Chapter XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the secret?

Hush, hush!

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

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

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

Even the unsqueamish MacFinnigan was overcome at the sight.

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

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