Chapter XVI: Part THREE: Adagio (6)

This meeting with the Canadians was probably the last piece of enjoyment or tranquillity that Winterbourne ever had. From the moment he went back to his own Battalion his life became one long harassed nightmare. He was deluged with all sorts of documents requiring information and statistics he was totally unable to furnish. The blunders, the mistakes, the negligences of his inexperienced men were legion, and all were visited upon him by the martinet Colonel. For days and weeks he got scarcely any sleep and never once even took his boots off. He had continually to be up and down the trench, especially during the periodic six days in the Front line, and even in Support. He spent hours a day answering idiotic written questions brought by weary Runners and trying to puzzle out minute and unnecessary orders. He was always being told to report to Battalion Headquarters, where he was savagely attacked and reprimanded for the most piffling and unimportant errors. He went on patrol himself, contrary to orders, to make sure that at least one patrol a night was properly done—and was severely reprimanded for that. The boys, suddenly released from button-polishing and saluting and drill (which they had been taught to consider all important) became deplorably slack in important matters. They lost portions of their equipment, dropped their ammunition, never knew their orders as sentries, went to sleep on sentry duty, shivered when ordered to go on patrol, cried when put in listening posts in No Man’s Land, littered up the trench with paper, bully beef tins and fragments of food, urinated in the trenches, and “forgot” perpetually everything they were told. While Winterbourne was at one end of his section of trench, desperately and sweatingly trying to get some sort of order and sense into them, others were committing all sorts of military abominations at the other end. It was useless to “take their names” for punishment, especially as there aren’t many punishments as bad as being in the line. One day he did exasperatedly make the Sergeant-Major “Take their names” and by nightfall found he had collected forty-two. Ludicrous. The N.C.O.’s gave the job up in despair and let things drift.

He found most of the recruits were hopelessly slow in getting on their gas masks, and appeared to be in such a state of hebetude that they did not realize that gas was dangerous. They did preposterous things. They would, for instance, entirely abandon a Lewis Gun post to get their dinners. It was ten days before Winterbourne discovered this. The subalterns had seen it, of course, but had not known that they ought to report it. Winterbourne “ran” the responsible N.C.O. as an example. He “ran” a boy for sleeping on sentry duty, and then washed out the charge when he reflected that the poor wretch might be shot for so serious a military crime. His Front line positions were an exhausting nightmare, too. His front was over five hundred yards. He had an outpost line of four listening and observation posts with a section in each. Three hundred yards farther back he had his main defence line and his own headquarters. Behind that he had various isolated Lewis Gun positions. All these were imposed upon him in spite of his protests. The defence scheme might be all very well on paper, and might have worked out with experienced troops, but it was hopeless under these peculiar circumstances. He realized after a couple of nights in the Front line that under any determined attack it would be impossible for him to hold his positions for ten minutes. He urged this on the Colonel, begging that the dispositions might be temporarily revised and the men brought more closely together under his own eyes. He was told that he was incompetent and not fit to be a Lance-Corporal. Winterbourne sarcastically replied that some people are born Corporals and some are not. He offered to resign his command, and was ordered to continue it under threat of immediate arrest and court-martial for negligence and disobeying orders in the face of the enemy. Knowing how easily a court-martial can be “cooked,” Winterbourne unwillingly carried on.

Most fortunately, he was not at first attacked, but he lost several men. Two were wounded on a ration party, having lost contact and wandered about half the night. One was shot through the neck by a fixed rifle, although Winterbourne had thrice ordered every N.C.O. to warn the men about it. At Stand-to one morning, the Germans bombarded them with mustard gas shells. Winterbourne had warned them of the gas until he was sick of doing so. Two mustard shells fell just outside the parapet of a fire-step with six men on it. They ducked down when the shells burst and then stood stupidly looking at the bright yellow shell-hole, wondering what the funny smell was. Three of them were gassed, and two died.

Winterbourne spent most of each night plodding up and down his immense area of trenches to see that every one was at his post. After dawn one morning, instead of trying to snatch an hour’s sleep, he went up to inspect his listening posts, feeling an uneasy intuition about them. There were four, about a hundred yards apart, isolated in what had once been the Front line. At the third listening post, he found six rifles leaning against the trench and no men. They had been captured by a silent raiding party in broad daylight! Probably all asleep. Winterbourne was furious, sent his Runner back for another section, and remained on guard himself. The Runner came back timidly after an interminable time, and said the Sergeant wouldn’t come. Winterbourne didn’t want the other posts to know that one had been captured, fearing a panic. It was useless to leave the Runner on guard; he would simply have waited until Winterbourne’s back was turned and have run to the other posts and spread an alarmist report. Winterbourne hurried back, and found that the Runner had delivered such a garbled and incoherent message that the Sergeant had been utterly unable to understand, and had sent him back for precise orders. Of course, the Colonel put all the responsibility upon Winterbourne, and threatened him again with a court-martial. Winterbourne protested and they had a furious row; after which the Colonel re-doubled his persecutions. When they went out for four days’ “rest” after their first three weeks in the line Winterbourne felt more exhausted and depressed than he would have believed possible. He saw that the men got into their billets, after infinite tramplings and shoutings in the darkness, and fell on to a sacking bed. He slept for fourteen hours.

* * * * *

Of course, Winterbourne had taken all this far too tragically and responsibly. The situation happened to be one which most disastrously fed his “worry” neurosis. A bitterly humorous destiny seemed intentionally to involve him in circumstances which rent his mind to pieces and exhausted his body—unnecessarily. It was a misfortune, due possibly to the fact that the initial of his name made him come towards the end of a list, that he was sent to a battalion so raggedly composed and so naggingly commanded. We passed out almost together at the Cadet School, but where everything ran comparatively easily and smoothly for me, all went wrong with him. He brooded incessantly and saw all things in terms of the bleakest despair—the collapse of his own life, his present situation, the continued retirement of the Allied Armies which seemed to promise an indefinite continuation of the War, his feeling that even if he came out alive he would never be able to re-build his life. It was unlucky to go straight back to M——, which had such tragic associations for him and made it doubly hard to repress shell-shocked nerves. His state of mind, what with sleeplessness and worry and shock and ague, which came back as soon as he was in the line again, and physical exhaustion and inhibited fear, almost fringed dementia, and he would have collapsed but for his strength of will and pride. But he was a wrecked man, swept along in the swirling cataracts of the War.

* * * * *

The days passed into weeks, the weeks into months. He moved through impressions like a man hallucinated. And every incident seemed to beat on his brain, Death, Death, Death. All the decay and death of battle fields entered his blood and seemed to poison him. He lived among smashed bodies and human remains in an infernal cemetery. If he scratched his stick idly and nervously in the side of a trench he pulled out human ribs. He ordered a new latrine to be dug out from the trench, and thrice the digging had to be abandoned because they came upon terrible black masses of decomposing bodies. At dawn one morning when it was misty he walked over the top of Hill 91, where probably nobody had been by day since its capture. The heavy mist brooded about him in a strange stillness. Scarcely a sound on their immediate front, though from north and south came the vibration of furious drum-fire. The ground was a desert of shell-holes and torn rusty wire, and everywhere lay skeletons in steel helmets still clothed in the rags of sodden khaki or field grey. Here a fleshless hand still clutched a broken rusty rifle, there a gaping decaying boot showed the thin knotty foot-bones. He came on a skeleton violently dismembered by a shell explosion; the skull was split open and the teeth lay scattered on the bare chalk; the force of the explosion had driven coins and a metal pencil right into the hip-bones and femurs. In a concrete pill-box three German skeletons lay across their machine-gun with its silent nozzle still pointing at the loop hole. They had been attacked from the rear with phosphorous grenades, which burn their way into the flesh and for which there is no possible remedy. A shrunken leather strap still held a battered wrist-watch on a fleshless wrist-bone. Alone in the white curling mist, drifting slowly past like wraiths of the slain, with the far-off thunder of drum-fire beating the air, Winterbourne stood in frozen silence and contemplated the last achievements of civilized man.

* * * * *

A raiding party was sent out from his front. He watched the box barrage from the front line. The Germans filled the night with Verey lights and coloured rockets. Their artillery and trench-mortars and machine-guns retaliated fiercely. Smoke and gas drifted across. After interminable waiting the officer and three of the men staggered back, bleeding, blackened with smoke, their clothes torn to pieces on the wire. The raid had failed.

* * * * *

A Company of Gas Experts came up from the Base, and sent over some thousands of Stokes mortars loaded with a heavy concentration of poison gas. As soon as the last mortar was fired they were in a fearful hurry to get away. The German artillery retaliation smashed their trenches. Next morning, Winterbourne watched through glasses the Germans carrying out their dead on stretchers.

* * * * *

A British airplane fell in No Man’s Land. Winterbourne saw the pilot, who was still alive, struggle to get out from the wreckage. An enemy machine-gun was turned on him, and he fell limp across the side of the cock-pit. The plane was smashed to pieces by British heavies to prevent the Germans from obtaining the model.

* * * * *

They shifted to another part of the line. The Company was out in No Man’s Land in the darkness strengthening their shattered wire against a threatened attack. Suddenly from half a mile of German front leaped a line of flame. There was a whistling roar of projectiles, and a thousand gas containers crashed to the ground all about them. Men were killed outright by direct hits, and wounded by pieces of flying metal. Every man who took more than two breaths of the deadly concentration was doomed. All that night and far into the misty dawn the stretchers went down the communication trench carrying inert figures with horrible foam on their mouths.

* * * * *

The German attacks spent their force, and the huge Allied counter-attacks began. The starving German armies were hurled back to the Hindenburg Line, their impregnable defence. The Canadians miraculously stormed the Drocourt-Quéant switch line.

Winterbourne was back on the Somme, that incredible desert, pursuing the retreating enemy. They came up the Bapaume-Cambrai road by night, and bivouacked in holes scratched with entrenching tools in the side of a sandy bank. The wrecked country-side in the pale moonlight was a frigid and motionless image of Death. They spoke in whispers, awed by the immensity of desolation. By day the whole landscape was covered with the débris left by the broken German armies. Smashed tanks, guns with their wheels broken, stood out like fixed wrecks in the unmoving ocean of shell-holes. The whole earth seemed a litter of overcoats, shaggy leather packs, rifles, water-bottles, gas masks, steel helmets, bombs, entrenching tools, cast away in the panic of flight. By night, the sky glowed with the flames of burning Cambrai, with the black hump of Bourlon Hill silhouetted against them.

They drove the Germans from Cambrai, and pressed on from village to village, constantly shelled and harassed by machine-gun fire from their rear-guard. The German machine-gunners, fragments of the magnificent armies of the early War years, died at their posts. The demoralized German Infantry surrendered wholesale.

For three days in succession Winterbourne’s Company formed the advance guard, and he led it in the darkness over unknown ground by compass bearing in a kind of dazed delirium. Pressing on through falling shells in the blank night, with the ever present dread of falling into a machine-gun ambush, became an agony. They fought their way into inhabited villages which had been held by the Germans for over four years. The terrified people crouched in cellars or ran distractedly into the fields. They took the village of F——, after a brief but fierce bombardment, an hour after dawn. The roads leading in and out were encumbered with dead Germans, smashed transport, the contorted bodies of dead horses. Dead German soldiers lay about the village street, which was cluttered with fallen tiles and bricks. In a garden a war-demented peasant was digging a grave to bury his wife, who had been killed by a shell-burst. In the ruined village school Winterbourne picked up a book—it was Pascal’s “Thoughts on Christianity.”

* * * * *

Part of Cambrai had been levelled to the ground in 1914, and stood a melancholy monument of neatly-piled wreckage. Part of the remainder was burned. In the undestroyed streets many houses had been looted. The furniture had been smashed, pictures and photographs torn from the walls, cushions ripped open with bayonets, curtains slashed down, carpets gashed into rags. The whole mass of desecrated objects had been flung into the centre of the floor, after which the Germans had urinated and dropped their excrement upon it. Winterbourne gazed into a dozen houses which had been treated in this way. The villages beyond Cambrai had not been sacked, but were utterly filthy and swarming with buzzing legions of flies. Isolated cottages had sometimes been completely gutted of their contents. In one place Winterbourne found an emaciated French woman and two starved children living in a cottage with nothing but straw—literally nothing but straw in the place. He gave them his iron rations and twenty francs. The woman took them with a dull hopelessness.

* * * * *

They were approaching the Belgian border. On the evening of the 3rd of November Winterbourne with about twenty men rushed into the village of K——, just as the Germans hastily retreated from the other end. He had been ordered to occupy the place if possible, and to arrange billets. He lodged his Company, placed guards and pickets and then went through the cellars. The Germans were experts in placing booby-traps which would explode if carelessly moved, and Winterbourne did not know whether there might not be men concealed in the cellars to take them unawares. He went down into cellar after cellar with his electric torch, and was soon re-assured. The Germans had fled in such haste that they had left their rifles and equipment in several cellars. The floors were strewn with straw. On a table he found a half-finished letter, abandoned in the middle of a sentence. In another a large black dog lay dead—its owner had killed it with a bullet rather than leave it to possible ill-treatment.

* * * * *

The Colonel explained the dispositions for the coming battle over a map. The conference of officers took notes of the orders which were very elaborate, but precise and clear. It was nearly half-past three when they had finished, and zero hour was six-thirty. Winterbourne had been on foot since five the morning before. His eyes smarted with lack of sleep, and his mind was so dulled that he could scarcely comprehend and write down his orders. He misspelled words as he scrawled down notes in shaking deformed handwriting. He puzzled a long time over map-references, and irritated the Colonel by repeatedly asking questions.

They had an hour before they moved out to their battle positions. The other officers hurried away to snatch an hour’s sleep. Winterbourne felt utterly sleepy, but quite unable to sleep. The thought of another battle, even with the dispirited and defeated German rear-guard, filled him with shrinking dread. How face another barrage? He tried to write letters to Fanny and Elizabeth, but his mind kept wandering away and he could not collect his thoughts sufficiently to string together a few banal sentences. He sat on a chair brought him by his servant, with his head in his hands, staring at the straw and the dead black dog. He had only one thought—peace. He must at least have peace. He was at the very end of his endurance, had used up the last fraction of his energy and strength. He wished he was one of the skeletons lying on Hill 91, an anonymous body among the corpses lying outside in the street. He had not even the courage to shoot himself with his revolver; and added that last grain of self-contempt to his despair.

* * * * *

They assembled by platoons in the village street, and each officer marched off in silence to his allotted position. Winterbourne followed with his little knot of Company Headquarters, and saw that each platoon was in its proper place. He shook hands with each officer.

“Quite sure about your orders and objective?”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye.”

“Oh, make it au revoir.”

“Good-bye.”

Winterbourne returned to his own position and waited. He looked at his luminous wrist-watch. Six twenty-five. Five minutes to zero hour. The cold November night was utterly silent. Thousands of men and hundreds of guns were facing each other on the verge of battle, and there seemed not a sound. He listened. Nothing. His Runner whispered something to a signaller, who whispered a reply. Three more minutes. Silence. He could feel the beating of his heart, more rapid than the tick of seconds as he held his watch to his ear.

CRASH! Like an orchestra at the signal of a baton the thousands of guns north and south opened up. The night sprang to flickering day-light with the gun-flashes, the earth trembled with the shock, the air roared and screamed with shells. Lights rushed up from the German line, and their artillery in turn flamed into action. Winterbourne could just see a couple of his sections advancing as he started off himself, and then everything was blotted out in a confusion of smoke and bursting shells. He saw his Runner stagger and fall as a shell burst between them; then his Corporal disappeared, blown to pieces by a direct hit. He came to a sunken road, and lay on the verge, trying to see what was happening in the faint light of dawn. He saw only smoke; and pushed on. Suddenly German helmets were all round him. He clutched at his revolver. Then he saw they were unarmed, holding shaking hands above their heads.

The German machine-guns were tat-tat-tatting at them, and there was a ceaseless swish of bullets. He passed the bodies of several of his men. One section wiped out by a single heavy shell. Other men lay singly. There was Jameson dead; Halliwell dead; Sergeant Morton, Taylor and Fish, dead in a little group. He came to the main road, which was three hundred yards short of his objective. A deadly machine-gun fire was holding up his Company. The officers and men were lying down, the men firing rifles, and the Lewis Guns ripping off drums of bullets. Winterbourne’s second Runner was hit, and lay groaning: “O for God’s sake kill me, _kill_ me. I can’t stand it. The agony. _Kill_ me.”

Something seemed to break in Winterbourne’s head. He felt he was going mad, and sprang to his feet. The line of bullets smashed across his chest like a savage steel whip. The universe exploded darkly into oblivion.

RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE

COMMANDEMENT EN CHEF
DES ARMÉES ALLIÉES

_Officers, Non-commissioned Officers and Men of the Allied Armies._

After resolutely holding the enemy in check, for months you have repeatedly attacked with unwearied energy and confidence.

You have won the greatest battle in History and saved the most sacred of all causes: The liberty of the world.

You may well be proud.

You have wreathed your Colours with immortal fame.

Posterity is grateful to you.

(Signed) F. FOCH

MARSHAL OF FRANCE
COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE ALLIED ARMIES