Chapter VIII

Soon after that we went down to the Somme. It was autumn then, and all that desolate area of stark brown earth was wet and heavy and stinking. Down the Ancre valley there were still some leaves in Thiepval Wood, and the tall trees along the river were green and beautiful in the thin October sun. But the centre of battle was coming up to that valley; in a month the green was all gone, and there was nothing to see but the endless uniform landscape of tumbled earth and splintered trunks, and only the big shells raising vain waterspouts in the wide pools of the Ancre gave any brightness to the tired eye.

But you know about all this. Every Englishman has a picture of the Somme in his mind, and I will not try to enlarge it. We were glad, in a way, to go there, not in the expectation of liking it, but on the principle of Henry V.'s speech on the eve of St. Crispin. We saw ourselves in hospitals, or drawing-rooms, or bars, saying, 'Yes, we were six months on the Somme' (as indeed we were); we were going to be 'in the swing.' But it was very vile. After Souchez it was real war again, and many Souchez reputations wilted there and died. Yet with all its horror and discomfort and fear that winter was more bearable than the Gallipoli summer. For, at the worst, there was a little respite, spasms of repose. You came back sometimes to billets, cold, bare, broken houses, but still houses, where you might make a brave blaze of a wood fire and huddle round it in a cheery circle with warm drinks and a song or two. And sometimes there were estaminets and kind French women; or you went far back to an old château, perched over the village, and there was bridge and a piano and guests at Headquarters. Civilization was within reach, and sometimes you had a glimpse of it--and made the most of it.

But we had a bad time, as every one did. After a stiff three weeks of holding a nasty bit of the line, much digging of assembly trenches, and carrying in the mud, we took our part in a great battle. I shall not tell you about it (it is in the histories); but it was a black day for the battalion. We lost 400 men and 20 officers, more than twice the total British casualties at Omdurman. Hewett was killed and six other officers, the Colonel and twelve more were wounded. Eustace showed superb courage with a hideous wound. Harry and myself survived. Now I had made a mistake about Harry. After that scouting episode at Souchez I told myself that his 'nerve' was gone, that for a little anyhow he would be no good in action. But soon after we got to the Somme he had surprised me by doing a very good piece of work under fire. We were digging a new 'jumping-off' line in No Man's Land, two hundred men at work at once. They were spotted, the Boches dropped some Minnies about, and there was the beginnings of a slight stampede--you know the sort of thing--mythical orders to 'Retire' came along. All Harry did was to get the men back and keep them together, and keep them digging: the officer's job--but he did very well, and to me, as I say, surprisingly well. The truth was, as I afterwards perceived, that only what I may call his 'scouting' nerve was gone. It is a peculiar kind of super-nerve, as I have tried to show, and losing it he had lost a very valuable quality, but that was all at present.

Or I may put it another way. There is a theory held among soldiers, which I will call the theory of the favourite fear. Every civilian has his favourite fear, death by burning or by drowning, the fear of falling from a great height, or being mangled in a machine--something which it makes us shiver to think about. Among soldiers such special fears are even more acute, though less openly confessed, but in the evenings men will sometimes lie on the straw in the smoky barns and whisper the things of which they are most afraid.

It is largely a matter of locality and circumstance. In Gallipoli, where the Turks' rapid musketry fire was almost incredibly intense and their snipers uncannily accurate, men would say that they hated bullets, but shell-fire left them unmoved. The same men travelled to France and found rifle fire practically extinct but gun-power increasingly terrible, and rapidly reversed their opinions.

More often, however, there has been some particular experience which, out of a multitude of shocks, has been able to make a lasting impression, and leave behind it the favourite fear.

One man remembers the death of a friend caught by the gas without his gas mask, and is possessed with the fear that he may one day forget his own and perish in the same agony. And such is the effect on conduct of these obsessions that this man will neglect the most ordinary precautions against other dangers, will be reckless under heavy shell-fire, but will not move an inch without his respirator.

With others it is the fear of being left to die between the lines, caught on the wire and riddled by both sides, the fear of snipers, of 5-9's, even of whizz-bangs. One man feels safe in the open, but in the strongest dug-out has a horror that it may be blown in upon him. There is the fear of the empty trench, where, like a child on the dark staircase, another man is convinced that there are enemies lying behind the parapet ready to leap upon him; and there is the horror of being killed on the way down from the line after a relief.

But most to be pitied of all the men I have known, was one who had served at Gallipoli in the early days; few men then could have an orderly burial in a recognized ground, but often the stretcher-bearers buried them hastily where they could in and about the lines. This man's fear was that one day a sniper would get him in the head; that unskilled companions would pronounce his death sentence, and that he would wake up, perhaps within a few yards of his own trench, and know that he was buried but not dead.

That was how it was with Harry. The one thing he could not face at present was crawling lonely in the dark with the thought of that tornado of bullets in his head. Nothing else frightened him--now--more than it frightened the rest of us, though, God knows, that was enough.

So that he did quite well in this battle in a sound, undistinguished way. He commanded a platoon for the occasion, and took them through the worst part of the show without exceptional losses; and he got as far as any of the regiment got. He held out there for two days under very heavy shell-fire, with a mixed lot of men from several battalions, and a couple of strange officers. In the evening of the second day we were to be relieved, and being now in command I sent him down with a runner to Brigade Headquarters to fix up a few points about our position and the relief. There was a terrific barrage to pass, but both of them got through. When his business was done he started back to rejoin the battalion. By that time it was about eleven o'clock at night, and the relief was just beginning; there was no reason why he should have come back at all; indeed, the Brigade Major told him he had better not, had better wait there in the warm dug-out, and join us as we passed down. Now when a man has been through a two days' battle of this kind, has had no sleep and hardly any food for two days, and finished up with a two-mile trudge over a stony wilderness of shell-holes, through a vicious barrage of heavy shells; when after all this he finds himself, worn and exhausted so that he can hardly stand, but safe and comfortable in a deep dug-out where there are friendly lights and the soothing voices of calm men; and when he has the choice of staying there, the right side of the barrage, till it is time to go out to rest, or of going back through that same barrage, staggering into the same shell-holes, with the immediate prospect _of doing it all over again with men to look after as well as himself_--well, the temptation is almost irresistible. But Harry did resist it--I can't tell you how--and he started back. The barrage was worse than ever, all down the valley road, and, apparently, when they came near the most dangerous part, Harry's runner was hit by a big splinter and blown twenty yards. There were no stretchers unoccupied for five miles, and it was evident that the boy--he was only a kid--would die in a little time. He knew it himself, but he was very frightened in that hideous valley where the shells still fell, and he begged Harry not to leave him. And so we came upon them as we stumbled down, thanking our stars we were through the worst of it, Harry and the runner crouched together in a shell-hole, with the heart of the barrage blazing and roaring sixty yards off, and stray shells all round.

From a military or, indeed, a common-sense point of view, it was a futile performance--the needless risk of a valuable officer's life.

They do not give decorations for that kind of thing. But I was glad he had stayed with that young runner.

And I only tell you this to show you how wrong I was, and how much stuff he had in him still.