernible to the naked eye, along the white
patches of distant roads, was a flicker of moving dots which, seen
through the glasses, resolved themselves into long lines of men on
the march, guns, transport waggons, and the like. Then, in the nearer
foreground, where the yellow church tower emerged from the trees,
the eye caught a glimpse of figures--here a knot of men streaming
away across the fields, there a solitary form strained to an attitude
of watching. Over to the right, along a distant road running across
the slope of a hill, a limber came galloping; and our Ensign’s eyes,
following the moving vehicle through the glasses, rested upon a German
battery drawn up in the open, an officer (our Ensign could see his
tightly-waisted greatcoat) in the centre, peering through his glasses.

A voice just behind our Ensign exclaimed--

“By God! we’ve got them in the open at last!”

Another cried excitedly--

“Jasus, boys, look at Fritz running away!”

But for the most part the men were silent, standing erect in the
open, gazing spellbound at the Promised Land which it had taken two
years’ bitter fighting to attain. Thus Cortes and his little band of
adventurers may have stood on the Sierra and contemplated with a thrill
of mystery the wonder-city of the Aztecs which lay spread out at their
feet. There were many Guardsmen in that little band of men from half
a dozen Guards’ battalions who had suffered all the bitterness of the
retreat from Mons, who had thrilled to the pursuit of the fleeing
enemy from the Marne, and then had undergone the long vicissitudes of
trench warfare against a better equipped foe. And now they saw him
on the run! Those veterans must have felt that now they could die
content--and many died that day and the next.

That sight banished all thoughts save one from the minds of that
thin brown line. Hardly a man there but had his uniform torn and
bloody,--not a man but had lost a friend; since the start at dawn they
had had no word from the rear--just a handful of adventurers standing
on the fringe of an empty and forsaken stretch of ground. Yet no man
heeded any of these things. Operation Orders had said: “The attack will
be pushed with the utmost vigour,” and the thought dominating every
mind was the determination to drive home to its logical conclusion the
victory which that spectacle of rout proclaimed they had won. It was
a moment such as occurs in all great battles ... on which the memory
afterwards loves to linger in the spirit of “what might have been.”

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the birds were singing, the
grass was firm and springy underfoot, and the men went forward
joyously, all unconcerned at the shells which fell spasmodically about
them. They waded through a field of long rank thistles and dried
cornstalks reaching up to their middles, and came out on the other
side to a low shallow trench, which had apparently been constructed to
provide a covered way between the guns of a German battery once posted
there. The place was littered with the long wicker-work cases in which
the Germans carry their shells, and with brass shell-cases innumerable.
One Irish Guardsman found on the ground a very delicate and beautiful
telescopic sight for use with a 77-millimetre field-gun in a brown
leathern case, and pounced upon it as a “souvenir.”

The Machine-Gunner and our Ensign had a brief council of war on the
edge of the root-field, and decided to put the men into the shallow
trench and set them digging themselves in pending further orders. While
the Machine-Gunner began to install his guns in convenient shell-holes,
our Ensign spread the men out along the trench until they came in touch
with another party of the Guards who were in the same trench. There
were one or two officers with them, a couple of Coldstreamers, and a
Grenadier captain.

By this time the shelling was growing distinctly unpleasant. Through
his glasses our Ensign could clearly see the German battery he had
already observed, in action, the men standing to the guns, two
officers in flat caps and greatcoats in the middle. The shells were
whizz-bangs--shrapnel and high explosive--and they were bursting with
unpleasant regularity and disconcerting accuracy up and down the trench
line. Everybody was horribly exposed, and now the disagreeable “swish
... swish” of some very active machine-guns on the right (in the
Quadrilateral, no doubt) blended with the whistle of the shells. Every
man in the trench was now working like a Trojan, scraping and hacking
away with his entrenching tool in the soft brown soil, and the narrow
trench was quite impassable. To get along one had simply to walk across
the open and pay no heed to the bullets snapping in the air.

But the excitement of being “in the open” made everybody amazingly
callous. The men never ceased working, though here and there hideously
mutilated bodies were gently lifted out of the trench and bedded in the
thistles, and in places men were shouting, unanswered, the familiar
battlefield cry, “Stretcher-bearER!” Officers were walking about in the
open, keeping the men to their task, and on the edge of the root-field
three Commanding Officers of the Guards were talking things over,
raising their glasses now and then to their eyes, like spectators at an
Army point-to-point. They were our Ensign’s Commanding Officer, that
Commanding Officer of the Coldstream who had that day rallied his men
to the note of the silver hunting-horn which our Ensign saw sticking
between the buttons of his jacket, and another. Presently, somebody
suggested the advisability of taking a little cover, and they adjourned
into an adjacent deep shell-hole, where the discussion was resumed.
Many days afterwards our Ensign read in a message from ‘The Times’
war correspondent in France how “at one point in the advance certain
Battalion Commanders of the Guards held a conference, which will be
historic, in a shell-hole to try and locate precisely where they were.”

Near the “historic shell-hole” our Ensign met Duke, an ensign of his
own Battalion, one of his own Mess, in a huge trench-coat. He informed
our Ensign that Roderick had been sniped in the trench and badly
wounded.

“You and I,” he said to our Ensign, “seem to be the only Company
Officers left. Everybody else has disappeared. My word! it was hot
getting up to that last trench!”

He told our Ensign that El Capitan (who had been left behind when the
Battalion went into action) had been sent for after Roderick was hit,
and was coming to take over the company.

And here was El Capitan himself, rubbing his hands, bristling with
fight.

“We’re going on,” he grinned; “there’s another mixed party of Guards
and people in shell-holes a bit down the slope, and we’re going to try
and join up with ’em!”

Our Ensign’s recollections of the rest of that afternoon are rather
hazy. He remembers sallying out again with a party of Irish Guardsmen
over the coarse yellow grass towards a long low slope running across
from left to right. There came a perfect tornado of German shells and
a steady incessant swish of bullets from the machine-guns enfilading
the slope from the Quadrilateral. Still the line went on, but strangely
thinned, as our Ensign noticed in wonder. He remembers seeing little
spurts of dust about his feet without understanding what they meant,
and asking himself whether the curious whistling noises followed by
a metallic whirr were rifle grenades. He caught a glimpse of the
Machine-Gun Officer coming out with his men, standing on the slope
behind him. When he looked once more he was gone, and our Ensign never
saw him again.

All the men were in shell-holes now. Our Ensign toppled breathlessly
into one, a shallow crater, where there were two men of the machine-gun
team with a gun. The German guns were searching the whole slope with
whizz-bangs and those rifle grenades, or whatever they were, that
made that whistling noise and that curious metallic whirr (our Ensign
afterwards knew them to be H.E. shrapnel). The shells were bursting
everywhere; one could _taste_ their sulphur reek, and the ears ached
with the perpetual detonations.

The machine-gunners scraped vigorously at the bottom of the hole. It
was obviously too small to shelter three, so our Ensign scrambled
out and, bending low, darted forward. Once more there was a whirr of
bullets. He realised that he must be in full view of some one watching
that slope. He dropped into another shell-hole, a much bigger one than
the last. A solitary Irish Guardsman was sitting there, phlegmatically
scooping himself a little trench with his entrenching tool.

Then our Ensign saw El Capitan striding across the open, his orderly by
his side. As our young man watched, he saw the orderly clap his hand to
his leg and drop. El Capitan disappeared into a shell-hole with him
and presently emerged alone. Our Ensign shouted to him: the other waved
to him to stay where he was, and went striding on calmly back to the
trench.

A man dropped heavily on our Ensign and his companion in the
shell-hole. He was an Irish Guardsman, too.

“I was in with two chaps in the hole beyant,” he panted, “and a shell
is after landing on the edge of the hole. It’s a wonder that meself’s
alive, for thim other two is dead!”

“Well, take a hould on your entrinchin’ tool,” said the other without
sympathy, “and dig this out a bit for th’ officer!”

While they scraped away our Ensign chatted to the two men. Their talk
was all of the “Gerboys harin’ off,” the number of prisoners they had
seen ... incidents of the day’s fighting; of their present position in
a shell-hole on a bullet-swept slope with shells bursting all around
them they said nothing.

The slope of the ground in front rather masked the view, so our young
man resolved to push on a shell-hole or two and try and discover what
was happening at the front of the slope. He crawled for a dozen yards,
then he heard a shell “coming at him,” as the saying is, and he flung
himself into the nearest hole. There he found Duke with an ashen face,
his jacket split up the back and drenched in blood. With him was his
orderly, a big man wearing the D.C.M. ribbon.

“I’m all right,” observed the wounded man; “I’ve got it in the
shoulder, I think. They put a shell--shrapnel, I believe it was--right
on top of us. Have you got a cigarette to spare?”

Our Ensign looked at his watch. It was four o’clock, a brilliant autumn
afternoon, full of light and colour. He found it quite impossible to
realise that it was on the cards that none of them would ever get out
of that hole alive. But the oddness of their situation tickled his
sense of humour, and he remarked upon it as he handed his fellow-ensign
his cigarette-case.

Thus they sat for fully an hour and a half. By that time our Ensign and
the orderly had dug the shell-hole into quite a respectable trench.
They had to work with great circumspection, for the least movement
attracted a shower of projectiles in their direction. Otherwise, the
enemy seemed loth to waste ammunition; when the surface of the slope
was unruffled the guns were silent.

No word came up from the trench behind them, meanwhile, and at
half-past five our Ensign thought he had better go back and find out
what was happening. He promised to send out the stretcher-bearers to
fetch in Duke as soon as darkness fell. Then he crawled cautiously
back, noticing on his way that the shell-hole in which he had first
taken shelter now held two corpses and a wrecked machine-gun.




CHAPTER XV.


On returning to the trench, our Ensign found that, during his absence,
the men had dug a foot or so down and had fashioned a rude kind of
fire-step. Their numbers had been increased by the arrival of two
more officers of our Ensign’s Battalion with mixed parties of Guards.
These two officers had been having an exhilarating time bombing the
enemy out of the right of the third German line. Our Ensign found all
the surviving officers of his Battalion--with the Commanding Officer,
the Doctor, and the Padre, seven in all--installed in a sort of small
observation trench (probably dug originally for the officers of the
German battery installed there). Several of the party were busy
deepening the trench with pick and entrenching tool, but others were
looking through their glasses at the slopes to the right of the yellow
church tower where strange doings were toward.

Word had been brought in from the small party of Guards and other units
holding the most advanced line that the Germans were massing for a
counter-attack. Through his glasses our Ensign could clearly descry
dense parties of men advancing in artillery formation on the distant
slopes bathed in the mellow evening sunshine, while on the roads
transport waggons, artillery limbers, and even motor-buses were to be
seen rolling up. The situation was desperate enough. The Guards were
still without word from the rear, without any known support, without
any definite connection either right or left, without machine-guns, for
the last team had been knocked out that afternoon, without Verey lights
for the approach of darkness, or any material to put the trench in a
proper state of defence. If the Germans attacked it would have to be a
fight to a finish, for, of course, there was no idea of falling back.
Our Ensign noticed the Commanding Officer, who was perfectly cheerful
and entirely confident, examining the chamber of his revolver.

Then, over to the right, a sudden German barrage with nasty, black
5·9 shells, began with unexpected violence. Through the high-spouting
shell-bursts a steady line plodded forward and the word flashed along
the line--

“The Scots Guards are attacking!”

Onward they went in the failing light, tall figures swallowed up in
black masses of smoke, men flung this way and that, ducking, stumbling,
falling. Suddenly our Ensign, watching through his glasses, saw an
officer he knew well topping the skyline,--a shell burst quite close
to the familiar figure--he shot up an arm to protect his face, then
plunged forward again and was lost to view in the eddying smoke and the
gathering dusk. Then the line was slowly swallowed up, and only the
shells remained to bar the advance of supports.

The day died reluctantly, sullenly, and the temperature began to sink.
Our Ensign, who had been doing his share of the digging, suddenly
remembered that he had had no lunch. He looked for his orderly, a
man he had got in the last line to take the place of the wounded
MacFinnigan, but he was nowhere to be seen, vanished in the smoke of
battle together with our Ensign’s haversack containing his sandwiches.
However, El Capitan came to the rescue with a hunk of bread and tongue
and a bar of chocolate, which, together with a draught of the famous
tea-and-brandy mixture, gave our young man a satisfying meal. As he was
eating he saw the stretcher-bearers arriving with Duke, with whom the
Doctor immediately busied himself.

It was almost dark when an Irish Guards sergeant arrived with the
news that the Germans were still massing to attack. Our Ensign never
forgot the sight of that man, a big Celtic type with fine eyes, a
blood-stained bandage round his head, very white against his black
hair. He had come from the mixed party still holding out in the most
advanced line. Having delivered his message, he went forth once more
into the dusk ... and was never seen again. Thus do men vanish in
battle.

The counter-attack never came. Long after the German star-shells had
begun spouting, long after the survivors of the party in the most
advanced line and of the detachment which had gone forward in the
afternoon had been withdrawn, the Guards remained on the _qui vive_.
Our Ensign and his brother ensigns divided the night into watches,
and took turns to spend three hours in the raw air with the line of
outposts which the Guards threw out in front of their trench. That
night, at last, they got touch with a line battalion on the left, and
on the right with another battalion of Guards.

When our Ensign returned to the trench on being relieved on outpost
duty ... it was about midnight ... feeling very cold and utterly weary,
he found an unwonted stir there. Rations and water had come up and were
being distributed among the men. Nor had the officers been forgotten.
Three servants had accompanied the ration party and brought food and
drink for the officers, also the letters. Loud were the praises of the
Quartermaster sung that night, for it was a great feat. All day the
Battalion had been marooned, yet, with the coming of night, the rations
arrived in spite of Heaven knows what difficulties to be surmounted
on the way up. There were three letters for our Ensign, and the first
he opened was a bill from a London florist! That thin sheet of paper,
with its elaborately engraved heading, brought home vividly to him the
extraordinary contrasts in which war abounds,--at one moment cowering
in a shell-hole, with death busy all about; the next moment back again
in the old routine of life, with letters and newspapers ... and bills!
Thus our Ensign pondered as he devoured cold tongue and bread and
biscuits, and sipped some excellent claret out of an enamel mug, at his
feet El Capitan and the Padre snoring peaceably.

When the first streaks of another dawn appeared in the sky, the outpost
line was withdrawn and the men came trudging back to the trench,
muddy, red-eyed with want of sleep, transpierced with cold. Our Ensign
watched the morning creeping rosy-fingered into the sky, and idly
wondered what the day would bring forth. During the night, apparently,
the British artillery had profited by the deep stretch of ground won
from the enemy, for, as soon as it was light, some vicious little
field-pounders began barking very close up behind the Guardsmen’s
position. Then a few British aeroplanes hummed out into the clear
morning sky and flew away. Not long after a regular covey of German
machines sallied out and hovered above the Guards, cramped up in their
shallow and altogether unprotected trench.

“Now we shall catch it,” thought our Ensign, and catch it they did.
It was mostly shrapnel, H.E. shrapnel, black and vile-smelling,
with a deafening detonation, that the Hun sent over, reserving his
heavier stuff for the little battery behind, which barked incessantly
notwithstanding. The German shooting was bad, and the shells fell short
of or over the trench. Several shrapnel bursts clanged and whizzed and
pattered round the heads of the officers as they sat in the bottom
of their corner of the trench, but they had no casualties. In fact,
although the shelling went on at intervals all through the day, the
casualties were few.

But it was an arduous time. There was no means of proceeding along the
trench, for it was far too crowded, and, indeed, there was no object in
doing so. One could only sit there and attempt the impossible--namely,
to pay no heed to the shells. The little group of officers was
strangely isolated, for there was no movement to be observed, either
before or behind them. The ground in the rear was in full view of the
enemy, so communication with the troops in the line behind was cut off
during the daylight hours. It all gave our young man a queer sort of
“desert island” sensation, and he kept on thinking of the shipwrecked
pleasure party in “The Admirable Crichton.”

Some of the officers slept, others ate, others took turns at assisting
the orderlies to deepen still further the trench, the bottom of which
was found to consist of live German shells in their wicker cases. One
of the orderlies, stoutly wielding a pick, made this interesting
discovery, upon which the pick was unanimously disqualified, and only
very gentle scraping with the entrenching tool allowed. Our Ensign
slept a little and ate a little and drank a little, and then did a
thing he had never done before, being a strict Tory, ... he read ‘The
Daily News’ from cover to cover--leading articles, Women’s Page,
advertisements, and all, and then passed it on to somebody else, who
did the same. It was the only newspaper in the trench.

But the green panorama stretched out before them was not without its
compensations either. Ever since the previous afternoon the British
Heavies had played a wonderful game with the pretty little hamlet
with the yellow church tower peering forth from among the trees. Huge
projectiles whooshed noisily through the air, and hurled destruction
among the red roofs and the verdant foliage. A great pall of smoke,
flanked by spouts of black and brown earth, and topped with eddies
of coral-pink haze, was the last that our Ensign had seen of the
little village by daylight. At night, as he went round the outposts,
however, he had still heard the great shells crashing into the
village, and watched a house blaze heavenwards with a glare that lit
up the surrounding spouts of smoke. In the first light of morning he
had seen the yellow church tower but a single ragged stick of broken
masonry amid a tangle of broken trees and gaping roofs. And still the
shells went pounding in. Ah, the guns of the Somme--they do their work
thoroughly!

It is not often in this war of trenches that a man can get a
comprehensive view of an attack. To the little group of officers,
cooped up in their narrow trench, was vouchsafed that morning as
grandiose a spectacle as (our Ensign believes) any man has witnessed in
this war. Somewhere about the hour of half-past nine a light infantry
brigade over on the left attacked, and from their “grand stand,” as
the men, delighted, called it, the Guards could see every detail of
the advance. It was a sight, too, to gladden brave men’s eyes! For
though the little lines of brown dots that went creeping forward up
the distant green slopes were swept away again and again, while across
the valley echoed the loud stutter of the German machine-guns, yet
the succeeding lines went on. The tiny brown figures seemed literally
to be blown down, yet others struggled forward, wave upon wave, until
they were lost to view. Through the glasses one could see the wake
they had left--little figures crawling about, hobbling, with the
stretcher-bearers darting and ducking and dodging to and fro. Once a
figure detached itself from the advancing line, right in the teeth of
that whirlwind of death, bent over a prostrate figure, picked it up,
and started to struggle along ... probably towards the shelter of a
shell-hole. But, even as our Ensign watched, with bated breath, the
little brown figure and his burden rolled over and lay still.

All the valley now re-echoed to the roar of artillery, and the Germans
left the Guards alone while they concentrated on the attacking forces.
The British supports were seen coming up through a heavy barrage, then
men began to trickle back down the slope strewn with brown figures
left in the trail of the advance. What had happened? No one knew. Had
the attack failed? None could say. Little by little the artillery fire
slackened, some inquisitive aeroplanes came out and hovered over the
scene, and, by-and-by, the noise and the smoke subsided. Then, after a
pause, the enemy turned his attention to the Guards, and started his
intermittent bombardment again.

In the course of the day word at last came up from the rear. The Guards
were to maintain their position, and might be called upon to support
an attack. In the afternoon the troops on the left went forward again
to the attack, but the wind blew the smoke across the field of vision,
and the Guards could not exactly see what was going forward. Germans,
however, could still be discerned in and about the ruined village.

Towards dusk that evening our Ensign and a Grenadier officer took a
party of men and raided some _chevaux de frise_--trestles garnished
with barbed wire--which the lynx eye of our Ensign’s Commanding Officer
had noticed in front of a German trench in their rear. This was lifted
bodily in sections, and put out in front of the trench to furnish some
slight measure of protection in the event of a German attack.

Night fell again, dank and cold, with a menace of rain. Still there was
no word of relief. How distant seemed that fresh dawn when, under the
paling stars, the Guards had gone forward to the attack! Everybody
was worn out. Excitement, fatigue, want of sleep, had done their
work. But no respite could be granted. Again, at nightfall, the line
of outposts was posted; and again the ensigns, haggard and scrubby,
did a shift each in turn. The men were so utterly exhausted that they
literally could not keep their eyes open as they lay crouching in their
shell-holes in pairs, their faces towards the spouting German lights,
their backs towards the blackness of their trench. Our Ensign, moving
continually during his turn of duty to keep himself awake, had to go
from shell-hole to shell-hole and assure himself that the sentries were
watchful by kicking the soles of their boots.

While our Ensign was out during the hours before midnight, in company
with one of his sergeants, he managed to get in touch with the troops
who had made the gallant attacks that morning and afternoon. In a
sunken road which had been wrested from the enemy, and was strewn with
German and British dead, he found the wounded laid out in long lines
of stretchers, moaning, shivering with cold, pathetically asking for
cigarettes--a thing he could not give them. They were waiting their
turn to be carried down over the broken and shell-swept ground to the
rendezvous of the field ambulances, a mile or so back.

In a German dug-out our Ensign found two battalion commanders supping
off bread and chocolate and a drain of whisky in a bottle, with them
two or three young officers. They were all mud-stained and worn, but
they made our Ensign welcome and offered him a share in their drain
of whisky. They told our Ensign they were momentarily expecting to be
relieved, and promised to inform their successors of the Guards’ line
of outposts, so that they could join up with the Guards.

When our Ensign got back to the trench, he heard glad tidings: the
Guards were to be relieved that night. It was half-past one in the
morning, but there were no signs of the relief as yet; and presently
our Ensign was sent out again with another party of men to strengthen
the outpost line, for there were rumours of a German attack to be
delivered at two o’clock.

Once more the weary men, many of whom had already been three hours on
outpost duty that night, fared forth into the blackness in a smother
of rain. The night was very dark, and it was hard work getting the men
out of the trench and lined up, for they were heavy with sleep. Perhaps
this operation created an undue amount of noise; but the fact remains
that hardly had our Ensign led them into the open than a perfect storm
of German bullets came over--machine-guns stuttered loudly, and a great
shower of German lights soared up into the sky.

Everybody flung himself flat on his face, our Ensign reflecting that
the enemy seemed to anticipate a further British attack rather than
to contemplate launching one himself. Presently the storm abated, and
our Ensign rose to his feet. But the man at his side did not stir.
Bending down, our Ensign shaded his lamp with his hand and flashed the
light for an instant on to the prostrate figure. It was our Ensign’s
orderly--his third since the attack started--lying dead on his back
with a bullet through the head. He was the only casualty.

       *       *       *       *       *

The cold night was all but spent, and the sky was slowly changing to
the play of the approaching day, when, from out of a scene of some
bustle about the trench, word came to our Ensign to bring the outposts
in ... the reliefs had arrived. Never was relief effected more swiftly.
It went at a whirlwind pace. Stiff and aching, the outposts stumbled
in and were pushed by their comrades into their places in the sadly
shrunk companies of the Battalion; a blur of figures groped their way
into the trench, a couple of infantry subalterns emerged and reported
to the Commanding Officer, ... how fresh they looked, thought our
Ensign....

Then a German shell screamed over and burst noisily, scattering a
pailful of shrapnel about: another followed, and another. The sky is
flushing with the coming of the sun: every moment the light grows
brighter. Hurry, hurry, or the Huns will finish off even that wasted
shadow of a battalion before it clears the ridge. What are they waiting
for in front? Clang ... whee ... ee ... oo ... oo! goes the shrapnel.
Why the devil don’t they move on? Crash! there falls another shell....

But the leading company is off at a good steady amble, the rest of the
Battalion at its heels, each company commander taking the shortest
way that will bring his men out of the zone of visibility behind the
shelter of the ridge. Away they go, across the German third line,
where the only Guards left now are the dead, and muffled figures are
frying bacon over little wood fires,--past shell-holes tenanted by
stiff forms, over roads strewn with field-grey corpses and littered
with the jumble of the battlefield, down the slope back to life and
air and safety, where the larks are singing in the pellucid sky,
where the gunners are clinking dixies as they come and go about their
breakfast--past a smashed gun here and a wrecked horse ambulance
there, and so on to a road where signallers and sappers and R.A.M.C.
orderlies, washing and shaving and breakfasting in the bright sunshine,
wave an encouraging hand as the Guards go by.

There, in an open space by a wood, spruce figures--the officers
and non-commissioned officers who had been left behind--are moving
in and out of the muddy, dishevelled Guardsmen grouped about the
smoking cookers. Peter is there, and all the others; and there,
too, is the faithful Johnson, waiting with our Ensign’s cap and a
discreetly murmured “Glad to see you all right, sir!” There also the
Mess Sergeant, pink and perspiring, darting to and fro among a cloud
of servants busy over a white cloth spread on the ground ready for
breakfast. The grateful smell of breakfast is in the air and the buzz
of many voices--but all the movement stops, all the voices are hushed,
as the Battalion, much reduced in strength, marches in, forms up,
and is dismissed by the Commanding Officer. Then the buzz of voices
breaks forth again, hearty greetings are exchanged, there is much
hand-shaking, while the company officers, their company sergeant-majors
by their sides, run about and see that the men get their breakfast.

Half an hour later our Ensign sank down beside the white table-cloth.
The craving for warm food was uppermost, stronger even than the desire
to sleep, ... it was a Gargantuan meal in the sunshine. Whilst he ate,
he heard of the fortunes of the fight, the fine advance made, the
numbers of prisoners captured, the success of the French, the losses,
the death of this friend and of that, the condition of the wounded, ...
but it made no impression on his mind at the time. He was too tired,
his mind was too benumbed by the sensations he had experienced, to
grasp or to realise anything.

Then, finally, came the march back to camp, the drums of the Battalion
at the head. They followed that self-same road by which our Ensign had
seen the remnants of the Irish Division coming out of action a week or
so before. The men held themselves erect, and stepped out well to the
roll of the drums and the squeal of the fifes, which brought out on to
the roadside banks men from batteries, bivouacs, and horse-lines all
around. Near the camp the Brigadier met them and walked a part of the
way beside the Commanding Officer, sitting his horse at the head of the
column.

And so, to the lilt of the regimental quickstep, they came to a great
city of canvas spread out upon a breezy hillside, and marched in to
rest through lines of other Guardsmen, like them, just out of action,
who smiled them a welcome through the grime on their faces.




CHAPTER XVI.

  “The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
  Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
    Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
  Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.”

                                                         --OMAR KHAYYÁM.


The morrow of battle is worse than battle itself, worse even than the
eve. For, when the weary body has been rested, the dazed brain begins
to reassert itself, and the flood of realisation pains like the rush
of blood to a numbed limb. The empty messes, the missing faces, the
shrunken appearance of the battalion when the roll is called, the pile
of kits lying ownerless outside the Quartermaster’s store ... each of
these visible signs of the battalion having passed through the fire
the mind takes in, reluctantly and recoiling from each fresh shock. In
sleep it revives shudderingly every phase of the fight, and, liberated
from the shackles of the will, lying powerless in the ban of slumber,
suffers unresisting, a thousand times intensified, every torment of
fear and horror which the waking mind has suppressed. For dreams--so
the psychologists tell us--are but the expression of emotions
consciously or subconsciously held in restraint in the waking hours.

Tents, as far as the eye could see, pitched in a sea of mud, ruffled by
chill gusts of rain and wind sweeping across the slopes; a mammoth gun
belching forth green fire and yellow smoke a few hundred yards away,
the thunder of distant cannon, blending with the stir of the camp;
drums beating, pipes skirling from the lines of the Scots Guards, the
solemn harmony of men’s voices singing hymns (only the Welsh Guards
possessed a choir like that!) ... these were the sights and sounds to
which our Ensign awoke from his first troubled sleep after getting back
to camp.

He came to his senses with a start of terror that sent him flying to
the tent door. Hideous nightmare shapes were haunting the tents and
huts where officers and men of the Guards slept the sleep of utter
exhaustion, physical and mental, the terrifying spectres that drift
through the battle--dreams of men who have been in action. Until our
Ensign had gazed long upon the lines of tents swaying in the wind,
and had seen the familiar khaki figures, wrapped in their waterproof
capes, passing to and fro in the mud, his mind remained in the grip of
a nameless terror: he did not know who or where he was, whether he were
alive or dead, on earth or in space. Thus do men awake from their first
sleep after coming out of battle.

For a few instants he felt like one raised from the dead. Slowly and
painfully his mind picked up, one by one, the threads of his life
where it seemed to have left off on that sunny morning--surely it was
years ago?--when the whistles had sounded, the hurricane din had broken
loose, and the Guards had moved forward into battle.

But there across the tent lay Peter’s sleeping valise and things:
there, on the tent pole, hung the little mirror they shared in common.
The tent was dry and clean: the yellow light diffused through its
canvas sides was bright and comforting. And here was the faithful
Johnson, getting ready his bath and a complete change of clothing, and
collecting his torn and blood-stained uniform for the battalion tailor
to mend and scour.

Lazily our Ensign fished a box of cigarettes from his kit spread out
beside him, lit one, and lying back in his warm sleeping-bag, watched
the smoke curl upwards towards the peaked dome of the tent. He was
stiff all over, every bone in his body was aching, but he was conscious
of a deep sense of thanksgiving; he was overpoweringly glad to be back
in the world again.

They had to carry on. He had a pang when he found all those joyous
company Messes he had known shrunk to a group of officers small enough
to take their meals together at one short table. He would not let
himself think of the old double-company Mess, for only he and two
others survived--all the rest were casualties. “_Der Mann stirbt_,”
says the old German maxim, “_das Regiment bleibt_,” and the old
Battalion routine continued unbroken. The Battalion had to be remade,
companies re-shuffled, new non-commissioned officers appointed,
casualty lists made up, names sent in for decorations, and with it all
the old duties to be done--rifle inspections and rum issues and all the
rest. The very matter-of-factness of this resumption of the old life
hurt a little sometimes, but the work of the Army, like the Government
of the realm, brooks no interruption.

Drafts arrived to fill up the gaps in the ranks of the Battalion.
They saw the first batch of these parading one angry and lowering
autumn evening as they trooped back through the mud and rain from the
little cemetery in the centre of the camp, where they had laid to
rest a brother officer ... a plain rite with no other ceremonial than
that with which the simple majesty of the Burial Service invests the
humblest obsequies, with the rain blowing damp upon their bare heads,
and the guns of the Somme growling in the distance.

Truly the Regiment is a thing immortal.

       *       *       *       *       *

But even in the midst of the work of reorganising the Battalion,
rumours began to circulate that the Guards, like other Divisions,
were going to have “a second helping” of the great offensive. There
was a plain hint of this intention in the very stirring message of
congratulation which the Brigadier sent to the Battalion for their
achievements on September 15: “You may be called upon in the near
future,” the passage ran, “to carry out similar work, and I know that
you will not fail.”

Of course they would not, but the news created something akin to dismay
amid the little band of survivors of the great advance--not from any
reluctance to play a man’s part again, but from apprehension as to how
the strong leaven of untried recruits in their ranks would withstand
the fury of a modern battle as their first taste of active service.
Events were to prove how utterly groundless these apprehensions were,
but there was a pretty general feeling at the time that it was hard
luck for the Battalion’s fine fighting reputation to be thus staked on
the untested quality of new drafts.

Moreover, this time it was the turn of our Ensign’s Battalion to lead
the attack. Everybody was going in: and our Ensign found himself back
with his company, as second in command to Peter and the only other
officer in the company. Nos. 1 and 2 companies were to furnish the
first “waves” of the assault.

One afternoon the Corps Commander rode over to the camp, and from his
horse told the officers of our Ensign’s Battalion, assembled in a
semicircle, what was expected of the Battalion, and why. In a few very
brief but very lucid words he explained the higher strategy of the
Somme offensive, which the general public was to learn three months’
later from Sir Douglas Haig’s memorable despatch, and assured them that
what the great British artillery superiority on the Somme could do
to lighten their task would be done in a measure that should surpass
anything the Germans had yet experienced in the way of bombardments.
Then, wishing them all good luck, he rode away, and in simple language,
such as soldiers understand, addressed the non-commissioned officers
to the same effect. And that simple, straightforward talk was like
a searchlight that picked out and held in its bright beam the word
“Duty,” which is engraved in every soldier’s mind.

       *       *       *       *       *

So, on a wet, dark evening, the Battalion marched back again to that
little copse where in the dug-out “The Last Supper of the Girondins”
had taken place. The roads had suffered terribly from the combined
effects of the rain and the heavy traffic of the recent advance. They
had been churned into deep quagmires of glutinous mud, where guns and
limbers and G.S. waggons kept on getting bogged, where the men sank in
above the middle of their puttees at every step.

What with the darkness and the mud and the frequent blocks owing to
vehicles sticking fast in the slime, the traffic was in a state of
chaos. The rain pelted down unmercifully, and it was so dark that a
man could not distinguish the features of his neighbour in the ranks.
Reliefs and fatigue parties, passing to and from the front line, got
inextricably mixed up. Men lost touch, and amid the curses of the
drivers as they urged their exhausted horses or mules through the deep
bog of the road, echoed cries such as: “Fatigue party this way!” “All
Welsh Guards to move forward”; “Make way there! Stretcher-bearers!”
while the rain splashed sorrowfully down and the air trembled to the
thundering crash of the guns all around.

The Battalion took about four hours to march the few miles separating
their last camp from the copse, and when they finally got in they were
all drenched and liberally besmeared with mud. A rum issue warmed them
a little, and then once more the men set about scraping themselves
dry spots in the crumbling shell-holes and building shelters out of
the litter of branches and shell-baskets and corrugated iron sheeting
scattered about the copse.

Their labours proved to be in vain, for at luncheon the next day a
baby-faced infantry subaltern walked up to the officers’ mess and very
diffidently suggested that the Battalion was occupying his battalion’s
billet. The Brigade was consulted and gave the verdict in favour of the
Line, so that afternoon the Battalion moved to another portion of the
wood, where, in a number of German dug-outs, all more or less battered,
and in shell-holes, they managed to make themselves fairly comfortable.
With the aid of the mess-servants, the officers managed to put a fairly
large dug-out into a state of repair, thatching the holes in the roof
with sandbags filled with earth, laid across iron girders, and building
up the gaps in the back of the shelter with sheets of corrugated iron
which one of the orderlies found lying in the wood. The floor was
carpeted with clean sandbags, a table was knocked together and a line
of seats constructed out of filled sandbags. A brazier of glowing coals
was placed in the doorway, for the nights were very cold, and thus
they managed to install themselves with some measure of comfort.

The men displayed extraordinary ingenuity in the little bivouacs and
earths they constructed out of their waterproof sheets and all kinds of
odd material. Fortunately the weather improved, and the sun came out
hot in the daytime, though the air got very cold after nightfall.

Early each morning the companies were taken out by an officer and
given half an hour’s physical drill in the bright sunshine--either a
little doubling (which was a matter of some difficulty, as the slopes
on which they exercised were pitted with shell-holes) or leap-frog or
follow-my-leader. In the afternoons there were fatigues to be done,
mostly salvage fatigues, to clear that littered brown slope over which
the Guards had advanced.

Until he had superintended one of these salvage parties, our Ensign
had had no idea of the extraordinary quantity and variety of articles
with which a battlefield is strewn. The men of the party--generally 100
strong--were spread out over the area designated by the Brigade to be
cleared, and ordered to bring in every single article they found, no
matter what it was, and deposit their burdens at a salvage-dump which
had been formed by the roadside. At the dump lay in huge piles rusty
rifles, both British and German, bayonets and equipment and greatcoats
the same, khaki caps and German helmets, boxes of ammunition and bombs,
thousands of rounds of ammunition, parts of machine- and Lewis guns
and trench mortars, field-dressings in their neat brown cases, and all
kinds of unused rations. All the dead that had strewn the slope had, by
this time, been covered in, and the articles which the salvage parties
brought by the hundred to the dump were merely the superficial litter
of the battlefield.

Altogether the Battalion spent four days in the wood. For the greater
part of the time they were shelled--an utterly haphazard, sporadic
bombardment, with large black 5·9 shells. In comparison with their
noise and number, the projectiles did very little damage, but they gave
the survivors of the 15th of September an insight into the quality
of the new drafts. One of these shells exploded in the middle of the
night, with a crash that shook the wood, within a score of yards of
a leafy shelter beneath which three of the recruits were sleeping.
But, as the Company Sergeant-Major informed our Ensign in accents of
admiration afterwards, the three recruits merely turned over on their
sides and went to sleep again.

It was 9 o’clock in the evening of September 24 when the Battalion
started out for the trenches from which the attack was to be delivered
the next day, at 12.35 P.M. instead of the more customary early
hour. Our Ensign’s company led off, and as both officers had been
over the route they found their way safely to the rendezvous, a
Tank stranded on the plain, where the guides sent by the battalion
they were relieving met them. The night was as dark as pitch and
the German guns most unpleasantly active; in fact, as soon as they
had topped the ridge--a long winding caterpillar of silent marching
figures--high-explosive shrapnel began to burst about them with
unpleasant force and in dangerous proximity.

Our Ensign marked down their experiences of that night in his diary as
“the most beastly night I ever remember.” Men marching at night are
always inclined to hurry the pace when they come under shell fire, and
as the going was very bad over the loose and crumbling shell-holes, the
rear of the company, where our Ensign was, had considerable difficulty
in keeping touch with the head. Night after night parties of Germans
walked into the British lines, for in the devastated country where most
trenches were merely lines of shell-holes connected up, there were no
landmarks to guide one. Once touch were lost with the head of the
column and the guide, our Ensign knew that he and his men stood a very
good chance of landing themselves in the German lines.

There was a communication trench, but it was full of water, so the
companies went up over the open. Several times they had to cross the
trench in its windings, and each time our Ensign had to help his
heavily-laden men to leap the yawning gulf, and then urge them forward
at the double to catch up with the rest of the party disappearing into
the gloom.

At length they reached their destination--a very narrow, shallow
trench dug in the soft brown earth on the grassy downward slope of a
low ridge, the German star-shells spouting from the flat ground below
them. The trench was so narrow that the reliefs had to stand on the
edge until the battalion occupying it had scrambled out. There were no
dug-outs or shelters of any kind--save that, here and there, men had
scraped long shelves in the back wall. The only fire-step was a series
of rough embrasures scooped at intervals in the forward wall; parapet
there was none, for the edge of the trench was practically flush with
the ground.

The relief was accomplished with remarkable alacrity, as reliefs in
such circumstances generally are, and the outgoing battalion hurried
helter-skelter away into the darkness amid a rain of shells. The only
means of communication between one end of that crowded trench and the
other was by walking along the top. Luckily, as the night advanced, the
Hun became quieter, so Peter and our Ensign made their way to the end
of their section of the trench and verified their connection with the
other Guards battalion which was to attack the next day on their right,
and got back unscathed to the officers’ corner of the trench.

There they found El Capitan and his ensign who were to take No. 1
Company “over the top” in the morning. The only accommodation was
a long shelf cut in the wall of the trench which would shelter two
sitting or one lying, and a niche, scooped out of the back wall about
level with their waists, which they used as a table.

Throughout the long cold hours until daylight the officers took it turn
and turn about to watch, whilst the remaining three sought slumber in
the sand-hole or on the floor of the trench. But sleep was out of the
question, for once below the level of the ground, by some trick of
acoustics, the air trembled so violently with the crash of the guns
that the ear-drums positively ached. All night the Germans shelled them
in desultory fashion, the shells ploughing up and down the trench but
never in it, and the only casualties they sustained were in a luckless
water fatigue party. All night the British artillery pounded away at
the German lines, cleaving a passage by which the Guards would advance
in the noonday hours.

Morning broke--the morning of September 25--pearly and fresh and
delightful, and from the shallow trench the officers surveyed the
objectives of the coming attack set in a landscape whose perfect
serenity was marred only by the gleaming shell-bursts that dotted it
everywhere. They saw the long gash in the brown shell-ploughed soil
which marked the trench, their first objective; beyond it the village,
embowered in foliage, swathed in coral-pink and saffron smoke ... a
yellow, jagged fragment of church tower, a glimpse of long skeleton
roofs and of gaping white walls ... with the capture of which their
day’s work would be done.

By some miracle of organisation servants turned up with breakfast,
and the four officers munched cold bacon and bread-and-butter and
hard-boiled eggs, and drank scalding-hot tea whilst they studied the
scene before them. Aeroplanes--British, of course: the Hun variety was
a rarity on the Somme in those days--soared out into the cloudless sky,
and fussed about over the German lines amid woolly-white shell-bursts,
whilst the German trenches broke their silence with the vicious stutter
of machine-guns.

All the time the British shells screamed overhead and burst with vast
brown earth-spouts and creamy belches of smoke about the trench and
the village. Up and down that first objective they went, now flinging
high into the air great beams of wood and other dark objects that might
have been human limbs, now sending up merely a low billow of dust and
smoke, showing that the projectile had fallen plumb into the trench.
In the village the shells crashed and thundered and sent great masses
of masonry and woodwork flying, and once, after a burst of pink smoke
had cleared away, our Ensign saw that the jagged finger of church tower
had vanished.




CHAPTER XVII.

  “But, by the Mass! our hearts are in the trim!”--_Henry V._


The noonday sun was high overhead. The long hand of the watch was
passing the half-hour mark after noon. The first wave of Guards was
waiting for the whistle-blast that would launch them to the attack,
rifle and bayonet in their hands, helmets strapped on tight, and one
foot in the little steps they had cut in the forward wall of the
trench. The men of the second wave stood, likewise ready, leaning with
their backs to the parados, to let the first wave get clear.

Peter and our Ensign were in the middle of the trench, girt about
with revolvers and lamps and compasses, helmets back to front so as
to hide their regimental crest that would proclaim them as officers,
coat collars turned up, and rifles by their sides. Peter was on the
fire-step, for he was to lead the first wave: a spin of the coin had
decided it: our Ensign leant against the back of the trench, and both
had their eyes glued to their left wrists, watching the long hand of
their watches crawling forward to the appointed hour.

“Now!” cried Peter.

“Now!” echoed the other, and even as the first wave scrambled out, the
roar of the guns increased to whirlwind intensity, and all the stretch
of No Man’s Land in front of them began to seethe yet more madly with
the bursting shells.

Away the solid brown line goes, a zig-zagging line of figures,
diminishing to right and left into mere dots, slowly, slowly, for
they must not walk into that creeping hurricane which is sweeping the
ground as they go forward. The noise is terrific, a vast cascade
of reverberating crashes blending with the swift, incessant, wingèd
scream of heavy metal hurtling through space, the only ingredient sound
distinguishable, the high-pitched whinny and spit of bullets in the air.

No whistle could be heard in such a din, and with the drill-book signal
for “Advance”--the right arm stretched forward and dropped--our Ensign
got his second wave out of the trench into the screaming, vibrating
atmosphere of No Man’s Land.

How the men responded to that signal! Never a laggard was there. Out
they scrambled and staggered and hopped,--it is no easy thing for a
big man, heavily laden, to get out of a narrow trench,--eager and
willing and determined, one helping the other, spreading out to the
proper extended distance, and dressing by the right as calmly as if
they were out on a company training day at home. Out they came with a
will, thankful to exchange their narrow quarters in the trench for the
freedom of the advance.

Over the top! Has any man’s life ever offered such a thrill, such a
sensation of freedom, such a bursting from incarceration into liberty,
from darkness into light, as that inspiriting leap into the open?
Gone the uneasiness, the doubtings of the eve--only the great moral
uplifting, which the din of battle brings, remains.

Slowly the line surged forward across the broken ground towards the
long ragged fringe of red-rusted wire running in front of the German
trench. The second wave soon caught up with and merged in the first,
and the whole line went on together, Peter and our Ensign and the
Company Sergeant-Major darting to and fro to restrain the eagerness of
the men, and prevent them from plunging into that maelstrom of fire
that crept forward yard by yard in front of them.

The advance was so leisurely that our Ensign had plenty of time to
look about him. He saw with some surprise--so slow is the mind to
take in the reality of death--how here a man and there a man would
suddenly stop and throw himself down with a deliberation that would
have excited the ire of a stage manager rehearsing a death scene.
He gazed with astonishment on the secrets which that serene and
silent stretch of ground, as viewed from their trench, now abruptly
revealed,--waxen and sorrowful corpses in clean field-grey overcoats
sprawling in shell-holes, the victims of that morning’s bombardment;
wounded Guardsmen waiting, with that dumb apathy which is such a fine
characteristic of our British wounded, for the stolid and dauntless
stretcher-bearers.

A brace of partridge suddenly whirred up from the broken and splintered
festoons of wire at their very feet. Our Ensign watched them fly off
to the left, and noted that they came unscathed through the torrent of
fire. The men laughed uproariously at the appearance of the birds,--it
takes but very little to set men laughing in battle.

Now they were at the wire which reached to the very lip of the German
trench, all battered and pounded. Already frightened faces appeared,
mouthing from under the ugly German coal-scuttle helmets their cry of
“Kamerad! Kamerad!” The whole line burst into a wild “whoroo”: the yell
echoed up and down the line, and even rang out above the din of the
fight. Then, like a torrent, the khaki flood poured into the trench.

From the top of the trench our Ensign surveyed its length. Germans
scuttled out of dug-outs, running this way and that uncertainly, like
trapped rats--then seeing the khaki surging down upon them, flung away
their rifles and threw up their hands, bleating “Kamerad! Kamerad!”

What a sight that trench was! The dead were lying everywhere--stamped
or blown into the soft mud bottom, sprawling at the mouths of the
dug-outs, prone upon the parapet; and amongst the flaccid forms others
yet alive, with ghastly wounds, shuddering, gibbering, slavering,
groaning, whimpering for mercy, for food, for water. There, in a tiny
unfinished shelter, cowered a youth with a shattered jaw, slobbering
blood; here, in the bottom of the trench, lay another field-grey with
one foot blown clean away--mud-stained, unshaven, filthy--sobbing in a
sing-song voice, “_Ach, bitte! ach, bitte!_” and all around the shells
screamed through the air or crashed with hideous reverberation and
clouds of dust and stifling reek into the crumbling ground.

Our Ensign took his orderly and a couple of men and pushed along to
the right into a bare and apparently unoccupied stretch of trench.
He wanted to link up with the Guards attacking on their right, so
as to form an unbroken front. The German barrage had begun, and the
shells were bursting freely about the newly captured position. Behind
them they could see the supports swarming out across the ground over
which they had just advanced. Our Ensign caught a glimpse of a gross
German, fat and unwieldy, sprawling dead on the parapet, his face to
the ground. Our young man found himself wondering fearfully if a shell
would come and hideously dissipate that mass of flesh. With a shudder
he hurried on.

They joined hands with the Guards on their right, and heard from the
hot and grimy men a hurried tale of uncut wire and heavy losses. Our
Ensign was told the story of the heroic death of a friend, an officer,
who had adventured forth alone to cut the wire that barred their
progress, and had met his death with his face to the enemy, the cutters
in his hand. Then a man came up to our Ensign,--there was a German
officer in a dug-out who demanded to speak to “th’ officer.”

Our Ensign followed the private, who led him back along the trench
to a dug-out, at the entrance of which an officer stood facing a
ring of Guardsmen. He was the old type of Prussian officer--none
of your upstart, counter-jumper, pot-bellied, bespectacled,
“I-surrender-and-let’s-call-it-a-draw” sort of special reservist,
such as we have all met on the Somme, but a tall well-groomed figure,
reticent and coldly hostile. He was wearing a Prussian military cap and
a well-fitting grey overcoat. In his hand he held his shrapnel helmet.
He introduced himself in good German fashion, with a little bow and
click of heels, as a Lieutenant of the 240th Infantry Regiment. He came
from the Rhine, where our Ensign had learnt his language.

“There are none but wounded men here with me,” he said in German, “and
we shall make no further resistance.”

“You’d better not,” observed the British officer.

“I myself am also wounded,” the German went on, protruding his leg
and showing his trouser ripped up to the thigh, which was wrapped in
blood-stained bandages, “and I will give you my word of honour that
there shall be no act of aggression on our part. Will you be good
enough to see that there is no killing?”

He used the German expression “_Totmachen_,” infinitely grimmer, our
Ensign thought, than the English equivalent.

“Nobody is going to touch you if you don’t get up to any tricks,” our
Ensign answered. In exchange for the German’s blunt expression he gave
him a blunter. “_Nur keine Schweinerei Ihrerseits!_” were the words he
used. A German best understands plain speaking. But our young man felt
himself strangely moved at the spectacle of this Prussian, who walked
surrounded by a halo in his own country, pleading so humbly for his
life and that of his men’s, with his besotted German conviction that
as they had done, so they would be done by.

Thus the pourparlers of surrender were conducted in a circle of big and
gentle British soldiers. The conditions were that all the wounded who
were able to walk should come out of the dug-out and be sent down to
the rear under escort, and that the rest should remain where they were
under guard until they could be removed by the stretcher-bearers. Our
Ensign posted a couple of sentries at the dug-out with instructions
to shoot anybody who tried to come out. He carefully explained these
orders to the officer.

“You’d better go too,” our Ensign added, “for this trench is going to
be very unhealthy presently, and you’ll be sorry you stayed!”

But the officer protested that he could not walk, so he stayed where he
was under guard. He offered our Ensign his helmet, but our young man
declined it.

“We’re too busy to go collecting souvenirs!” he said, and went off to
help his company commander get the men to work on the consolidation of
the position.

Presently, while the shells spouted on in front of them in a steady
stream, and German shells screamed back barraging all the slope behind,
the advance went forward again, the supports coming up to hold the
newly-won trench, and the attacking waves going forward to the next
objective, a sunken road skirting the village. Here they found a
rudimentary fire-position with several deep dug-outs and massively
constructed shelters, into which they dropped a few bombs to make all
safe within. But there was no living sign of the enemy.

A few hundred yards across to the right lay the centre of the village,
a wild wreck of crumbling ruins, bathed in the mellow afternoon
sunshine which gilded the smoke-clouds drifting in and out of the gaunt
roofs. The din of battle raged unabated, for in addition to the crash
of the mighty projectiles exploding in the village, German shells burst
noisily from time to time about their position on the road. But the
shooting was poor. The enemy, deprived of the high ground and driven
from the air, was shooting by the map and he was guessing badly.

It was very hot. The officers got the men strung out along the road
until they were in touch with both flanks. The men lay down and
wiped the sweat from their eyes and foreheads and drained their
water-bottles, and chatted eagerly about their experiences of the day.
Peter and our Ensign sat on a fallen tree-trunk and discussed the
exact location of their next objective, a slope on the far side of the
village, and debated the possibility of trouble in the forthcoming
assault on the village, which was known to be very strongly fortified.

All this time the hamlet showed no sign of life. Scan it as they
would, their glasses showed them nothing more than the scatter of
splintered roof-trees, the litter of red tiles, the torn white masonry
of the houses,--of the enemy no trace. The next advance would take the
Battalion right through the extreme left of the village--first through
the orchards behind some houses lining a road leading into the main
street; then across the road, through the houses on the other side
and through more orchards to a sunken road, and across that to the
slope beyond. Certainly the place had had an exemplary pounding from
the artillery; but German machine-guns have a way of surviving the
most ruthless artillery bombardment--especially in these villages of
the Somme, which are honeycombed with old quarries and subterranean
passages. It was quite on the cards, therefore, that the Battalion
might be blown off the map before it reached its final objective.

But they did not bother their heads much about that. The men were
in the best of spirits. The old hands were delighted with the stout
bearing of the young recruits, while the new-comers, if a trifle more
sober, were well buoyed up by the excitement of the advance. The
Company Sergeant-Major gave our Ensign a Gold Flake cigarette, and our
Ensign offered in return his water-bottle, which had again been filled
with the famous tea-and-brandy mixture.

It was time to move on again. The officers ran up and down the line
getting the men up. They needed no encouragement: they were frantic to
get on. So the line swept forward into the village.

They plunged into a tangle of long grass and shell-holes and broken
stumps of gnarled apple-trees, and through a great farmyard surrounded
by big barns and outhouses smashed and torn by the shells, showing
lines of bunks and blankets tossed aside as though the place had been
forsaken in a hurry. Somewhere on the right the loud tack-tack of
machine-guns resounded, and the swish of bullets brushed along their
front. The officers checked the line a moment. On the right they saw
a string of Guardsmen doubling into a house which spat fire from the
first storey and basement windows. Abruptly the swish of bullets
ceased, and the stream of figures tumbled out of the house again and
followed in the wake of the advance.

In its day the village must have been a charming spot, its comfortable
white houses with their red roofs embowered in ancient trees: in
the spring, when the fruit-trees, clustering so thickly round every
farmstead, were in blossom, it must have been rarely beautiful. Our
Ensign had seen it in its prime, for on September 15 he had taken a
compass-bearing on its yellow church tower, now battered to a blunt and
crumbling stump by the British bombardment.

They pressed on through the tangle of ruins, clambering over palings
and jumping ditches like a party of boys out for a day in the country,
past the ravaged houses and the broken trees, with the smell of
singeing cloth and charred beams in their nostrils. They burst from the
last orchard into the sunken road with a vision before their eyes of
field-grey figures darting away across the fields. Then the men yelled
their battle-cry and rifles rang out, and they all poured into the road
and up the bank on the other side, and so out upon a wide grassy slope
commanding a great green plain, where the British shells were bursting
in a long, white, fleecy line.

Our Ensign looked at his watch. It was a quarter to three in the
afternoon, and already the day was won. But he knew the hardest part
was coming. Now they had to hold what they had gained.

Men are always inclined to rest on their laurels, to sit down in the
final objective and light their fags and stretch their legs and talk
over their experiences with their pals. But Peter, radiating his
satisfaction at their success, chased up and down the line, setting
every man to dig the new trench.

They dug in on the fringe of a potato field. The men turned up potatoes
by the score, and laid them carefully on one side, saying they would
do for supper. The sun burnt down hotly upon them out of a clear blue
sky as they dug and burrowed and scraped. The German shells screamed
noisily over their heads, but none fell near the diggers. The British
barrage still seethed and danced all over the plain in front of them.

That steady rain of shells was too much for the Huns, who had fled
from the village to take refuge in shell-holes in the open. By twos or
threes, and by larger packets, they kept bursting into view, running
like men possessed, their hands above their heads, while the Guards,
looking up from their digging, cheered derisively. Several parties thus
broke cover and rushed hell-for-leather into the midst of our Ensign’s
Battalion, where they meekly, almost gratefully, submitted to be
searched, and were marched off at a good round pace to the rear through
the raging German barrage.

But now the Germans seemed to have located the new line. Their guns
shortened their range, and whizz-bangs and 5·9 shells began bursting
about the digging Guardsmen. The officers went to and fro encouraging
the men, sometimes lending a hand with pick or spade to give a good
example. The shell fire was getting hotter every minute, and there was
absolutely no cover save such as the shallow shell-holes afforded.
There were casualties, and the cry of “Stretcher-bearER!” echoed up and
down the line.

El Capitan sat on a corn-stook writing his report for the Commanding
Officer; Peter was in conference with the Company Sergeant-Major. The
men had buckled to their work with a will and were digging feverishly,
the sweat pouring down their faces. A British aeroplane soared, shrilly
tooting, above their heads.

Lord, how hot it was! Our Ensign doffed his heavy helmet and wiped
his brow. His rifle, which he had carried round with him all day, was
planted, bayonet downwards, in the ground beside him. In a shell-hole,
a few yards away, sat a brother officer whom he had not seen since
the previous evening. The latter called out to him to come over and
sit down. Our Ensign walked across and dropped on to the edge of
the shell-hole, at the bottom of which a man was scraping with his
entrenching tool.

He filled his pipe and got out his match-box to light it. Then, from
behind, something struck him a tremendous blow and lifted him high in
the air with a mighty force, against which he struggled in vain with
mind and body, desperately fighting to remain on the ground, striving
to retain the mastery over himself....

       *       *       *       *       *

It was during his convalescence that this narrative came to be written.


THE END.


PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES


Obvious typos corrected. Periods printed after abbreviations (e.g.
Dubs., Coy., and notably gym.) have been left as-is.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.



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