Chapter XIII

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

--OMAR KHAYYÁM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh, sir!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where are you hit?” asked our Ensign.

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

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

“Got any brandy?” asked the Grenadier.

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

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

“How are things going?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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