Chapter V: Part 5

A farm of some size had been at one time a point in the advanced trenches, and had been converted into a 'keep.' Its late owner would never have recognised it in its new part. Such walls as were left had been buttressed out of sight by sandbags; trenches twisted about the outbuildings, burrowed under and into them, and wriggled out again through holes in the walls; a market cart, turned upside down, and earthed over to form a bomb-store, occupied a corner of the farmyard; cover for snipers' loopholes had been constructed from ploughshares; a remaining fragment of a grain loft had become an 'observing station'; the farm kitchen a doctor's dressing station; the cow-house a machine-gun place; the cellar, with the stove transplanted from the kitchen, a cooking, eating, and sleeping room. All the roofs had been shelled out of existence. All the walls were notched by shells and peppered thick with bullet marks. A support trench about shoulder deep with a low parapet along its front was so damaged by shell fire that the men for the most part had to move along it bent almost double to keep out of sight and bullet reach. Every here and there--where a shell had lobbed fairly in--there was a huge crater, its sides sealing up the trench with a mass of tumbled earth over which the men scrambled crouching. Behind the trench a stretch of open field was pitted and pock-marked with shell-holes of all sizes from the shallow scoop a yard across to the yawning crater, big and deep enough to bury the whole field-gun that had made the smaller hole. The field looked exactly like those pictures one sees in the magazines of a lunar landscape or the extinct volcanoes of the moon.

The line of men turned at last into a long deep-cut communication trench leading out into a village. The air in the trench was heavy and close and stagnant, and the men toiled wearily up it, sweating and breathing hard. At a branching fork one path was labelled with a neatly printed board 'To Battn. H.Q. and the Mole Heap,' and the other path 'To the Duck Pond'--this last, the name of a trench, being a reminder of the winter and the wet. The officer leading the party turned into the trench for 'The Mole Heap,' walked up it, and emerged into the sunlight of the grass-grown village street, skirted a house, crossed the street by a trench, and passed through a hole chipped out of the brick wall into a house, the men tramping at his heels. The whole village was seamed with a maze of trenches, but these were only for use when the shelling had been particularly heavy. At other times people moved about the place by paths sufficiently well protected by houses and walls against the rifle bullets that had practically never ceased to smack into the village for many months past. These paths wandered behind buildings, across gardens, into and out of houses either by doors or by holes in the wall, over or round piles of rubble or tumbled brick-work, burrowed at times below ground-level on patches exposed to fire, ran frequently through a dozen cottages on end, passage having been effected simply by hacking holes through the connecting brick walls, in one place dived underground down some short stairs and took its way through several cellars by the same simple method of walking through the walls from one cellar to another. The houses were littered with empty and rusty tins, torn and dirty clothing, ash-choked stoves, trampled straw, and broken furniture. The back-yards and gardens were piled with heaps of bricks and tiles, biscuit and jam tins; broken fences and rotted rags were overrun with a rank growth of grass and weeds and flowers, pitted with shell-holes and strewn with graves.

The whole village was wrecked from end to end, was no more than a charnel house, a smashed and battered sepulchre. There was not one building that was whole, not one roof that had more than a few tiles clinging to shattered rafters, hardly a wall that was not cracked and bulged and broken.

In the houses they passed through the men could still find sufficient traces of the former occupants to indicate their class and station. One might have been a labourer's cottage, with a rough deal table, a red-rusted stove-fireplace, an oleograph in flaming crude colours of the 'Virgin and Child' hanging on the plaster wall, the fragments of a rough cradle overturned in a corner, a few coarse china crocks and ornaments and figures chipped and broken and scattered about the mantel, and the bare board floor. Another house had plainly been a home of some refinement. The rooms were large, with lofty ceilings; there were carpets on the floors, although so covered with dirt and dried mud and the dust of fallen plaster that they were hardly discernible as carpets. In one room a large polished table had a broken leg replaced by an up-ended barrel, one big arm-chair had its springs and padding showing through the burst upholstering. Another was minus all its legs, and had the back wrenched off and laid flat with the seat on the floor, evidently to make a bed. There were several good engravings hanging askew on the walls or lying about the floor, all soiled with rain and cut and torn by their splintered glass. The large open-grate fireplace had an artistically carved overmantel sadly chipped and smoke-blackened, a tiled hearth in fragments; the wall-paper in a tasteful design of dark-green and gold was blotched and discoloured, and hung in peeling strips and gigantic 'dog's-ears'; from the poles and rings over the windows the tattered fragments of a lace curtain dangled. There was plenty of evidence that the room had been occupied by others since its lawful tenants had fled. It was strewn with broken or cast-off military equipments, worn-out boots, frayed and mud-caked putties, a burst haversack and pack-valise, a holed water-bottle, broken webbing straps and belts, a bayonet with a snapped blade, a torn grey shirt, and a goatskin coat. The windows had the shutters closed, and were sandbagged up three parts their height, the need for this being evident from the clean, round bullet-holes in the shutters above the sandbags, and the ragged tears and holes in the upper part of the opposite wall. In an upper corner a gaping shell-hole had linen table-cloths five or six fold thick hung over to screen the light from showing through at night. In a corner lay a heap of mouldy straw and a bed-mattress; the table and fireplace were littered with dirty pots and dishes, the floor with empty jam and biscuit tins, opened and unopened bully-beef tins, more being full than empty because the British soldier must be very near starving point before he is driven to eat 'bully.' Over everything lay, like a white winding-sheet, the cover of thick plaster-dust shaken down from the ceiling by the hammer-blows of the shells. The room door opened into a passage. At its end a wide staircase curved up into empty space, the top banisters standing out against the open blue sky. The whole upper storey had been blown off by shell fire and lay in the garden behind the house, a jumble of brickwork, window-frames, tiles, beams, beds and bedroom furniture, linen, and clothes.

These houses were inexpressibly sad and forlorn-looking, with all their privacy and inner homeliness naked and exposed to the passer-by and the staring sunlight. Some were no more than heaps of brick and stone and mortar; but these gave not nearly such a sense of desolation and desertion as those less damaged, as one, for instance, with its front blown completely out, so that one could look into all its rooms, upper and lower and the stairs between, exactly as one looks into those dolls' houses where the front is hinged to swing open.

The village had been on the edge of the fighting zone for months, had been casually shelled each day in normal times, bombarded furiously during every attack or counter-attack. The church, with its spire or tower, had probably been suspected as an artillery observing station by the Germans, and so had drawn a full share of the fire. All that was left of the church itself was one corner of shell-holed walls, and a few roof-beams torn and splintered and stripped of cover. The tower was a broken, jagged, stump--an empty shell, with one side blown almost completely out; the others, or what remained of them, cracked and tottering. The churchyard was a wild chaos of tumbled masonry, broken slates, uprooted and overturned tombstones, jumbled wooden crosses, crucifixes, black wooden cases with fronts of splintered glass, torn wreaths, and crosses of imitation flowers. Amongst the graves yawned huge shell craters; tossed hither and thither amongst the graves and broken monuments and bricks and rubbish were bones and fragments of coffins.

But all the graves were not in the churchyard. The whole village was dotted from end to end with them, some alone in secluded corners, others in rows in the backyards and vegetable gardens. Most of them were marked with crosses, each made of two pieces of packing-case or biscuit-box, with a number, rank, name, and regiment printed in indelible pencil. On some of the graves were bead-work flowers, on others a jam-pot or crock holding a handful of withered sun-dried flower-stalks. Nearly all were huddled in close to house or garden walls, one even in the narrow passage between two houses. There were, in many cases, other and less ugly open spaces and gardens offering a score of paces from these forlorn last resting-places apparently so oddly selected and sadly misplaced; but a second look showed that in each case the grave was dug where some wall or house afforded cover to the burying-party from bullets. In the bright sunlight, half-hidden under or behind heaps of debris, with crosses leaning drunkenly aslant, these graves looked woefully dreary and depressing. But the files of men moving round and between them, or stepping carefully over them, hardly gave them a glance, except where one in passing caught at a leaning cross and thrust it deeper and straighter into the earth. But the men's indifference meant no lack of feeling or respect for the dead. The respect was there, subtle but unmistakable, instanced slightly by the care every man took not to set foot on a grave, by the straightening of that cross, by those withered flowers and dirty wreaths, even as it has been shown scores of times by the men who crawl at risk of their lives into the open between the forward trenches at night to bring in their dead for decent burial.

Outside the shattered village stood the remains of a large factory, and on this the outcoming files of the Regiment converged, and the first arrivals halted to await the rest. What industry the factory had been concerned with it was impossible to tell. It was full of machinery, smashed, bent, twisted, and overturned, all red with rust, mixed up with and in parts covered by stone and brickwork, beams and iron girders, the whole sprinkled over with gleaming fragments of window-glass The outside walls were almost completely knocked flat, tossed helter-skelter outwards or on top of the machinery. The tall chimney--another suspected 'observing post' probably--lay in a heap of broken brickwork with the last yard or two of the base standing up out of the heap, and even in its remaining stump were other ragged shell-holes. A couple of huge boilers had been torn off their brick furnaces by the force of some monster shell and tossed clear yards away. One was poised across the broken outer wall, with one end in the road. The thick rounded plates were bent and dented in like a kicked biscuit-tin, were riddled and pierced through and through as if they had been paper. The whole factory and its machinery must once have represented a value of many thousands of francs. Now it was worth just the value of its site--less the cost of clearing it of debris--and the price of some tons of old iron.

Some of the men wandered about amongst the ruins, examining them curiously, tracing the work of individual shells, speculating on the number of hands the place had once employed, and where those hands were now.

'Man, man,' said a Scottish private, 'sic an awfu' waste. Think o' the siller it must ha' cost.'

''Ow would you like to be a shareholder in the company, Jock?' said his companion. 'Ain't many divvydends due to 'em this Christmas.'

The Scot shook his head sadly. 'This place an' the hale toon laid waste,' he said. 'It's awfu' tae think o' it.'

'An' this is one bloomin' pebble in a whole bloomin' beach,' said the other. 'D'you remember Wipers an' all them other towns? An' that old chap we saw sittin' on the roadside weepin' 'is eyes out 'cos the farm an' the fruit-trees 'e'd spent 'is life fixin' up was blowed to glory b' Jack Johnsons. We 'ave seed some rummy shows 'ere, 'aven't we? Not but what this ain't a pretty fair sample o' wreck,' he continued critically. 'There's plenty 'ud think they'd got their two-pennorth to see this on the screen o' a picture-show at 'ome, Jock.'

'Huh! Picturs!' sniffed Jock. 'Picturs, and the-ayters, and racin', and fitba'. Ah wanner folks hasna better use for their time and money, at sic a time 's this.'

'Aw,' said the other, 'But y' forget, Jock. Out 'ere they 'ave their 'ouses blown up an' their business blown in. A thousan' a day o' the like o' you an' me may be gettin' killed off for six months on end. But at 'ome, Jock--aw!'

He stooped and picked up a lump of white, chalky earth from the roadside, scrawled with it on the huge boiler-end that rested on the broken wall, and left the written words to finish the spoken sentence.

Jock read, and later the remains of the Regiment read as they moved off past the aching desolation of the silent factory, down the shell-torn road, across the war-swept ruins of a whole country-side. A few scowled at the thoughts the words raised, the most grinned and passed rough jests; but to all those men in the thinned ranks, their dead behind them, the scenes of ruin before them, the words bit, and bit deep. They ran:

But it's
Bisness As Usual
--AT HOME.

A HYMN OF HATE

'_The troops continue in excellent spirits._'--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

To appreciate properly, from the Army's point of view, the humour of this story, it must always be remembered that the regiment concerned is an English one--entirely and emphatically English, and indeed almost entirely East End Cockney.

It is true that the British Army on active service has a sense of humour peculiarly its own, and respectable civilians have been known, when jests were retailed with the greatest gusto by soldier raconteurs, to shudder and fail utterly to understand that there could be any humour in a tale so mixed up with the grim and ghastly business of killing and being killed.

A biggish battle had died out about a week before in the series of spasmodic struggles of diminishing fury that have characterised most of the battles on the Western Front, when the Tower Bridge Foot found themselves in occupation of a portion of the forward line which was only separated from the German trench by a distance varying from forty to one hundred yards. Such close proximity usually results in an interchange of compliments between the two sides, either by speech, or by medium of a board with messages written on it--the board being reserved usually for the strokes of wit most likely to sting, and therefore best worth conveying to the greatest possible number of the enemy.

The 'Towers' were hardly installed in their new position when a voice came from the German parapet, 'Hello, Tower Bridge Foot! Pleased to meet you again.'

The Englishmen were too accustomed to it to be surprised by this uncannily prompt recognition by the enemy of a newly relieving regiment of which they had not seen so much as a cap top.

'Hullo, Boshy,' retorted one of the Towers. 'You're makin' a mistake this time. We ain't the Tower Bridges. We're the Kamchatka 'Ighlanders.'

'An' you're a liar if you says you're pleased to meet us again,' put in another. 'If you've met us afore I lay you was too dash sorry for it to want to meet us again.'

'Oh, we know who you are all right,' replied the voice. 'And we know you've just relieved the Fifth Blankshires; and what's more, we know who's going to relieve you, and when.'

''E knows a bloomin' heap,' said a Tower Bridge private disgustedly; 'an' wot's more, I believe 'e does know it.' Then, raising his voice, he asked, 'Do you know when we're comin' to take some more of them trenches o' yours?'

This was felt by the listening Towers to be a master-stroke, remembering that the British had taken and held several trenches a week before, but the reply rather took the wind out of their sails.

'You can't take any more,' said the voice. 'You haven't shells enough for another attack. You had to stop the last one because your guns were running short.'

'Any'ow,' replied an English corporal who had been handing round half a dozen grenades, 'we ain't anyways short o' bombs. 'Ave a few to be goin' on with,' and he and his party let fly. They listened with satisfaction to the bursts, and through their trench periscopes watched the smoke and dust clouds billowing from the trench opposite.

'An' this,' remarked a Tower private, 'is about our cue to exit, the stage bein' required for a scene-shift by some Bosh bombs,' and he disappeared, crawling into a dug-out. During the next ten minutes a couple of dozen bombs came over and burst in and about the British trench and scored three casualties, 'slightly wounded.'

'Hi there! Where's that Soho barber's assistant that thinks 'e can talk Henglish?' demanded the Towers' spokesman cheerfully.

That annoyed the English-speaking German, as of course incidentally it was meant to do.

'I'm here, Private Petticoat Lane,' retorted the voice, 'and if I couldn't speak better English than you I'd be shaming Soho.'

'You're doing that anyway, you bloomin' renegade dog-stealer,' called back the private. 'Wy didn't you pay your landlady in Lunnon for the lodgin's you owed when you run away?'

'Schweinhund!' said the voice angrily, and a bullet slapped into the parapet in front of the taunting private.

'Corp'ril,' said that artist in invective softly, 'if you'll go down the trench a bit or up top o' that old barn behind I'll get this bloomin' Soho waiter mad enough to keep on shootin' at me, an' you'll p'raps get a chance to snipe 'im.'

The corporal sought an officer's permission and later a precarious perch on the broken roof of the barn, while Private Robinson extended himself in the manufacture of annoying remarks.

'That last 'un was a fair draw, Smithy,' he exulted to a fellow private. 'I'll bet 'e shot the moon, did a bolt for it, when 'e mobilised.'

'Like enough,' agreed Smithy. 'Go on, ol' man. Give 'im some more jaw.'

'I s'pose you left without payin' your washin' bill either, didn't you, sower-krowt,' demanded Private Robinson. There was no reply from the opposition.

'I expeck you ler' a lot o' little unpaid bills, didn't you?--if you was able to find anyone to give you tick.'

'I'll pay them--when we take London,' said the voice.

'That don't give your pore ol' landlady much 'ope,' said Robinson. 'Take Lunnon! Blimy, you're more like to take root in them trenches o' yours--unless we comes over again an' chases you out.'

Again there was no reply. Private Robinson shook his head. ''E's as 'ard to draw as the pay that's owin' to me,' he said. 'You 'ave a go, Smithy.'

Smithy, a believer in the retort direct and no trafficker in the finer shades of sarcasm, cleared his throat and lifted up his voice. ''Ere, why don't you speak when you're spoke to, you lop-eared lager-beer barrel, you. Take your fice out o' that 'orse-flesh cat's-meat sossidge an' speak up, you baby-butcherin' hen-roost robber.'

'That ain't no good, Smithy,' Private Robinson pointed out. 'Y'see, callin' 'im 'ard names only makes 'im think 'e's got you angry like--that 'e's drawed you.'

(Another voice called something in German.)

'Just tell them other monkeys to stop their chatter, Soho,' he called out, 'an' get back in their cage. If they want to talk to gen'l'men they must talk English.'

'I like your d--d impertinence,' said the voice scornfully. 'We'll make you learn German, though, when we've taken England.'

'Oh, it's Englan' you're takin' now,' said Private Robinson. 'But all you'll ever take of Englan' will be same as you took before--a tuppenny tip if you serves the soup up nice, or a penny tip if you gives an Englishman a proper clean shave.'

The rifle opposite banged again and the bullet slapped into the top of the parapet. 'That drawed 'im again,' chuckled Private Robinson, 'but I wonder why the corp'ril didn't get a whack at 'im.'

He pulled away a small sandbag that blocked a loophole, and, holding his rifle by the butt at arm-length, poked the muzzle out slowly. A moment later two reports rang out--one from in front and one behind.

'I got 'im,' said the corporal three minutes later. 'One bloke was looking with a periscope and I saw a little cap an' one eye come over the parapet. By the way 'is 'ands jerked up an' 'is 'ead jerked back when I fired, I fancy 'e copped it right enough.'

Private Robinson got to work with a piece of chalk on a board and hoisted over the parapet a notice, 'R.I.P. 1 Boshe, late lamented Soho garçon.'

'Pity I dunno the German for "late lamented," but they've always plenty that knows English enough to unnerstand,' he commented.

He spent the next ten minutes ragging the Germans, directing his most brilliant efforts of sarcasm against made-in-Germany English-speakers generally and Soho waiters in particular; and he took the fact there was no reply from the voice as highly satisfactory evidence that it had been the 'Soho waiter' who had 'copped it.'

'Exit the waiter--curtain, an' soft music!' remarked a private known as 'Enery Irving throughout the battalion, and whistled a stave of 'We shall meet, but we shall miss him.'

'Come on, 'Enery, give us 'is dyin' speech,' some one urged, and 'Enery proceeded to recite an impromptu 'Dyin' Speech of the Dachshund-stealer,' as he called it, in the most approved fashion of the East End drama, with all the accompaniments of rolling eyes, breast-clutchings, and gasping pauses.

'Now then, where's the orchestra?' he demanded when the applause had subsided, and the orchestra, one mouth-organ strong, promptly struck up a lilting music-hall ditty. From that he slid into 'My Little Grey Home,' with a very liberal measure of time to the long-drawn notes especially. The song was caught up and ran down the trench in full chorus. When it finished the orchestra was just on the point of starting another tune, when 'Enery held up his hand.

'"'E goes on Sunday to the church, an' sits among the choir."' he quoted solemnly and added, 'Voices 'eard, off.'

Two or three men were singing in the German trench, and as they sang the rest joined in and 'Deutschland über Alles' rolled forth in full strength and harmony.

'Bray-vo! An' not arf bad neither,' said Private Robinson approvingly. 'Though I dunno wot it's all abart. Now s'pose we gives 'em another.'

They did, and the Germans responded with 'The Watch on the Rhine.' This time Private Robinson and the rest of the Towers recognised the song and capped it in great glee with 'Winding up the Watch on the Rhine,' a parody which does not go out of its way to spare German feelings.

'An' 'ow d'you like that, ol' sossidge scoffers?' demanded Private Robinson loudly.

'You vait,' bellowed a guttural voice. 'Us vind you op--quick!'

'Vind op--squeak, an' squeakin',' retorted Private Robinson.

The German reply was drowned in a burst of new song which ran like wild-fire the length of the German trench. A note of fierce passion rang in the voices, and the Towers sat listening in silence.

'Dunno wot it is,' said one. 'But it sounds like they was sayin' something nasty, an' meanin' it all.'

But one word, shouted fiercely and lustily, caught Private Robinson's ear.

''Ark!' he said in eager anticipation. 'I do believe it's--s-sh! There!' triumphantly, as again the word rang out--the one word at the end of the verse . . . '_England_.'

'It's _it_. It's the "'Ymn of 'Ate"!'

The word flew down the British trench--'It's the 'Ymn! They're singin' the "'Ymn of 'Ate,"' and every man sat drinking the air in eagerly. This was luck, pure gorgeous luck. Hadn't the Towers, like many another regiment, heard about the famous 'Hymn of Hate,' and read it in the papers, and had it declaimed with a fine frenzy by Private 'Enery Irving? Hadn't they, like plenty other regiments, longed to hear the tune, but longed in vain, never having found one who knew it? And here it was being sung to them in full chorus by the Germans themselves. Oh, this _was_ luck.

The mouth-organist was sitting with his mouth open and his head turned to listen, as if afraid to miss a single note.

''Ave you got it, Snapper?' whispered Private Robinson anxiously at the end. 'Will you be able to remember it?'

Snapper, with his eyes fixed on vacancy, began to play the air over softly, when from further down the trench came a murmur of applause, that rose to a storm of hand-clappings and shouts of 'Bravo!' and 'Encore--'core--'core!'

The mouth-organist played on unheedingly and Private Robinson sat following him with attentive ear.

'I'm not sure of that bit just there,' said the player, and tried it over with slight variations. 'P'raps I'll remember it better after a day or two. I'm like that wi' some toons.'

'We might kid 'em to sing it again,' said Robinson hopefully, as another loud cry of 'Encore!' rang from the trench.

'Was you know vat we haf sing?' asked a German voice in tones of some wonderment.

'It's a great song, Dutchie,' replied Private Robinson. 'Fine song--goot--bong! Sing it again to us.'

'You haf not understand,' said the German angrily, and then suddenly from a little further along the German trench a clear tenor rose, singing the Hymn in English. The Towers subsided into rapt silence, hugging themselves over their stupendous luck. When the singer came to the end of the verse he paused an instant, and a roar leaped from the German trench . . . 'England!' It died away and the singer took up the solo. Quicker and quicker he sang, the song swirling upward in a rising note of passion. It checked and hung an instant on the last line, as a curling wave hangs poised; and even as the falling wave breaks thundering and rushing, so the song broke in a crash of sweeping sound along the line of the German trench on that one word--'England!'

Before the last sound of it had passed, the singer had plunged into the next verse, his voice soaring and shaking with an intensity of feeling. The whole effect was inspiring, wonderful, dramatic. One felt that it was emblematic, the heart and soul of the German people poured out in music and words. And the scorn, the bitter anger, hatred, and malice that vibrated again in that chorused last word might well have brought fear and trembling to the heart of an enemy. But the enemy immediately concerned, to wit His Majesty's Regiment of Tower Bridge Foot, were most obviously not impressed with fear and trembling. Impressed they certainly were. Their applause rose in a gale of clappings and cries and shouts. They were impressed, and Private 'Enery Irving, clapping his hands sore and stamping his feet in the trench-bottom, voiced the impression exactly. 'It beats Saturday night in the gallery o' the old Brit.,' he said enthusiastically. 'That bloke--blimy--'e ought to be doin' the star part at Drury Lane'; and he wiped his hot hands on his trousers and fell again to beating them together, palms and fingers curved cunningly, to obtain a maximum of noise from the effort.

An officer passed hurriedly along the trench. 'If there's any firing, every man to fire over the parapet and only straight to his own front,' he said, and almost at the moment there came a loud 'bang' from out in front, followed quickly by 'bang-bang-bang' in a running series of reports.

The shouting had cut off instantly on the first bang, some rifles squibbed off at intervals for a few seconds and increased suddenly to a sputtering roar. With the exception of one platoon near their centre the Towers replied rapidly to the fire, the maxims joined in, and a minute later, with a whoop and a crash the shells from a British battery passed over the trench and burst along the line of the German parapet. After that the fire died away gradually, and about ten minutes later a figure scrambled hastily over the parapet and dropped into safety, his boots squirting water, his wet shirt-tails flapping about his bare wet and muddy legs. He was the 'bomb officer' who had taken advantage of the 'Hymn of Hate' diversion to go crawling up a little ditch that crossed the neutral ground until he was near enough to fling into the German trench the bombs he carried, and, as he put it later in reporting to the O.C., 'give 'em something to hate about.'

And each evening after that, for as long as they were in the trenches, the men of the Tower Bridge Foot made a particular point of singing the 'Hymn of Hate,' and the wild yell of 'England' that came at the end of each verse might almost have pleased any enemy of England's instead of aggravating them intensely, as it invariably did the Germans opposite, to the extent of many wasted rounds.

'It's been a great do, Snapper,' said Private 'Enery Irving some days after, as the battalion tramped along the road towards 'reserve billets.' 'An' I 'aven't enjoyed myself so much for months. Didn't it rag 'em beautiful, an' won't we fair stagger the 'ouse at the next sing-sing o' the brigade?'

Snapper chuckled and breathed contentedly into his beloved mouth-organ, and first 'Enery and then the marching men took up the words:

'Ite of the 'eart, an' 'ite of the 'and,
'Ite by water, an' 'ite by land,
'Oo do we 'ite to beat the band?

(deficient memories, it will be noticed, being compensated by effective inventions in odd lines).

The answering roar of 'England' startled almost to shying point the horse of a brigadier trotting up to the tail of the column.

'What on earth are those fellows singing?' he asked one of his officers while soothing his mount.

'I'm not sure, sir,' said the officer, 'but I believe--by the words of it--yes, it's the Germans' "Hymn of Hate."'

A French staff officer riding with the brigadier stared in astonishment, first at the marching men, and then at the brigadier, who was rocking with laughter in his saddle.

'Where on earth did they get the tune? I've never heard it before,' said the brigadier, and tried to hum it. The staff officer told him something of the tale as he had heard it, and the Frenchman's amazement and the brigadier's laughter grew as the tale was told.

We 'ave one foe, an' one alone--England!

bellowed the Towers, and out of the pause that came so effectively before the last word of the verse rose a triumphant squeal from the mouth-organ, and the appealing voice of Private 'Enery Irving--'Naw then, put a bit of 'ate into it.' But even that artist of the emotions had to admit his critical sense of the dramatic fully satisfied by the tone of vociferous wrath and hatred flung into the Towers' answering roar of '. . . . _England!_'

'What an extraordinary people!' said the French staff officer, eyeing the brigadier shaking with laughter on his prancing charger. And he could only heave his shoulders up in an ear-embracing shrug of non-comprehension when the laughing brigadier tried to explain to him (as I explained to you in the beginning):

'And the best bit of the whole joke is that this particular regiment is English to the backbone.'

THE COST

'_The cost in casualties cannot be considered heavy in view of the success gained._'--EXTRACT FROM OFFICIAL DESPATCH.

Outside there were blazing sunshine and heat, a haze of smoke and dust, a nostril-stinging reek of cordite and explosive, and a never-ceasing tumult of noises. Inside was gloom, but a closer, heavier heat, a drug-shop smell, and all the noises of outside, little subdued, and mingled with other lesser but closer sounds. Outside a bitterly fought trench battle was raging; here, inside, the wreckage of battle was being swiftly but skilfully sorted out, classified, bound up, and despatched again into the outer world. For this was one of the field dressing stations scattered behind the fringe of the fighting line, and through one or other of these were passing the casualties as quickly as they could be collected and brought back. The station had been a field labourer's cottage, and had been roughly adapted to its present use. The interior was in semi-darkness, because the windows were completely blocked up with sandbags. The door, which faced towards the enemy's lines, was also sandbagged up, and a new door had been made by knocking out an opening through the mud-brick wall. There were two rooms connected by a door, enlarged again by the tearing down of the lath-and-plaster partition. The only light in the inner room filtered through the broken and displaced tiles of the roof. On the floor, laid out in rows so close packed that there was barely room for an orderly to move, were queer shapeless bundles that at first glance could hardly be recognised as men. They lay huddled on blankets or on the bare floor in dim shadowy lines that were splashed along their length with irregularly placed gleaming white patches. They were puzzling, these patches, shining like snow left in the hollows of a mountain seen far off and in the dusk. A closer look revealed them as the bandages of the first field dressing that every man carries stitched in his uniform against the day he or the stretcher-bearers may rip open the packet to use it. A few of the men moved restlessly, but most lay very still. A few talked, and one or two even laughed; and another moaned slowly and at even unbroken intervals. Two or three lighted cigarettes pin-pricked the gloom in specks of orange light that rose and fell, glowing and sparkling and lighting a faint outline of nose and lip and cheeks, sinking again to dull red. A voice called, feebly at first, and then, as no one answered, more strongly and insistently, for water. When at last it was brought, every other man there demanded or pleaded for a drink.

In the other room a clean-edged circle of light blazed in the centre from an acetylene lamp, leaving the walls and corners in a shadow deep by contrast to blackness. Half the length of a rough deal table jutted out of the darkness into the circle of light, and beneath it its black shadow lay solid half-way across the light ring on the floor.

And into this light passed a constant procession of wounded, some halting for no more than the brief seconds necessary for a glance at the placing of a bandage and an injection of an anti-tetanus serum, some waiting for long pain-laden minutes while a bandage was stripped off, an examination made, in certain cases a rapid play made with cruel-looking scissors and knives. Sometimes a man would walk to the table and stoop a bandaged head or thrust a bandaged hand or arm into the light. Or a stretcher would appear from the darkness and be laid under the light, while the doctors' hands busied themselves about the khaki form that lay there. Some of the wounds were slight, some were awful and unpleasant beyond telling. The doctors worked in a high pressure of haste, but the procession never halted for an instant; one patient was hardly clear of the light-circle before another appeared in it. There were two doctors there--one a young man with a lieutenant's stars on his sleeve; the other, apparently a man of about thirty, in bare arms with rolled-up shirt-sleeves. His jacket, hooked on the back of a broken chair, bore the badges of a captain's rank. The faces of both as they caught the light were pale and glistening with sweat. The hands of both as they flitted and darted about bandages or torn flesh were swift moving, but steady and unshaking as steel pieces of machinery. Words that passed between the two were brief to curtness, technical to the last syllable. About them the dust motes danced in the light, the air hung heavy and stagnant, smelling of chemicals, the thick sickly scent of blood, the sharper reek of sweat. And everything about them, the roof over their heads, the walls around, the table under their hands, the floor beneath their feet, shook and trembled and quivered without cessation. And also without pause the uproar of battle bellowed and shrieked and pounded in their ears. Shells were streaming overhead, the closer ones with a rush and a whoop, the higher and heavier ones with long whistling sighs and screams. Shells exploding near them crashed thunderously and set the whole building rocking more violently than ever. The rifle and machine-gun fire never ceased, but rose and fell, sinking at times to a rapid spluttering crackle, rising again to a booming drum-like roll. The banging reports of bombs and grenades punctuated sharply the running roar of gun and rifle fire.

Through all the whirlwind of noise the doctors worked steadily. Unheeding the noise, the dust, the heat, the trembling of the crazy building, they worked from dawn to noon, and from noon on again to dusk, only pausing for a few minutes at mid-day to swallow beef-tea and a biscuit, and in the afternoon to drink tepid tea. Early in the afternoon a light shell struck a corner of the roof, making a clean hole on entry and blowing out the other side in a clattering gust of flame and smoke, broken tiles and splintering wood. The room filled with choking smoke and dust and bitter blinding fumes, and a shower of dirt and fragments rained down on the floor and table, on the doctors, and on the men lying round the walls. At the first crash and clatter some of the wounded cried out sharply, but one amongst them chided the others, asking had they never heard a Fizz-Bang before, and what would the Doctor be thinking of them squealing there like a lot of schoolgirls at a mouse in the room? But later in the day there was a worse outcry and a worse reason for it. The second room was being emptied, the wounded being carried out to the ambulances that awaited them close by outside. There came suddenly out of the surrounding din of battle four quick car-filling rushes of sound--sh-sh-sh-shoosh--ba-ba-ba-bang! The shells had passed over no more than clear of the cottage, and burst in the air just beyond, and for an instant the stretcher-bearers halted hesitatingly and the wounded shrank on their stretchers. But next instant the work was resumed, and was in full swing when a minute later there came again the four wind-rushes, followed this time by four shattering crashes, an appalling clatter of whirling tiles and brick-work. The cottage disappeared in swirling clouds of smoke and brick-dust, and out of the turmoil came shrieks and cries and groans. When the dust had cleared it showed one end of the cottage completely wrecked, the roof gone, the walls gaping in ragged rents, the end wall collapsed in jumbled ruins. Inside the room was no more than a shambles. There were twenty odd men in it when the shells struck. Seven were carried out alive, and four of these died in the moving. In the other room, where the two doctors worked, no damage was done beyond the breakdown of a portion of the partition wall, and there was only one further casualty--a man who was actually having a slight hand-wound examined at the moment. He was killed instantly by a shell fragment which whizzed through the door-way. The two doctors, after a first hasty examination of the new casualties, held a hurried consultation. The obvious thing to do was to move, but the question was, Where to? One place after another was suggested, only for the suggestion to be dismissed for some good and adequate reason. In the middle of the discussion a fresh torrent of casualties began to pour in. Some plainly required immediate attention, and the doctors fell to work again. By the time the rush was cleared the question of changing position had been forgotten, or, at any rate, was dropped. The wounded continued to arrive, and the doctors continued to work.

By now, late afternoon, the fortunes of the fight were plainly turning in favour of the British. It was extraordinary the difference it made in the whole atmosphere--to the doctors, the orderlies, the stretcher-bearers, and even--or, rather, most of all--to the wounded who were coming in. In the morning the British attack had been stubbornly withstood, and thousands of men had fallen in the first rushes to gain a footing in the trenches opposite. The wounded who were first brought in were the men who had fallen in these rushes, in the forward trench, in the communication trenches on their way up from the support trench, and from the shell fire on the support trenches. Because they themselves had made no advance, or had seen no advance made, they believed the attack was a failure, that thousands of men had fallen and no ground had been gained. The stretcher-bearers who brought them in had a similar tale to tell, and everyone looked glum and pulled a long face. About noon, although the advance on that particular portion was still hung up, a report ran that success had been attained elsewhere along the line. In the early afternoon the guns behind burst out in a fresh paroxysm of fury, and the shells poured streaming overhead and drenched the enemy trenches ahead with a new and greater deluge of fire. The rifle fire and the bursting reports of bombs swelled suddenly to the fullest note yet attained. All these things were hardly noted, or at most were heeded with a half-attention, back in the dressing station, but it was not long before the fruits of the renewed activity began to filter and then to flood back to the doctor's hands. But now a new and more encouraging tale came with them. We were winning . . . we were advancing . . . we were into their trenches all along the line. The casualties bore their wounds to the station with absolute cheerfulness. This one had 'got it' in the second line of trenches; that one had seen the attack launched on the third trench; another had heard we had taken the third in our stride and were pushing on hard. The regiment had had a hammering, but they were going good; the battalion had lost the O.C. and a heap of officers, but they were 'in wi' the bayonet' at last. So the story ran for a full two hours. It was borne back by men with limbs and bodies hacked and broken and battered, but with lips smiling and babbling words of triumph. There were some who would never walk, would never stand upright again, who had nothing before them but the grim life of a helpless cripple. There were others who could hardly hope to see the morrow's sun rise, and others again grey-faced with pain and with white-knuckled hands clenched to the stretcher-edges. But all, slightly wounded, or 'serious,' or 'dangerous,' seemed to have forgotten their own bitter lot, to have no thought but to bear back the good word that 'we're winning.'

Late in the afternoon the weary doctors sensed a slackening in the flowing tide of casualties. They were still coming in, being attended to and passed out in a steady stream, but somehow there seemed less rush, less urgency, less haste on the part of the bearers to be back for a fresh load. And--ominous sign--there were many more of the bearers themselves coming back as casualties. The reason for these things took little finding. The fighting line was now well advanced, and every yard of advance meant additional time and risk in the bearing back of the wounded.

One of the regimental stretcher-bearers put the facts bluntly and briefly to the doctors: 'The open ground an' the communication trenches is fair hummin' wi' shells an' bullets. We're just about losin' two bearers for every one casualty we bring out. Now we're leavin' 'em lie there snug as we can till dark.'

A chaplain came in and asked permission to stay there. 'One of my regiments has gone up, he said, 'and they'll bring the casualties in here. I won't get in your way, and I may be able to help a little. Here is one of my men now.'

A stretcher was carried in and laid with its burden under the doctor's hands. The man was covered with wounds from head to foot. He lay still while the doctors cut the clothing off him and adjusted bandages, but just before they gave him morphia he spoke. 'Don't let me die, doctor,' he said; 'for Christ's sake, don't let me die. Don't say I'm going to die.' His eye met the chaplain's, and the grey head stooped near to the young one. 'I'm the only one left, padre,' he said. 'My old mother. . . . Don't let me die, padre. You know how--it is, back home. Don't--let me--die--too.'

But the lad was past saving. He died there on the table under their hands.

'God help his mother!' said the chaplain softly. 'It was her the boy was thinking of--not himself. His father was killed yesterday--old Jim Doherty, twenty-three years' service; batman to the O.C.; would come out again with young Jim and Walt. Been with the Regiment all his life; and the Regiment has taken him and his two boys, and left the mother to her old age without husband or chick or child.'

The two doctors were lighting cigarettes and inhaling the smoke deeply, with the enjoyment that comes after hours without tobacco.

Another man was borne in. He was grimed with dust and dirt, and smeared with blood. The sweats of agony beaded his forehead, but he grinned a twisted grin at the doctors and chaplain. 'An' 'ere we are again, as the song says,' he said, as the stretcher was laid down. 'This makes the third time wounded in this war--twice 'ome an' out again. But this is like to be the last trip I'm thinkin'. Wot about it, sir? Will I be losin' 'em both?' And he looked down at his smashed legs. 'Ah, I thought so,' he went on. 'I'm a market gardener, but I dunno 'ow I'm goin' to market-garden without legs. Four kids too, the eldest six years, an' an ailin' wife. But she'll 'ave me, or wot's left o' me; an' that's more'n a many'll 'ave.'

'That'll be all right, my lad,' said the chaplain. 'You'll have a pension. The country will look after you.'

'Ah, padre--I didn't see you, sir. The country? Arst my brother Joe about the country. Wounded in South Africa 'e was, an' never done a day's work since. An' the pension 'as been barely enough to starve on decently. It'll be the same again arter all this is over I don't doubt. Any'ow that's 'ow we all feels about it. No, sir, I don't feel no great pain to speak of. Sort of numb-like below there just.'

He went on talking quite rationally and composedly until he was taken away.

After that there was another pause, and the ambulances, for the first time that day, were able to get the station cleared before a fresh lot came in. The dusk was closing in, but there was still no abatement of the sounds of battle.

'There must be crowds of men lying out in front there wanting attention,' said the captain, reaching for his coat and putting it on quietly. 'You might stay here, Dewar, and I'll have a look out and see if there's a chance of getting forward to give a hand.'

The other doctor offered to go if the other would wait, but his offer was quietly put aside. 'I'll get back in an hour or two,' the captain said, and went off. Dewar and the chaplain stood in the door and watched him go. A couple of heavy shells crashed down on the parapet of the communication trench he was moving towards, and for a minute his figure was hidden by the swirling black smoke and yellow dust. But they saw him a moment later as he reached the trench, turned and waved a hand to them, and disappeared.

'His name's Macgillivray,' said the doctor, in answer to a question from the chaplain. 'One of the finest fellows I've ever met, and one of the cleverest surgeons in Great Britain. He is recognised as one of the best already, and he's only beginning. Did you notice him at work? The most perfect hands, and an eye as quick and keen as an eagle's. He misses nothing--sees little things in a flash where twenty men might pass them. He's a wonder.'

And Macgillivray was moving slowly along the communication trench that led to the forward fire trench. It was a dangerous passage, because the enemy's guns had the position and range exactly and were keeping a constant fire on the trench, knowing the probability of the supports using it. In fact the supports moving up had actually abandoned the use of the approach trenches and were hurrying across the open for the most part. Macgillivray, reluctant at first to abandon the cover of the trench, was driven at last to doing so by a fact forced upon him at every step that the place was a regular shell-trap. Sections of it were blown to shapeless ruins, and pits and mounds of earth and the deep shell-craters gaped in it and to either side for all its length. Even where the high-explosive shells had not fallen the shrapnel had swept and the clouds of flies that swarmed at every step told of the blood-soaked ground, even where the torn fragments of limbs and bodies had not been left, as they were in many places.

So Macgillivray left the trench and scurried across the open with bullets hissing and buzzing about his ears and shells roaring overhead. He reached the forward fire trench at last and halted there to recover his breath. The battered trench was filled with the men who had been moved up in support, and there were many wounded amongst them. He busied himself for half an hour amongst them, and then prepared to move on across the open to what had been the enemy's front-line trench. It was dusk now and shadowy figures could be seen coming back towards the British lines. At one point, a dip in the ground and an old ditch gave some cover from the flying bullets. Towards this point along what had been the face and was now the back of the enemy front trench, and then in along the line of the hollow, a constant procession of wounded moved slowly. It was easy to distinguish them, and even to pick out in most cases where they were wounded, because in the dusk the bandages of the first field dressing showed up startlingly white and clear on the shadowy forms against the shadowy background. Some, with the white patches on heads, arms, hands, and upper bodies, were walking; others, with the white on feet and legs, limped and hobbled painfully, leaning on the parapet or using their rifles crutch-wise; and others lay on the stretchers that moved with desperate slowness towards safety. The line appeared unending; the dim figures could be seen trickling along the parapets as far as the eye could distinguish them; the white dots of the bandages were visible moving as far along the parapet as the sight could could reach.