Chapter XIV

“Then was seen with what majesty the British soldier
fights....”--NAPIER.

Once again our Ensign was in the midst of the Guards--Grenadiers, Coldstream, Irish, ... remains of half a dozen battalions were there, intermingled with a good sprinkling of men from all manner of line regiments. They stood packed close as herrings in a barrel in the deep and narrow trench, so that it was wellnigh impossible to force a passage. Of officers, for the moment, there was no trace.

Our Ensign stood for a moment to regain his breath and to take in the surroundings. The trench was in a hideous mess, showing abundant traces of the appalling pounding it had received during three days’ incessant artillery fire. The British shells had blown whole segments bodily out of it, so that here the parapet, there the parados, was blasted clean away--sometimes both in the same place--leaving a broad gap void of all protection.

In its time it had been a good specimen of a German fire-trench--in point of fact it was the German main third line--with a neat fire-step, solid traverses, and deep, timber-lined dug-outs with many steps leading sheer down into the bowels of the earth. But now the fire-step was broken and crumbling, the traverses were nearly all blown in, and in many of the dug-outs part of the framework had collapsed, leaving the entrance either sagging or completely blocked up by fallen earth.

The place was a shambles. There were shapeless masses of field-grey trodden down fast into the soft mud bottom of the trench, and sprawling forms, both khaki and grey, lay all over the place. In a yawning rent in the trench, at our Ensign’s very elbow, was the dead body of a lad wearing the black buttons and badges of a Rifle regiment,--a mere boy, with a round bullet-hole in the temple. At his side a figure was sitting, knees drawn up, head resting on the hand, in an attitude of contemplation. Our Ensign recognised a sergeant of his own Battalion ... an oldish, steady man whom he had known well.... So tired and utterly weary was the look on his face, that for the moment the young officer fancied that the man had fallen asleep. But the waxen features told a different tale.... Our Ensign’s heart sank a little within him as he gazed on the two listless figures: all the morning they remained there, and every time he passed them he felt himself shrinking with horror.

The trench was strewn with “souvenirs”--German helmets and caps and rifles and greatcoats and ammunition pouches, boxes of cigars, loaves of bread, tins of meat and sardines, empty bottles, letters, pay-books, littered about among the prostrate forms. The men in the trench were turning these over; many had rank German cigars in their mouths. But our Ensign had no time to waste in poring over these things--as the only officer present, he felt that it devolved upon him to try and bring a little order into the chaos.

Presently he espied a familiar form, gaunt and tall,--it was Sergeant Jackson, of our Ensign’s company. Briefly, the sergeant gave the officer the news. All the officers of our Ensign’s company and the acting company sergeant-major had been knocked out ... none of the officers were killed, he thought ... he had seen “the captain” being carried away in all his usual serenity. There were some officers farther along the trench.

Our Ensign bade the sergeant get the men to work in consolidating the position. Now that the trench was in British hands, it had to be reversed, the parapet built up into a parados and a fire-step cut in the parapet.

“The men will have to work like blazes,” added our young man; “in a few minutes we shall have every German gun in the place opening on us, and the men will want all the cover they can get.”

“And, for Heavens sake, Sergeant Jackson,” he went on, “get some of these bodies put out of the trench!”

Then, with infinite difficulty, our young man started to force himself along the crowded trench. There was no shelling as yet, but there was a lot of machine-gun fire and the air was fairly humming with bullets. He fought his way along desperately hard: the men were willing enough to let him pass, but your Guardsman in full attacking order is a big object that, even edgeways, almost blocks an ordinary trench, and our Ensign had an exhausting time. As he dragged himself round a traverse, he all but stepped on a German lying on the ground. As he passed him, the man caught hold of the officer’s legs and shrieked in a broad Bavarian accent--

“Ach! Herr Leutnant! Ich halt’es nicht aus ... schiessen Sie mich! Ach! schiessen Sie mich! Ich bitt’ Sie!”

The taking of a man’s life in cold blood had never entered into our novice’s philosophy, so he shook the man off and passed on, with a horrid picture in his memory of a livid, grimacing mask.

Our Ensign next came to a broad gap blown clean through parados and parapet. As he was about to pass, a young Coldstreamer at his elbow pushed past him into the gap. The next moment the lad cried out “Oh!” a loud, gasping exclamation of utter astonishment, spun round, and fell prone at the officer’s feet with a great gush of blood that splashed the other’s tunic.

“There’s a sniper laying on that gap, sir,” said an Irish Guardsman standing by; “for the love of God, kape your head down!”

“This is a bloody business,” said our Ensign to himself. These ghastly sights were beginning to get on his nerves. Then, ducking down, he darted across the gap and in a minute or two found himself in the presence of Headquarters. The Commanding Officer told him he was to take command of No. 2 Company, as the only officer surviving, and asked for news of the Second-in-command. Our Ensign told his tale.

A group of officers were there: Roderick, tall and quite cool; The Lad, brimming over with excitement, who had drifted in from his battalion, together with his Commanding Officer, a Brigade Machine-Gun Officer, the Doctor, the Padre, a Forward Observation Officer.

Roderick gave our Ensign a brief budget of news. The Don had been shot through the thigh, crossing the ridge; Apollo had got it through the shoulder, and had last been seen volubly explaining to the stretcher-bearers carrying him down the exact nature of his wound in highly technical language; Duke was all right. Of the officers of the other companies, two at least were known to be killed--Roderick had heard the men talking about them.

One of these two officers was a friend of our Ensign’s, yet he heard of his death quite unmoved. In the heat of battle everything appears unreal--so much is rumour, so little is fact; and even towards the concrete realities under his very eyes a man feels that he will wake up and find it all a dream....

One of the group of officers, who was surveying through his glasses the low brown horizon with its tangle of rusted wire, suddenly pointed to the right.

“That communication trench is full of Huns,” he cried; “look! you can see them in their helmets leaning on the parapet!”

Everybody put up their glasses. There, sure enough, was a long line of heads in coal-scuttle helmets lining the trench indicated. They had a machine-gun trained on the trench where the Guards were; they were also busy sniping into all the gaps.

A Lewis gunner was haled forth from the crowded trench, and he lost no time in laying his gun on the line of Germans. But the gun jammed at the first burst of fire. While they were trying another, our Ensign was ordered to take charge of the left of the line, post sentries, and set every man to the task of consolidating the trench. He was briefly told the situation. On the right, the attacking troops had been held up by the strong position known as The Quadrilateral, bristling with machine-guns, the same guns which had caught the Guards in enfilade as they crossed the ridge; what had happened on the left was not clear.

Our Ensign set off back along the way he had come with a light heart. He rejoiced at having a definite job which would keep him from thinking about the horrors piling up on every side of him. With him went the Brigade Machine-Gun Officer and a Grenadier Ensign, from whom our young man had once taken over in the trenches in the salient. Of the three officers, only our Ensign was destined to survive the day, but, of course, he did not know that then.

The German, who had clutched at our Ensign’s leg on his passage, lay dead in the bottom of the trench. Our Ensign wondered whether the man had found some one to do the service that he refused him. The dead Coldstreamer in the gap had now three companions prone on their faces in the mud.

As they elbowed their way along, the three officers set every man in the trench to the task of consolidation. The men obeyed willingly enough, and the sergeants, at the officers’ bidding, posted sentries at intervals along the trench, with strict injunctions to keep a sharp look-out, right, left, and centre. Thus the three officers forced their way down the trench, leaving a trail of busy diggers in their wake. By mutual arrangement our Ensign pushed on alone to the extreme left, where he found himself among troops of the line, until he met a very youthful subaltern of a Rifle regiment, whom our Ensign informed of the situation, and of the measures they were taking for their protection. This done, our Ensign toiled his way back again along the trench.

And now the long-expected _strafe_ began. A German battery that had been shelling over them shortened its range, and the shells, vicious, black “whizz-bangs,” began dropping uncomfortably close to the trench. Word had been coming along from the right, “All men of the such-and-such battalion of the Coldstream to the right,” “All men of the such-and-such battalion of the Irish Guards to the right,” so the trench was a little clearer as the different battalions got sifted out. Some kind of advance was going forward to the extreme right. Our Ensign saw long lines of men advancing through a tornado of great, black shell-bursts. Presently a flock of grey figures, hands above their heads, bolted across the open. Shouts rang out all down the trench.

“Shoot the dogs! Lend me your rifle, mate! Let them be! Shoot the ----! Ah, leave them alone!” But no shot fell, and the frightened herd plunged across the broken ground among their own shells, a couple of phlegmatic figures in khaki driving them before them.

The German shell fire was growing in intensity. A 5.9 battery had joined in. The cry of “stretcher-bearER!” ran up and down the trench; here and there men lagged at their digging. Our Ensign had to run up and down, “speeding up” the laggards like a negro slave-driver. But he noticed many more limp figures, many more ghastly wounds, and every dug-out had its pale and blood-stained occupants....

In all his efforts our Ensign was loyally supported by his own non-commissioned officers and men. The sergeants by word, the men by deed, gave a splendid lead to the reluctant. It is in battle that the sterling loyalty of British troops to their officers comes out strongest.

On his knees at the bottom of the trench, scraping vigorously away with his entrenching tool at the parapet to fashion a fire-step, our Ensign found old Lawson, one of the battalion snipers, the sweat glistening on his face, for by now the sun was shining hotly. By his side stood Sergeant Jackson, as dispassionate as ever.

“We’re going to catch it hot here, sir,” said the sergeant, with a shake of his head, to our Ensign, who sat down beside the couple and wiped his damp brow. Then, with a shrill scream, a salvo of four shells burst right over the group; some one yelled out loud, and a tangle of men fell all over our Ensign as he squatted on the ground, driving his helmet over his eyes. He fought himself clear, and found that all the men about him had stopped working. Some had taken refuge in a low dug-out, where three or four wounded men were sheltering.

Our Ensign rooted them out and set them again to their task. Then he looked about him. Old Lawson, the sniper, lay on his face in the trench, breathing stertorously. Our Ensign turned him over on his back, and saw at a glance that the old soldier was hovering on the brink of eternity. A few yards farther along the trench two men lay dead; another, with a staring white face, was opening his jacket with trembling, blood-stained hands. A little movement behind him caught our Ensign’s ear. He turned and found Sergeant Jackson, his face running with blood, rocking himself gently two and fro. On the ground beside him was his helmet, with a great jagged rent in the crown.

Our Ensign tore out his last remaining field-dressing and bound up a gaping wound in the sergeant’s head. Then he gave him a pull of the famous tea-and-brandy mixture. The sergeant was conscious, but he spoke in a curious, thick fashion.

“I’m all right, sir,” he said, “but I don’t quite feel up to duty somehow; and I’ve got a bit of a brow-ache, too!” And then his head fell forward, and with a sharp pang our Ensign thought he was dead. But presently he spoke again, complained that he could not hear, that his eyes were failing; so our Ensign gave him another pull at the water-bottle, and offered him a cigarette, which he took and was able to light alone. The officer left him seated in the trench contentedly puffing, and set off again to keep the men to their task.

And now our Ensign felt the reaction of the morning’s excitement coming over him. All the exhilaration he had experienced in the magnificent opening act of the day seemed to have evaporated. He found himself dwelling with loathing on the mere thought of war; his mind toyed with crude pictures he had seen in German papers of Hindenburg, the German Man of Destiny, striding over mounds of corpses--even such corpses as those that lay strewn all around.

Our Ensign felt his gorge rising at the horrors besetting him. He found himself longing fervently for a mad charge, a German attack,--anything to get away from the shambles, the blood, the mud, the dank smell of the earth, the hideous painted sky that mocked their sufferings. Of all the manifold sensations of the day, the hours he spent in that trench left the deepest impress on our Ensign’s memory, and ran their span again and again, with horrors intensified, in the battle-dreams that came to him in many nights subsequently.

In reality, they were not more than three or four hours in the third German line. To our Ensign the delay seemed endless; the men, too, were chafing to be away “after the Gers.,” anything rather than to sit there and be shelled to atoms.

Down the trench our Ensign found the Brigade Machine-Gunner again. The latter told him that apparently the attacking lines, misled by the two trenches which had lain, all unsuspected, between them and their first objective, had believed the trench they were in to be the third objective, whereas it was in reality only the first objective, as far as could be ascertained. In a country from which practically every landmark has been razed, where one trench looks exactly like another, such an error was easily made. Hence the delay. However, the Machine-Gunner said, the first lines had gone on now, and probably the rest would soon follow.

A charming fellow, this Machine-Gunner, practical, conscientious, and fearless beyond all praise. He and our Ensign found themselves cordially agreed that the sights in that trench were enough to sicken a man of war for the rest of his life.

Then our Ensign suddenly saw his Commanding Officer on the parapet above his head. He ordered our young man to collect all the men he could and bring them forward. Our Ensign and the Machine-Gunner were out of the trench in an instant, bawling to the men to follow them. The men were delighted to get away, and the Machine-Gunner, surrounded by a knot of his men with guns and tripods and ammunition boxes, led a big batch forward, whilst our Ensign ran up and down the trench beating up the rest. And so presently our young Ensign led the way over a wild chaos of broken wire and shell-ploughed brown earth out into the blue, turning his back for ever on that sinister place where, as it seemed to him, years of his life had been spent. On they went, through a few spasmodic shells, to the top of the low ridge, where an unforgettable sight burst upon their vision.

A broad green valley lay unfolded before them, a beauteous panorama as yet unspoiled by war. Mars had not laid a finger on the long green slopes and smiling valleys. Neat little villages still snuggled intact amid clumps of bosky trees, between them long white ribbons of roads bordered by trim rows of poplars. Here was a pretty hamlet with the glint of red roofs amid the verdant foliage, through which a slender yellow church tower thrust itself up into the azure sky. As though protruding right into the foreground--though in reality it was a mile behind the hamlet--ran a broad white ribbon with a tall fringe of trees,--one of the great national highways of France.

At the first view the whole countryside appeared to slumber in the brilliant sunshine of the Indian summer. Birds were singing in the sky, the trees rustled gently in the breeze, and the pleasant old church towers dotting the horizon, seen through the shimmering heat haze that arose off the green fields, seemed to nod drowsily as they kept their ancient watch over their little villages.

But there, clearly discernible to the naked eye, along the white patches of distant roads, was a flicker of moving dots which, seen through the glasses, resolved themselves into long lines of men on the march, guns, transport waggons, and the like. Then, in the nearer foreground, where the yellow church tower emerged from the trees, the eye caught a glimpse of figures--here a knot of men streaming away across the fields, there a solitary form strained to an attitude of watching. Over to the right, along a distant road running across the slope of a hill, a limber came galloping; and our Ensign’s eyes, following the moving vehicle through the glasses, rested upon a German battery drawn up in the open, an officer (our Ensign could see his tightly-waisted greatcoat) in the centre, peering through his glasses.

A voice just behind our Ensign exclaimed--

“By God! we’ve got them in the open at last!”

Another cried excitedly--

“Jasus, boys, look at Fritz running away!”

But for the most part the men were silent, standing erect in the open, gazing spellbound at the Promised Land which it had taken two years’ bitter fighting to attain. Thus Cortes and his little band of adventurers may have stood on the Sierra and contemplated with a thrill of mystery the wonder-city of the Aztecs which lay spread out at their feet. There were many Guardsmen in that little band of men from half a dozen Guards’ battalions who had suffered all the bitterness of the retreat from Mons, who had thrilled to the pursuit of the fleeing enemy from the Marne, and then had undergone the long vicissitudes of trench warfare against a better equipped foe. And now they saw him on the run! Those veterans must have felt that now they could die content--and many died that day and the next.

That sight banished all thoughts save one from the minds of that thin brown line. Hardly a man there but had his uniform torn and bloody,--not a man but had lost a friend; since the start at dawn they had had no word from the rear--just a handful of adventurers standing on the fringe of an empty and forsaken stretch of ground. Yet no man heeded any of these things. Operation Orders had said: “The attack will be pushed with the utmost vigour,” and the thought dominating every mind was the determination to drive home to its logical conclusion the victory which that spectacle of rout proclaimed they had won. It was a moment such as occurs in all great battles ... on which the memory afterwards loves to linger in the spirit of “what might have been.”

The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the birds were singing, the grass was firm and springy underfoot, and the men went forward joyously, all unconcerned at the shells which fell spasmodically about them. They waded through a field of long rank thistles and dried cornstalks reaching up to their middles, and came out on the other side to a low shallow trench, which had apparently been constructed to provide a covered way between the guns of a German battery once posted there. The place was littered with the long wicker-work cases in which the Germans carry their shells, and with brass shell-cases innumerable. One Irish Guardsman found on the ground a very delicate and beautiful telescopic sight for use with a 77-millimetre field-gun in a brown leathern case, and pounced upon it as a “souvenir.”

The Machine-Gunner and our Ensign had a brief council of war on the edge of the root-field, and decided to put the men into the shallow trench and set them digging themselves in pending further orders. While the Machine-Gunner began to install his guns in convenient shell-holes, our Ensign spread the men out along the trench until they came in touch with another party of the Guards who were in the same trench. There were one or two officers with them, a couple of Coldstreamers, and a Grenadier captain.

By this time the shelling was growing distinctly unpleasant. Through his glasses our Ensign could clearly see the German battery he had already observed, in action, the men standing to the guns, two officers in flat caps and greatcoats in the middle. The shells were whizz-bangs--shrapnel and high explosive--and they were bursting with unpleasant regularity and disconcerting accuracy up and down the trench line. Everybody was horribly exposed, and now the disagreeable “swish ... swish” of some very active machine-guns on the right (in the Quadrilateral, no doubt) blended with the whistle of the shells. Every man in the trench was now working like a Trojan, scraping and hacking away with his entrenching tool in the soft brown soil, and the narrow trench was quite impassable. To get along one had simply to walk across the open and pay no heed to the bullets snapping in the air.

But the excitement of being “in the open” made everybody amazingly callous. The men never ceased working, though here and there hideously mutilated bodies were gently lifted out of the trench and bedded in the thistles, and in places men were shouting, unanswered, the familiar battlefield cry, “Stretcher-bearER!” Officers were walking about in the open, keeping the men to their task, and on the edge of the root-field three Commanding Officers of the Guards were talking things over, raising their glasses now and then to their eyes, like spectators at an Army point-to-point. They were our Ensign’s Commanding Officer, that Commanding Officer of the Coldstream who had that day rallied his men to the note of the silver hunting-horn which our Ensign saw sticking between the buttons of his jacket, and another. Presently, somebody suggested the advisability of taking a little cover, and they adjourned into an adjacent deep shell-hole, where the discussion was resumed. Many days afterwards our Ensign read in a message from ‘The Times’ war correspondent in France how “at one point in the advance certain Battalion Commanders of the Guards held a conference, which will be historic, in a shell-hole to try and locate precisely where they were.”

Near the “historic shell-hole” our Ensign met Duke, an ensign of his own Battalion, one of his own Mess, in a huge trench-coat. He informed our Ensign that Roderick had been sniped in the trench and badly wounded.

“You and I,” he said to our Ensign, “seem to be the only Company Officers left. Everybody else has disappeared. My word! it was hot getting up to that last trench!”

He told our Ensign that El Capitan (who had been left behind when the Battalion went into action) had been sent for after Roderick was hit, and was coming to take over the company.

And here was El Capitan himself, rubbing his hands, bristling with fight.

“We’re going on,” he grinned; “there’s another mixed party of Guards and people in shell-holes a bit down the slope, and we’re going to try and join up with ’em!”

Our Ensign’s recollections of the rest of that afternoon are rather hazy. He remembers sallying out again with a party of Irish Guardsmen over the coarse yellow grass towards a long low slope running across from left to right. There came a perfect tornado of German shells and a steady incessant swish of bullets from the machine-guns enfilading the slope from the Quadrilateral. Still the line went on, but strangely thinned, as our Ensign noticed in wonder. He remembers seeing little spurts of dust about his feet without understanding what they meant, and asking himself whether the curious whistling noises followed by a metallic whirr were rifle grenades. He caught a glimpse of the Machine-Gun Officer coming out with his men, standing on the slope behind him. When he looked once more he was gone, and our Ensign never saw him again.

All the men were in shell-holes now. Our Ensign toppled breathlessly into one, a shallow crater, where there were two men of the machine-gun team with a gun. The German guns were searching the whole slope with whizz-bangs and those rifle grenades, or whatever they were, that made that whistling noise and that curious metallic whirr (our Ensign afterwards knew them to be H.E. shrapnel). The shells were bursting everywhere; one could _taste_ their sulphur reek, and the ears ached with the perpetual detonations.

The machine-gunners scraped vigorously at the bottom of the hole. It was obviously too small to shelter three, so our Ensign scrambled out and, bending low, darted forward. Once more there was a whirr of bullets. He realised that he must be in full view of some one watching that slope. He dropped into another shell-hole, a much bigger one than the last. A solitary Irish Guardsman was sitting there, phlegmatically scooping himself a little trench with his entrenching tool.

Then our Ensign saw El Capitan striding across the open, his orderly by his side. As our young man watched, he saw the orderly clap his hand to his leg and drop. El Capitan disappeared into a shell-hole with him and presently emerged alone. Our Ensign shouted to him: the other waved to him to stay where he was, and went striding on calmly back to the trench.

A man dropped heavily on our Ensign and his companion in the shell-hole. He was an Irish Guardsman, too.

“I was in with two chaps in the hole beyant,” he panted, “and a shell is after landing on the edge of the hole. It’s a wonder that meself’s alive, for thim other two is dead!”

“Well, take a hould on your entrinchin’ tool,” said the other without sympathy, “and dig this out a bit for th’ officer!”

While they scraped away our Ensign chatted to the two men. Their talk was all of the “Gerboys harin’ off,” the number of prisoners they had seen ... incidents of the day’s fighting; of their present position in a shell-hole on a bullet-swept slope with shells bursting all around them they said nothing.

The slope of the ground in front rather masked the view, so our young man resolved to push on a shell-hole or two and try and discover what was happening at the front of the slope. He crawled for a dozen yards, then he heard a shell “coming at him,” as the saying is, and he flung himself into the nearest hole. There he found Duke with an ashen face, his jacket split up the back and drenched in blood. With him was his orderly, a big man wearing the D.C.M. ribbon.

“I’m all right,” observed the wounded man; “I’ve got it in the shoulder, I think. They put a shell--shrapnel, I believe it was--right on top of us. Have you got a cigarette to spare?”

Our Ensign looked at his watch. It was four o’clock, a brilliant autumn afternoon, full of light and colour. He found it quite impossible to realise that it was on the cards that none of them would ever get out of that hole alive. But the oddness of their situation tickled his sense of humour, and he remarked upon it as he handed his fellow-ensign his cigarette-case.

Thus they sat for fully an hour and a half. By that time our Ensign and the orderly had dug the shell-hole into quite a respectable trench. They had to work with great circumspection, for the least movement attracted a shower of projectiles in their direction. Otherwise, the enemy seemed loth to waste ammunition; when the surface of the slope was unruffled the guns were silent.

No word came up from the trench behind them, meanwhile, and at half-past five our Ensign thought he had better go back and find out what was happening. He promised to send out the stretcher-bearers to fetch in Duke as soon as darkness fell. Then he crawled cautiously back, noticing on his way that the shell-hole in which he had first taken shelter now held two corpses and a wrecked machine-gun.