Chapter XII: Part THREE: Adagio (2)

The tents had wooden floors. The men drew a blanket and waterproof ground-sheet each, and slept twelve to a tent. It was a bit hard, but not impossible to sleep. Winterbourne lay awake for a long time, trying to get some order into his reflections. His attitude was plainly modified by that day’s experience. Was there a contradiction in it? Did it imply that he now supported the War and the War partisans? On the contrary, he hated the War as much as ever, hated all the blather about it, profoundly distrusted the motives of the War partisans, and hated the Army. But he liked the soldiers, the War soldiers, not as soldiers but as men. He respected them. If the German soldiers were like the men he had seen on the boat that morning, then he liked and respected them too. He was with them. With them, yes, but against whom and what? He reflected. With them, because they were men with fine qualities, because they had endured great hardships and dangers with simplicity, because they had parried those hardships and dangers not by hating the men who were supposed to be their enemies, but by developing a comradeship among themselves. They had every excuse for turning into brutes, and they hadn’t done it. True, they were degenerating in certain ways, they were getting coarse and rough and a bit animal, but with amazing simplicity and unpretentiousness they had retained and developed a certain essential humanity and manhood. With them then to the end, because of their manhood and humanity. With them, too, because that manhood and humanity existed in spite of the War and not because of it. They had saved something from a gigantic wreck, and what they had saved was immensely important—manhood and comradeship, their essential integrity as men, their essential brotherhood as men.

But what were they really against, who were their real enemies? He saw the answer with a flood of bitterness and clarity. Their enemies—the enemies of German and English alike—were the fools who had sent them to kill each other instead of help each other. Their enemies were the sneaks and the unscrupulous; the false ideals, the unintelligent ideas imposed on them, the humbug, the hypocrisy, the stupidity. If those men were typical, then there was nothing essentially wrong with common humanity, at least so far as the men were concerned. It was the leadership that was wrong—not the war leadership, but the peace leadership. The nations were governed by bunk and sacrificed to false ideals and stupid ideas. It was assumed that they had to be governed by bunk—but if they were never given anything else, how could you tell? De-bunk the World. Hopeless, hopeless....

He sighed deeply, and turned in his blanket wrapping. One man was snoring. Another moaned in his sleep. Like corpses they lay there, human rejects chucked into a bell tent on the hill above Boulogne. The pack made a hard pillow. Maybe he was all wrong, maybe it was “right” for men to be begotten only to murder each other in huge senseless combats. He wondered if he were not getting a little insane through this persistent brooding over the murders, by striving so desperately and earnestly to find out why it had happened, by agonizing over it all, by trying to think how it could be prevented from occurring again. After all, did it matter so much? Yes, did it matter? What were a few million human animals more or less? Why agonize about it? The most he could do was die. Well, die then. But O God, O God, is that all? To be born against your will, to feel that life might in its brief passing be so lovely and so divine, and yet to have nothing but opposition and betrayal and hatred and death forced upon you! To be born for the slaughter like a calf or a pig! To be violently cast back into nothing—for what? My God, for what? Is there nothing but despair and death? Is life vain, beauty vain, love vain, hope vain, happiness vain? “The war to end wars!” Is any one so asinine as to believe that? A war to breed wars, rather....

He sighed and turned again. It’s all useless, useless to flog one’s brain and nerves over it all, useless to waste the night hours in silent agonies when he might lie in the oblivion of sleep. Or the better oblivion of death. After all, there were plenty of children, plenty of war babies—why should one agonize for their future, any more than the Victorians thought about ours? The children will grow up, the war babies will grow up. Maybe they’ll have their war, maybe they won’t. In any case they won’t care a hang about us. Why should they? What do we care about the men of Albuera, except that the charge of the fusileers decorates a page of rhetorical prose? Four thousand dead—and the only permanent result a page of Napier’s prose. We have Bairnsfather....

He gave it up. Time after time he reverted to the whole gigantic tragedy, and time after time he gave it up. Two solutions. Just drift and let come what come may; or get yourself killed in the line. And much anyone would care whichever he did.

[ IV ]

They paraded at nine next morning, were casually inspected by an officer they did not know, and told to stand by. At eleven they drew bully beef and biscuits, and were ordered to parade again in half an hour, ready to move off. Winterbourne’s spirits rose. At last they were getting somewhere. He would be in the trenches that night and take his chance with the rest. No more fiddle-faddle.

He was mistaken. They entrained at Boulogne in a train which crawled interminably, and they de-trained at Calais. They were simply transferred to another Base.

The Base Camp at Calais was desperately over-crowded. It was filled with new drafts sent over to make up the losses on the Somme, and new columns of men kept pouring in daily from England, faster than the over-worked Staff could allot them to units. They were crowded into hastily erected bell-tents, twenty-two to a tent, which is closer than you can squeeze animals, and about as close as you can squeeze men. There was just room to lie down, and no more. Nothing to do after parade, except to moon about in the frosty darkness or lie down in one’s little slice of space, or play crown-and-anchor and drink coffee and rum while the estaminets were open. The town of Calais was out of bounds, except to men with passes. And not many passes were granted.

The weather grew daily colder. The misery of the interminable waiting and the over-crowded tents and the lack of anything to do, was not thereby alleviated. Every morning huge greyish columns of men undulated over the sandy soil, and were drawn up in long lines. An officer on horseback shouted orders through a megaphone. Nothing much happened, and they raggedly undulated back again. Yet they drew nearer to the mysterious “line.” They were given large jack-knives on lanyards. They were given gas masks and steel helmets. They were given service rifles and bayonets.

The gas masks were still the old flannel diving bell variety soaked in chemicals. They had a sharp, acrid, inhuman taste, and if worn too long had been known to produce skin eruptions. The drafts were given constant gas drill, and had to pass five minutes in a gas chamber, containing a concentration of the old chlorine gas sufficient to kill in five seconds. One man in Winterbourne’s lot lost his head and tried to tear off his mask. The instructor leapt at him, shouting curses through his own mask, and with the help of two of the men held him until the doors were opened. Winterbourne noticed that the gas had tarnished his bright brass buttons and the metal on his equipment. Their clothes reeked of the gas for a couple of hours.

They carefully cleaned the long steel bayonets, and examined the short wood-enclosed rifles. Winterbourne’s had a long groove cut by a bullet on the butt, and the bolt showed signs of considerable rust—obviously a rifle picked up on the battle-field and re-conditioned. Winterbourne wondered who was the man from whom he inherited it, and who would inherit it from him.

The days and nights grew colder and colder. Morning and evening rose and sank in blood-red mists, and at noon the sun was a cold bloody smear in a misty sky. Ice formed on the dykes, and the water taps froze. It became more and more difficult to wash, and shaving and washing in the ice-cold water became an agony. Their skins chapped as the light north wind breathed sharper and sharper cold. There appeared to be no baths, and they could not remove their clothes at night. To sleep, they took off their boots, wrapped themselves in an overcoat and blanket and shivered asleep, huddling together like sheep in a snowstorm. Most of them caught colds and began to cough; one man of the draft was taken to hospital with pleurisy.

And still day after day passed, and they were not sent to their units. Monotony, depression, boredom. By four it was dark, and there was nothing to do until dawn. The canteens and estaminets were thronged. Winterbourne luckily discovered that the pickets could be bribed, and several evenings went into Calais to dine. He bought a couple of French books and tried to read—in vain. He found he was unable to concentrate his mind, and fell into a deeper depression. There were few parades, and he had plenty of time for brooding.

They passed Christmas Day at the Base. The English newspapers, which they easily obtained a day or two late, were filled with glowing accounts of the efforts and expense made to give the troops a real hearty Christmas dinner. The men had looked forward to this. They ate their meals in huts which were decorated with holly for the occasion. The Christmas dinner turned out to be stewed bully beef and about two square inches of cold Christmas pudding per man. The other men in Winterbourne’s tent were furious. Their perpetual grumbling annoyed him, and he attacked them:

“Why fuss so much over a little charity? Why let them salve their consciences so easily? In any case, they probably meant well. Can’t you see that drafts at the Base are nobody’s children? The stuff’s gone to the men in the line, who deserve it far more than we do. We haven’t done anything yet. Or it’s been embezzled. Anyway what does it matter? You didn’t join the army for a bit of pudding and a Christmas cracker, did you?”

They were silent, unable to understand his contempt. Of course, he was unjust. They were simply grown children, angry at being defrauded of a promised treat. They could not understand his deeper rage. Any more than they could have understood his emotion each night when “Last Post” was blown. The bugler was an artist and produced the most wonderful effect of melancholy as he blew the call, which in the Army serves for sleep and death, over the immense silent camp. Forty thousand men lying down to sleep—and in six months how many would be alive? The bugler seemed to know it, and prolonged the shrill melancholy notes—“Last post! Last post!”—with an extraordinary effect of pathos. “Last post! Last post!” Winterbourne listened for it each night. Sometimes the melancholy was almost soothing, sometimes it was intolerable. He wrote to Elizabeth and Fanny about the bugler, as well as about the leave men he had seen on the boat. They felt he was getting hopelessly sentimental:

“Un peu gaga?” Elizabeth suggested.

Fanny shrugged her shoulders.

* * * * *

Two days after Christmas their orders came. They were taking off their equipment after morning parade when the Orderly Corporal pushed his head through the tent flap:

“You’ve clicked!”

“What? How? What y’ mean?” said several voices.

“Goin’ up the line. Parade at one-thirty ready to move off immediate. Over you go, an’ the best of luck!”

“What part of the line?”

“Dunno, you’ll find that when y’ get there.”

“What unit?”

“Dunno. Some o’ you’s clicked for a Pioneer Batt.”

“What’s that?”

“Muckin well find out. Don’t f’get I warned yer for p’rade.”

And he was off to the next tent. The men began talking excitedly, “wondering” this and “wondering” that futilely as usual. Winterbourne walked away from the tent lines, and stood looking over the desolate winter landscape. Half a mile away the tent lines of another huge camp began. Army lorries lumbered along a flat straight road in the distance. It was beginning to snow from a hard grey sky. He wondered vaguely how you slept in the line when there was snow. His breath formed little clouds of vapour in the freezing air. He pulled his muffler closer round his neck, and stamped on the ground to warm his icy feet. He felt as if his faculties were slowly running down, as if his whole mental power were concentrated upon mere physical endurance, a dull keeping alive. Time, like a torture, seemed infinitely prolonged. It seemed years since he left England, years of discomfort and depression and boredom. If the mere “cushy” beginning were like that, how endure the months, perhaps years of war to come?

He experienced a rapid fall of spirits to a depth of depression he had never before experienced. Hitherto, mere young vitality had buoyed him up, the _élan_ of his former life had carried him along through the days. In spite of his rages and his worryings and the complications and boredoms, he had really remained hopeful. He had wanted to go on living, because he had always unconsciously believed that life was good. Now something within him was just beginning to give way, now for the first time the last faint hues of the lovely iris of youth faded, and in horror he faced the grey realities. He was surprised and a little alarmed at his own listlessness and despair. He felt like a sheet of paper, dropping in jerks and waverings through grey air into an abyss.

The dinner bugle call sounded. He turned mechanically and joined the men thronging towards the eating huts. The snow was falling faster, and the men stamped their feet as they waited for the doors to open, cursing the cooks’ delay. There was the usual animal stampede for the best platefuls when the door opened. Winterbourne stood aside and let them struggle. The expressions on their faces were not pretty. He was practically the last in, and did not fare well. He ate the stewed bully, hunk of bread and soap-like cheese, with a sort of dog gratitude for the warmth, which was humiliating. He scarcely even resented the humiliation.

* * * * *

The train taking them to rail-head crawled interminably through a frozen landscape thinly sprinkled with snow. The light was beginning to wane. The skeleton outlines of dwarf trees, twisted by the wind, loomed faintly past the window. It was bitterly cold in the unwarmed third-class French carriage; one of the windows was smashed, and the bitter air and snow swept in. The men sat in silence, wrapped in their great-coats and stamping their feet rhythmically on the floor in vain efforts to keep warm. Winterbourne was cold to the knees, and yet felt feverish. His cough had grown worse, and he realized he had a temperature. He felt dirtily uncomfortable, because he had not taken his clothes off for days. The water at the camp had all frozen, and it had been impossible to get a bath.

Darkness slowly intensified. Slowly, more slowly the train crawled along. Winterbourne was in that section of the draft going to the Pioneer Battalion. He had asked the Sergeant what that meant:

“Oh, it’s cushy, much better than the ordinary infantry.”

“What do they do?”

“Workin’ parties in no man’s land,” said the Sergeant with a grin, “an’ go over the top when there’s a show.”

The train slightly increased its speed as they passed through a large junction. Somebody said it was St. Omer, somebody else said St. Pol, some one else suggested Béthune. They did not know where they were, or where they were going. About two miles outside the junction the train came to a stop. Winterbourne peered into the thick darkness. Nothing. He leaned out the glassless window and heard only the hissing steam from the stationary train, saw only the faint glow of the furnace. Suddenly, far away in front and to the left, a quick flash of light pierced the blackness and Winterbourne heard a faint boom. The guns! He waited, straining eyes and ears, in the freezing darkness. Silence. Then again—flash. Boom. Flash. Boom. Very distant, very faint, but unmistakable. The guns. They must be getting near the line.

Once again the train started and crawled interminably once more. For about half an hour they passed through a series of deep cuttings. Then, from the right this time, came a much nearer and brighter flash, followed almost at once by a deep boom audible above the noise of the train. The other men heard it this time:

“The guns!”

The train crept on stealthily for another couple of minutes through the gloom. The men were all crowded round the window. Flash. Boom. Another two minutes. Flash. Boom.

Three-quarters of an hour later they detrained at rail-head in complete darkness.

[ V ]

Winterbourne had an easy initiation into trench warfare. The cold was so intense that the troops on both sides were chiefly occupied in having pneumonia and trying to keep warm. He found himself in a quiet sector which had been fought over by the French in 1914 and had been the scene of a fierce and prolonged battle in 1915 after the British took over the sector. During 1916, when the main fighting shifted to the Somme, the sector had settled down to ordinary trench warfare. Trench raids had not then been much developed, but constant local attacks were made on battalion or brigade fronts. A little later the sector afterwards atoned for this calm.

To Winterbourne, as to so many others, the time element was of extreme importance during the war years. The hour goddesses who had danced along so gaily before and have fled from us since with such mocking swiftness, then paced by in a slow monotonous file as if intolerably burdened. People at a distance thought of the fighting as heroic and exciting, in terms of cheering bayonet charges or little knots of determined men holding out to the last Lewis Gun. That is rather like counting life by its champagne suppers, and forgetting all the rest. The qualities needed were determination and endurance, inhuman endurance. It would be much more practical to fight modern wars with mechanical robots than with men. But then, men are cheaper, although in a long war the initial outlay on the robots might be compensated by the fact that the quality of the men deteriorates, while they cost more in upkeep. But that is a question for the war departments. From the point of view of efficiency in war, the trouble is that men have feelings; to attain the perfect soldier, we must eliminate feelings. To the human robots of the last war, time seemed indefinitely and most unpleasantly prolonged. The dimension then measured as a “day” in its apparent duration approached what we now call a “month.” And the long series of violent stale-mates on the western front made any decision seem impossible. In 1916 it looked as if no line could be broken, because so long as enough new troops were hurried to threatened points the attacker was bound to be held up; and the supplies of hew troops seemed endless. It became a matter of which side could wear down the other’s man power and moral endurance. So there also was the interminable. The only alternatives seemed an indefinite prolongation of misery, or death or mutilation, or collapse of some sort. Even a wound was a doubtful blessing, a mere holiday, for wounded men had to be returned again and again to the line.

* * * * *

For the first six or eight “weeks,” Winterbourne, like all his companions, was occupied in fighting the cold. The Pioneer Company to which he was attached were digging a sap out into No Man’s Land and making trench mortar emplacements just behind the front line. They worked on these most of the night, and slept during the day. But the ground was frozen so hard that progress was tediously slow.

The Company was billeted in the ruins of a village behind the Reserve trenches, over a mile from the front line. The landscape was flat, almost treeless except for a few shell-blasted stumps, and covered with snow frozen hard. Every building in sight had been smashed, in many cases almost level with the ground. It was a mining country with great queer hills of slag and strange pit-head machinery of steel, reduced by shell-fire to huge masses of twisted rusting metal. They were in a salient, with the half-destroyed, evacuated town of M—— in the elbow-crook on the extreme right. The village churchyard was filled with graves of French soldiers; there were graves inside any of the houses which had no cellars, and graves flourished over the bare landscape. In all directions were crosses, little wooden crosses, in ones and twos and threes, emerging blackly from the frozen snow. Some were already askew; one just outside the ruined village had been snapped short by a shell-burst. The dead men’s caps, mouldering and falling to pieces, were hooked on to the tops of the crosses—the grey German round cap, the French blue and red kepi, the English khaki. There were also two large British cemeteries in sight—rectangular plantations of wooden crosses. It was like living in the graveyard of the world—dead trees, dead houses, dead mines, dead villages, dead men. Only the long steel guns and the transport wagons seemed alive. There were no civilians, but one of the mines was still worked about a mile and a half further from the line.

Behind Winterbourne’s billet were hidden two large howitzers. They fired with a reverberating crash which shook the ruined houses, and the diminishing scream of the departing shells was strangely melancholy in the frost-silent air. The Germans rarely returned the fire—they were saving their ammunition. Occasionally a shell screamed over and crashed sharply among the ruins; the huge detonation spouted up black earth or rattling bricks and tiles. Fragments of the burst shell case hummed through the air.

But it was the cold that mattered. In his efforts to defend himself against it, Winterbourne, like the other men, was strangely and wonderfully garbed. Round his belly, next the skin, he wore a flannel belt. Over that a thick woollen vest, grey flannel shirt, knitted cardigan jacket, long woollen under-pants and thick socks. Over that, service jacket, trousers, puttees and boots; then a sheepskin coat, two mufflers round his neck, two pairs of woollen gloves and over them trench gloves. In addition came equipment, box respirator on the chest, steel helmet, rifle and bayonet. The only clothes he took off at night were his boots. With his legs wrapped in a great-coat, his body in a grey blanket, a groundsheet underneath, pack for pillow, and a dixie of hot tea and rum inside him, he just got warm enough to fall asleep when very tired.

Through the broken roof of his billet, Winterbourne could see the frosty glitter of the stars and the white rime. In the morning when he awoke, he found his breath frozen on the pillow. In the line his short moustache formed icicles. The boots beside him froze hard, and it was agony to struggle into them. The bread in his haversack froze greyly; and the taste of frozen bread is horrid. Little spikes of ice formed in the cheese. The tins of jam froze and had to be thawed before they could be eaten. The bully beef froze in the tins and came out like chunks of reddish ice. Washing was a torment. They had three tubs of water between about forty of them each day. With this they shaved and washed—about ten or fifteen to a tub. Since Winterbourne was a late-comer to the battalion, he had to wait until the others had finished. The water was cold and utterly filthy. He plunged his dirty hands into it with disgust, and shut his eyes when he washed his face. This humiliation, too, he accepted.

* * * * *

He always remembered his first night in the line. They paraded in the ruined village street about four o’clock. The air seemed crackling with frost, and the now familiar bloody smear of red sunset was dying away in the southwest. The men were muffled up to the ears, and looked grotesquely bulky in their sheep- or goat-skin coats, with the hump of box respirators on their chests. Most of them had sacking covers on their steel helmets to prevent reflection, and sacks tied round their legs for warmth. The muffled officer came shivering from his billet, as the men stamped their feet on the hard frost-bound road. They drew picks and shovels from a dump, and filed silently through the ruined street behind the officer. Their bayonets were silhouetted against the cold sky. The man in front of Winterbourne turned abruptly left into a ruined house. Winterbourne followed, descended four rough steps and found himself in a trench. A notice said:

HINTON ALLEY
☞ To the Front Line

To be out of the piercing cold wind in the shelter of walls of earth was an immediate relief. Overhead shone the beautiful ironic stars.

A field gun behind them started to crash out shells. Winterbourne listened to the long-drawn wail as they sped away and finally crashed faintly in the distance. He followed the man ahead of him blindly. Word kept coming down: “Hole here, look out.” “Wire overhead.” “Mind your head—bridge.” He passed the messages on, after tripping in the holes, catching his bayonet in the field telephone wires, and knocking his helmet on the low bridge. They passed the Reserve line, then the Support, with the motionless sentries on the fire-step, and the peculiar smell of burnt wood and foul air coming from the dug-outs. A minute later came the sharp message: “Stop talking—don’t clink your shovels.” They were now only a few hundred yards from the German Front line. A few guns were firing in a desultory way. A shell crashed outside the parapet about five yards from Winterbourne’s head. It was only a whizz-bang, but to his unpractised ears it sounded like a heavy. The shells came in fours—crump, Crump, _crump_, CRRUMP—the Boche was bracketing. Every minute or so came a sharp “ping”—fixed rifles firing at a latrine or an unprotected piece of trench. The duck-boards were more broken. Winterbourne stumbled over an unexploded shell, then had to clamber over a heap of earth where the side of the trench had been smashed in, a few minutes earlier. The trench made another sharp turn, and he saw the bayonet and helmet of a sentry silhouetted against the sky. They were in the front line.

They turned sharp left. To their right were the fire-steps, with a sentry about every fifty yards. In between came traverses and dug-out entrances, with their rolled-up blanket gas-curtains. Winterbourne peered down them—there was a faint glow of light, a distant mutter of talk, and a heavy stench of wood smoke and foul air. The man in front stopped and turned to Winterbourne:

“Halt—password to-night’s ‘Lantern.’” Winterbourne halted, and passed the message on. They waited. He was standing almost immediately behind a sentry, and got on the fire-step beside the man to take his first look at No Man’s Land.

“’Oo are you?” asked the sentry in low tones.

“Pioneers.”

“Got a bit o’ candle to give us, chum?”

“Awfully, sorry, chum, I haven’t.”

“Them muckin R.E.’s gets ’em all.”

“I’ve got a packet of chocolate, if you’d like it.”

“Ah. Thanks, chum.”

The sentry broke a bit of chocolate and began to munch.

“Muckin cold up here, it is. Me feet’s fair froze. Muckin dreary, too. I can ’ear ole Fritz coughin’ over there in ’is listenin’ post—don’t ’arf sound ’ollow. Listen.”

Winterbourne listened, and heard a dull hollow sound of coughing.

“Fritz’s sentry,” whispered the men. “Pore ole bugger—needs some liquorice.”

“Move on,” came the word from the man in front. Winterbourne jumped down from the fire-step and passed on the word.

“Good-night, chum,” said the sentry.

“Good-night, chum.”

* * * * *

Winterbourne was put on the party digging the sap out into No Man’s Land. The officer stopped him as he was entering the sap.

“You’re one of the new draft, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Wait a minute.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The other men filed into the sap. The officer spoke in low tones:

“You can take sentry for the first hour. Come along, and don’t stand up.”

The young crescent moon had risen and poured down cold faint light. Every now and then a Verey light was fired from the German or English lines, brilliantly illuminating the desolate landscape of torn irregular wire and jagged shell-holes. They climbed over the parapet and crawled over the broken ground past the end of the sap. The officer made for a shell-hole just inside the English wire, and Winterbourne followed him.

“Lie here,” whispered the officer, “and keep a sharp lookout for German patrols. Fire if you see them and give the alarm. There’s a patrol of our own out on the right, so make sure before you fire. There’s a couple of bombs somewhere in the shell-hole. You’ll be relieved in an hour.”

“Very good, Sir.”

The officer crawled away, and Winterbourne remained alone in No Man’s Land, about twenty-five yards in front of the British line. He could hear the soft dull thuds of picks and shovels from the men working the sap and a very faint murmur as they talked in whispers. A Verey light hissed up from the English lines, and he strained his eyes for the possible enemy patrol. In the brief light he saw nothing but the irregular masses of German wire, the broken line of their parapet, shell-holes and débris, and the large stump of a dead tree. Just as the bright magnesium turned in its luminous parabola, a hidden machine-gun, not thirty yards from Winterbourne, went off with a loud crackle of bullets like the engine of a motor-bicycle. He started, and nearly pulled the trigger of his rifle. Then silence. A British sentry coughed with a deep hacking sound; then from the distance came the hollow coughing of a German sentry. Eerie sounds in the pallid moonlight. “Ping” went a sniper’s rifle. It was horribly cold. Winterbourne was shivering, partly from cold, partly from excitement.

Interminable minutes passed. He grew colder and colder. Occasionally a few shells from one side or the other went wailing overhead and crashed somewhere in the back areas. About four hundred yards away to his left began a series of loud shattering detonations. He strained his eyes, and could just see the flash of the explosion and the dark column of smoke and débris. These were German trench mortars, the dreaded “minnies,” although he did not know it.

Nothing different happened until about three-quarters of an hour had passed. Winterbourne got colder and colder, felt he had been out there at least three hours, and thought he must have been forgotten. He shivered with cold. Suddenly, he thought he saw something move to his right, just outside the wire. He gazed intently, all tense and alert. Yes, a dark something was moving. It stopped, and seemed to vanish. Then near it another dark figure moved and then a third. It was a patrol, making for the gap in the wire in front of Winterbourne. Were they Germans or British? He pointed his rifle towards them, got the bombs ready, and waited. They came nearer and nearer. Just before they got to the wire, Winterbourne challenged in a loud whisper:

“Halt, who are you?”

All three figures instantly disappeared.

“Halt, who are you?”

“Friend,” came a low answer.

“Give the word or I fire.”

“Lantern.”

“All right.”

One of the men crawled through the wire to Winterbourne, followed by the other two. They wore balaclava helmets, and carried revolvers.

“Are you the patrol?” whispered Winterbourne.

“Who the muckin hell d’you think we are? Father Christmas? What are you doin’ out here?”

“Pioneers digging a sap about fifteen yards behind.”

“Are you Pioneers?”

“Yes.”

“Got a bit o’ candle, chum?”

“Sorry, I haven’t, we don’t get them issued.”

The patrol crawled off, and Winterbourne heard an alarmed challenge from the men working in the sap, and the word “Lantern.” A Verey light went up from the German lines just as the patrol were crawling over the parapet. A German sentry fired his rifle and a machine-gun started up. The patrol dropped hastily into the trench. The machine-gun bullets whistled cruelly past Winterbourne’s head—Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. He crouched down in the hole. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. Then silence. He lifted his head, and continued to watch. For two or three minutes there was complete silence. The men in the sap seemed to have knocked off work, and made no sound. Winterbourne listened intently. No sound. It was the most ghostly, desolate, deathly silence he had ever experienced. He had never imagined that death could be so deathly. The feeling of annihilation, of the end of existence, of a dead planet of the dead arrested in a dead time and space, penetrated his flesh along with the cold. He shuddered. So frozen, so desolate, so dead a world—everything smashed and lying inertly broken. Then “crack-ping” went a sniper’s rifle, and a battery of field-guns opened out with salvos about half a mile to his right. The machine-guns began again. The noise was a relief after that ghastly dead silence.

At last the N.C.O. came crawling out from the sap with another man to relieve him. A Verey light shot up from the German line in their direction, just as the two men reached him. All three crouched motionless, as the accurate German machine-gun fire swept the British trench parapet—zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, the flights of bullets went over them. Winterbourne saw a strand of wire just in front of him suddenly flip up in the air where a low bullet had struck it. Quite near enough—not six inches above his head.

They crawled back to the sap, and Winterbourne tumbled in. He found himself face to face with the platoon officer, Lieutenant Evans. Winterbourne was shivering uncontrollably; he felt utterly chilled. His whole body was numb, his hands stiff, his legs one ache of cold from the knees down. He realized the cogency of the Adjutant’s farewell hint about looking after feet, and decided to drop his indifference to goose grease and neat’s-foot oil.

“Cold?” asked the officer.

“It’s bitterly cold out there, Sir,” said Winterbourne through chattering teeth.

“Here, take a drink of this,” and Evans held out a small flask.

Winterbourne took the flask in his cold-shaken hand. It chinked roughly against his teeth as he took a gulp of the terrifically potent Army rum. The strong liquor half choked him, burned his throat, and made his eyes water. Almost immediately, he felt the deadly chill beginning to lessen. But he still shivered.

“Good Lord, man, you’re frozen,” said Evans. “I thought it was colder than ever to-night. It’s no weather for lying in No Man’s Land. Corporal, you’ll have to change that sentry every half hour—an hour’s too long in this frost.”

“Very good, Sir.”

“Have some more rum?” asked Evans.

“No, thanks, Sir,” replied Winterbourne, “I’m quite all right now. I can warm up with some digging.”

“No, get your rifle and come with me.”

Evans started off briskly down the trench to visit the other working parties. About a hundred yards from the sap he climbed out of the trench over the parados; Winterbourne scrambled after, more impeded by his chilled limbs, his rifle and heavier equipment. Evans gave him a hand up. They walked about another hundred yards over the top, and then reached the place where several parties were digging trench mortar emplacements. The N.C.O. saw them coming and climbed out of one of the holes to meet them.

“Getting on all right, Sergeant?”

“Ground’s very hard, Sir.”

“I know, but—”

Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, zwiss came a rush of bullets, following the rapid tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of a machine-gun. The Sergeant ducked double. Evans remained calmly standing. Seeing his unconcern, Winterbourne also remained upright.

“I know the ground’s hard,” said Evans, “but those emplacements are urgently needed. Headquarters were at us again to-day about them. I’ll see how you’re getting on.”

The Sergeant hastily scuttled into one of the deep emplacements, followed in a more leisurely way by the officer. Winterbourne remained standing on top, and listened to Evans as he urged the men to get a move on. Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss, very close this time. Winterbourne felt a slight creep in his spine, but since Evans had not moved before, he decided that the right thing was to stand still. Evans visited each of the four emplacements, and then made straight for the front line. He paused at the parados.

“We’re pretty close to the Boche front line here. He’s got a machine-gun post about a hundred and fifty yards over there.”

Tat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss.

“Look! Over there.”

Winterbourne just caught a glimpse of the quick flashes.

“Damn!” said Evans, “I forgot to bring my prismatic compass to-night. We might have taken a bearing on them, and got the artillery to turf them out.”

He jumped carelessly into the trench, and Winterbourne dutifully followed. About fifty yards farther on, he stopped.

“I see from your pay-book that you’re an artist in civil life.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Paint pictures, and draw?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Why don’t you apply for a draughtsman’s job at Division? They need them.”

“Well, Sir, I don’t particularly covet a hero’s grave, but I feel very strongly I ought to take my chance in the line along with the rest.”

“Ah. Of course. Are you a pretty good walker?”

“I used to go on walking tours in peace time, Sir.”

“Well, there’s an order that every officer is to have a runner. Would you like the job of Platoon Runner? You’d have to accompany me, and you’re supposed to take my last dying orders! You’d have to learn the lie of the trenches, so as to act as guide; take my orders to N.C.O.’s; know enough about what’s going on to help them if I’m knocked out, and carry messages. It’s perhaps a bit more dangerous than the ordinary work, and you may have to turn out at odd hours, but it’ll get you off a certain amount of digging.”

“I’d like it very much, Sir.”

“All right, I’ll speak to the Major about it.”

“It’s very good of you, Sir.”

“Can you find your way back to the sap? It’s about two hundred yards along this trench.”

“I’m sure I can, Sir.”

“All right. Go back and report to the Corporal, and carry on.”

“Very good, Sir.”

“You haven’t forgotten the pass-word?”

“No, Sir, ‘Lantern.’”

* * * * *

About thirty yards along the trench, there was a rattle of equipment, and Winterbourne found a bayonet about two feet from his chest. It was a gas-sentry outside Company H.Q. Dugout.

“Halt! Who are yer?”

“Lantern.”

The sentry languidly lowered his rifle.

“Muckin cold to-night, mate.”

“Bloody cold.”

“What are you, Bedfords or Essex?”

“No, Pioneers.”

“Got a bit of candle to give us, mate, it’s muckin dark in them dugouts.”

“Very sorry, chum, I haven’t.”

Rather trying this constant demand for candle-ends from the Pioneers, who were popularly supposed by the infantry to receive immense “issues” of candles. But without candles the dugouts were merely black holes, even in the daytime, if they were any depth. They were deep on this front, since the line was a captured German trench reorganized. Hence the dugouts faced the enemy, instead of being turned away from them.

“Oh, all right, good-night.”

“Good-night.”

Winterbourne returned to the sap, and did two more half-hour turns as sentry, and for the rest of the time picked, or shovelled the hard clods of earth into sandbags. The sandbags were then carried back to the front line and piled there to raise the parapet. It was a slow business. The sap itself was camouflaged to avoid observation. Winterbourne hadn’t the slightest idea what its object was. He was very weary and sleepy when they finally knocked off work about one in the morning. An eight-hour shift, exclusive of time taken in getting to and from the work. The men filed wearily along the trench, rifles slung on the left shoulder, picks and shovels carried on the right. Winterbourne stumbled along half-asleep with the cold and the fatigue of unaccustomed labour. He felt he didn’t mind how dangerous it was—if it was dangerous—to be a runner, provided he got some change from the dreariness of digging, and filling and carrying sandbags.

After they passed the Support Line, the hitherto silent men began to talk occasionally. At Reserve they got permission to smoke. Each grabbed in his pockets for a fag, and lighted it as he stumbled along the uneven duckboards. After what seemed an endless journey to Winterbourne they reached the four steps, climbed up, and emerged into the now familiar ruined street. It was silent and rather ghostly in the very pale light of the new moon. They dumped their picks and shovels, went to the cook to draw their ration of hot tea, which was served from a large black dixie and tasted unpleasantly of stew. They filed past the officer who gave each of them a rum ration.

Winterbourne drank some of the tea in his billet, then took off his boots, wrapped himself up, and drank the rest. Some real warmth flushed into his chilled body. He was angry with himself for being so tired, after a cushy night on a cushy front. He wondered what Elizabeth and Fanny would say if they saw his animal gratitude for tea and rum. Fanny? Elizabeth? They had receded far from him, not so far as all the other people he knew, who had receded to several light years, but very far. “Elizabeth” and “Fanny” were now memories and names at the foot of sympathetic but rather remote letters. Drowsiness came rapidly upon him, and he fell asleep as he was thinking of the curious “zwiss, zwiss,” made by machine-gun bullets passing overhead. He did not hear the two howitzers when they fired a dozen rounds before dawn.

[ VI ]

Except for the episode with the officer, this specimen night may stand as a type of Winterbourne’s life in the next eight or ten days. They went up the line at dusk; they were shot at, worked, and shivered with cold: went down the line, slept, tried to clean themselves, and paraded again. Four or five times they passed corpses being carried down the trenches as they went up. There was, of course, nothing to report on the western front.

Then, just as the monotony was becoming almost as intolerable as drilling to the home-service R.S.M.’s “Stand still there, stand _steady!_” they had a night off, and were transferred to the day shift. But this was even more tedious. They paraded soon after dawn, and worked in Hinton Alley, about two hundred yards from the Front Line. Their job was to hack up the frozen mud—which was about as malleable as marble—extricate the worn duck-boards, dig “sump-holes,” and relay new duck boards. A job which in moist weather might have occupied two men for half an hour, in that frost occupied four men all day.

A Lieutenant-General came along while Winterbourne was laboriously jarring his wrists, trying to hack up the marble-like mud.

“Well, and what are you doing, my man?”

“Replacing duck-boards, Sir,” said Winterbourne, bringing his pick smartly to his side, and standing to attention, toes at an angle of forty-five degrees.

“Well, get on with it, my man, get on with it.”

Vive L’Empereur.

* * * * *

Diversions were few, but existed. There were, for instance, the rats. Winterbourne had been too much absorbed by other new experiences to pay much attention to them at first. And during the day they kept rather out of sight. One evening, just about sunset, as they were returning down Hinton Alley, there was a block in the trench. Winterbourne happened to be just at the corner of the Support line, with its damaged, revetted traverses, and piles of sandbags on the parapet. The Germans were sending up some rather fancy signal rockets from their Front line, and he was vaguely wondering what they meant, when a huge rat darted or rather scrambled impudently just past his head. Then he noticed that a legion of the fattest and longest rats he had ever seen were popping in and out the crevices between the sand-bags. As far as he could see down the trench in the dusk they were swarming over parapet and parados. Such well-fed rats! He shuddered, thinking of what they had probably fed upon.

In a very short time he had become perfectly accustomed to the very mild artillery fire, sniping and machine-gunning. No casualties had occurred in his own company, and he began to think that the dangers of the war had been exaggerated, while its physical discomforts and tedium had been greatly underestimated. The intense frost prevented his shaking off the heavy cold he had caught at Calais, and at the same time had given him a chill on the liver. The same thing had happened to half the men in the company, whether new-comers or old stagers; and all suffered from diarrhœa due to the cold. There was thus the added diversion of frequent visits to the latrine. Those in the line were primitive affairs of a couple of biscuit boxes and buckets, interesting from the fact that the Germans had fixed rifles trained on most of them and might get you if you happened to stand up inopportunely. If you had any sense you waited until the bullet ping-ed over, and then calmly walked out: for lack of which elementary precaution somebody occasionally was popped off. The Pioneers’ latrine, just behind their billet, was a more elaborate six-seater (without separate compartments) built over a deep trench and surrounded with sacking on posts. One of the posts had been damaged by a shell, and there were numerous rents in the sacking from shell splinters. Here Winterbourne was forced to spend a larger portion of his spare time than was pleasant in cold weather. One day when he entered he found another occupant, an artilleryman. This person was carefully examining his grey flannel shirt: and such portions of his body as were exposed to view were covered with small bloody blotches. Some horrid skin disease, Winterbourne surmised. He attended to his own urgent private affairs.

“Still terribly cold,” he ventured.

“Muckin cold,” said the artilleryman, continuing absorbedly the mysterious search in his shirt.

“Those are nasty skin eruptions you have.”

“It’s them muckin chats. Billet’s fair lousy with ’em.”

Chats? Lousy? Ah, of course, the artilleryman was lousy. So lousy that he had been bitten all over, and had scratched himself raw. Winterbourne felt uncomfortable. He detested the idea of vermin.

“How d’you get them? Can’t you get rid of them?”

“Get ’em? Everybody gets ’em. Ain’t you chatty? And there ain’t no gettin’ rid of ’em. The clothes they gives you at the baths is as chatty as those you ’ands in. Where there’s dug-outs and billets there’s chats, and where there’s chats, they cops yer.”

Winterbourne departed from the lousy artilleryman with a new pre-occupation in life—to remain one of the chatless as long as possible. It was not many weeks, however, before he too became resigned to the louse as an inevitable war comrade.

* * * * *

Like a good many recruits when first in the line he was rather inclined to be foolhardy than timorous. When a shell exploded near the trench, he popped his head up to have a look at it; and listened to the machine-gun bullets swishing past with great interest. The older hands reproved him:

“Don’t be so muckin anxious to look at whizz-bangs. You’ll get a damn sight too many pretty soon. And don’t keep shovin’ yer ’ead over the top. _We_ don’t care a muck if ole Fritz gets yer, but if he sees yer he might put his artillery on _us_.”

Winterbourne rather haughtily decided they were timorous, an impression confirmed by the manner in which they instantly ducked and crouched when a shell came whistling towards them. So many shells exploded harmlessly that he wondered at their inefficiency. Late one afternoon the Germans began firing on Hinton Alley—little salvos of four whizz-bangs at a time. The men went on with their work, but a little apprehensively. Winterbourne clambered partly up the side of the trench and watched the shells bursting—crump, Crump, _Crump_, CRRUMP. The splinters hummed harmoniously through the air. Suddenly he heard a loud whizz, and zip-phut, a large piece of metal hurtled just past his head and half-buried itself in the hard chalk of the trench. More surprised than scared he jumped down and levered the metal up with his pick. It was a brass nose-cap, still warm from the heat of the explosion. He held it in his hand, gazing with curiosity at the German lettering. The other men jeered and scolded him in a friendly way. He felt they exaggerated—his nerves were still so much fresher than theirs.

That night, just after he had got down into kip, the night silence was abruptly broken by a discharge of artillery. Gun after gun, whose existence he had never suspected, opened out all round, and in half a minute fifty or sixty were in action. From the line came the long rattle of a dozen or more machine-guns, with the funny little pops of distant hand grenades. He got up and went to the door. Ruins interrupted a direct view, but he saw the flashes of the guns, a sort of glow over a short part of the front line, and Verey lights and rockets flying up continually. A Corporal came unconcernedly into the billet.

“What is it?” asked Winterbourne, “an attack?”

“Attack be jiggered. Identification raid, I reckon.”

The German artillery had now opened up, and a shell dropped in the village street. Winterbourne retired to his earth-floor. In about three-quarters of an hour the firing quieted down; only one German battery of five-nines kept dropping shells in and about the village. Winterbourne began to reflect that shell-fire in gross might be more deadly than the few odd retail discharges he had hitherto experienced.

Next morning, the Corporal’s diagnosis proved correct. As they went up Hinton Alley soon after dawn, they met a British Tommy escorting six lugubrious personages in field grey, whose faces were almost concealed in large white bandages swathed all round their heads.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“Fritzes. Prisoners.”

“I wonder why they are all wounded in the head.”

“Koshed on the napper with trench clubs. I reckon they’ve got narsty ’eadaches, pore old barstards.”

* * * * *

About a week after that, they had a day off, and were warned to parade at five P.M. to begin another night shift. (Each platoon in turn did a week’s day shift and three weeks’ night-work.) The Sergeant turned to Winterbourne:

“And you’re to report at the Officer’s Mess fifteen minutes before p’rade.”

Winterbourne duly reported, wondering uneasily what breach of military discipline he had committed. He was met on the door-step by Evans, who was just coming out, all muffled up.

“Ah, there you are, Winterbourne. Major Thorpe says you may act as my runner, so hereafter you’ll parade here fifteen minutes earlier than the rest each night.”

“Very good, Sir.”

* * * * *

All this time Winterbourne was rather wretchedly ill, and remained so for weeks. He had a permanent cough and cold, and was weakened by the prolonged diarrhœa. Every night he felt feverish, passing rapidly from a cold shivering to a high temperature. On the day after his arrival in the line, he had “gone sick” to get something to relieve his hard cough. Major Thorpe had chosen to consider this as an attempt to evade duty, and had promptly insulted him. Whereupon Winterbourne had decided that so long as he could stand he would never “go sick” again. So he carried on. The stretcher-bearer in his platoon had a clinical thermometer. One night just before going up the line Winterbourne got the man to take his temperature. It was 102.

“You didn’t ought to go up the line like that, mate,” said the man, with a sort of coarse kindness Winterbourne liked, “I’ll tell the orfficer you ain’t fit for service, an’ make it all right with the M.O. to-morrer.”

Winterbourne laughed: