OUT OF THE WAY
THE USUAL MONOTONOUS spectacle when we woke next morning: the narrow streets of what a few days before had been a tranquil, out-of-the-war village choked with worn-out troops marching to go into rest. Now that we had become a brigade of artillery without guns, a British non-fighting unit struggling to get out of the way of a manoeuvring French army, our one great hope was that Corps would send us right back to a depot where we could refit ourselves with fresh guns and reinforcements, to some spot where we need not be wondering every five minutes whether the enemy was at our heels. Men who have fought four days and nights on end feel like that when the strain of actual battle ceases.
The Boche guns sounded nearer, and the colonel had ordered a mounted officer to go back and seek definite information upon the situation. By 10 A.M. a retiring French battalion marched through, and reported that the line was again being withdrawn. By 11 A.M. two batteries of “75’s” came back. Which decided the colonel that the tactical situation demanded our departure, and the Brigade began the march to Elincourt. On past more evacuated villages. Abandoned farm carts - some of which our batteries eagerly adopted for transporting stores and kit - and the carcases of dogs, shot or poisoned, lying by the roadside, told their own story of the rush from the Hun. By 1 P.M. we reached Elincourt, a medieval town whose gable-ends and belfry towers, and straight rows of hoary lime-trees, breathed the grace and charm of the real France. I made immediately for the Mairie, bent upon securing billets for officers and men; but standing at the gateway was a Corps despatch-rider who handed over instructions for the Brigade to continue the march to Estree St Denis, a town twenty kilometres distant.
5 P.M.: Estree St Denis, to which I rode in advance with a billeting officer from each battery, proved to be a drab smoky town of mean-looking, jerry-built houses. One thought instinctively of the grimiest parts of Lancashire and the Five Towns. The wide and interminably long main street was filled with dust-laden big guns and heavy hows., four rows of them. Every retreating Division in France seemed to be arriving and to be bringing more dust. Hundreds of refugees from villages now in Boche possession had come, too. What a place to be sent to! It was useless looking for billets, so I fixed upon a vast field on the outskirts of the town where we could establish our horse lines and pitch tents and bivouacs. This was satisfactory enough, but the watering problem was bound to be difficult. Four small pumps in the main street and one tiny brackish pond totalled the facilities. It would take each battery an hour and a half to water its horses. “Corps moves in most mysterious ways,” crooned Stone. “Why did they send us here?” We rode and walked until we were tired, but found nothing that would improve matters. Then Fentiman, Stone, and I found the Café de la Place, and entered the “Officers only” room, where we sat down to a bottle of wine and devoured the Continental ‘Daily Mail’ of March 23, the first paper we had seen since starting the retreat. Madame informed us that some officers of Divisional Headquarters had turned up the day before and were dining there. As we went out to go and meet the batteries and lead them to the waggon lines, there was a shout of recognition, and “Swiffy” and the little American doctor ran up, grinning and rather shamefaced. “We thought of posting you as deserters,” I said with pretended seriousness, “not having seen you since the afternoon of the 23rd.” It was now the 26th. They narrated a long and somewhat sheepish story that, boiled down, told of a barn that promised a sound afternoon’s nap, an awakening to find every one vanished; then a worried and wearied tramp in search of us, with nothing to eat except what they could beg or buy at ruinous prices; one perturbing two hours when they found themselves walking into the arms of the oncoming Hun; and finally, a confirmed resolve never to stray far from the Brigade mess-cart again.
7 P.M.: When the batteries were settled in their waggon lines, I led the colonel and “Swiffy” and the doctor through the crowded dusty streets into the Café de la Place. The restaurant was filled with French and British officers. “Swiffy” insisted on cracking a bottle of champagne to celebrate the return of the doctor and himself to the fold; then I spotted Ronny Hertford, the Divisional salvage officer, who was full of talk and good cheer, and said he had got his news from the new G.S.O. II., who had just come from England, travelling with a certain politician. “It’s all right, old boy,” bubbled Ronny. “The War Office is quite calm about it now; we’ve got ’em stone-cold. Foch is in supreme command, and there are any number of Divisions in reserve which haven’t been called on. We’re only waiting to know if this is the real push, or only a feint, and then we strike. We’ve got ’em trapped, old top, no doubt about that.”
“Right-o, strategist!” I retorted in the same vein.
“Do you want to buy a calf, old boy?” he switched off. “Look here - there’s one under the table. About 110 lbs. of meat at 3 francs a pound. Dirt cheap these times. A Frenchman has left it with Madame to sell. We’d buy it for our mess, but we’ve got a goose for dinner to-night. Stay and dine with us, old boy.”
Through the glass door that showed into the café one saw a little group of civilians, dressed in their Sunday black, waiting for carts to take them from the town. A mother was suckling a wailing child. An old cripple nodded his head helplessly over hands propped up by his stick. A smart young French soldier came in at the door, and Madame’s fairhaired daughter rushed to his arms and held him while she wept. They talked fast, and the civilians listened with strained faces. “Her fiancé,” quietly explained an interpreter who came through the café to join us in the “Officers only” room. “He’s just come from Montdidier with a motor-transport. He says he was fired at by machine-guns, which shows that the Boche is still coming on.”
The camp commandant of the Division, nervously business-like, the baths’ officer, D.A.D.O.S., and a couple of padres came in. The Camp Commandant refused to hear of the colonel sleeping in a tent. “We’ve got a big dormitory at the back here, sir - thirty wire-beds. We can put all your Brigade Headquarter officers up.” The colonel protested that we should be quite happy in bivouacs, but he was overruled.
We dined in a tent in the waggon lines. As I made my way there I noticed a blue-painted motor-van, a mobile French wireless station, some distance away in the fields. What really caught my eye when I drew near it was a couple of Camembert cheeses, unopened and unguarded, on the driver’s seat. I bethought myself that the operator inside the van might be persuaded to sell one of the cheeses. He wasn’t, but he was extremely agreeable, and showed me the evening communiqué that had just been “ticked” through. We became friends, which explains why for three days I was able to inform the camp commandant, Ronny Hertford, and all their party, of the latest happenings at the Front, hours before the French newspapers and the Continental ‘Daily Mail’ arrived.
And what do you think the men of two of our batteries were doing an hour after the camps were pitched and the horses watered? - playing a football match! Marvellous fellows!
We stayed at Estree until the evening of the 28th, days of gossip and of fairly confident expectations, for we knew now that the Boche’s first offensive was held - but a time of waiting and of wondering where we were to be sent next. Division was nearly thirty miles away, incorporated with the French Army, and still fighting, while Corps seemed to have forgotten that we needed supplies. Still there was no need to worry about food and forage. Estree was an important railhead, and the supply officer seemed anxious to get his stores distributed as soon as they came in: he was prepared to treat most comers as famine-stricken stragglers. Besides, near the station stood an enormous granary, filled to the brim, simply waiting to be requisitioned.
About noon on the 28th we were very cast down by the news that, to meet the demand for reinforcements, the Brigade might be disbanded, and the gunners hurried off in driblets, to make up losses on various parts of our particular Army’s front.
The colonel had instructions to attend a Staff Conference in the afternoon, and each battery was ordered to prepare a list of its available gunners.
There were sore hearts that afternoon. Many of the men had been with the Brigade since it was formed, and to be scattered broadcast after doing well, and coming through a time of stress and danger together, would knock the spirit out of every one. The colonel came back at teatime, impassive, walking briskly. I knew before he opened his lips that the Brigade was saved. “We move to-night to Pont St Maxence. We are going on to Poix to refit,” was all he said.
* * * * *
Every one was anxious to be off, fearing that the Staff might change its mind. It rained in torrents that night, and owing to the Corps’ failure to map out proper accommodation arrangements, we slept anyhow and anywhere, but no one minded much. The Brigade was still in being, and nothing else mattered. I could tell many stories of the next few days - marching and billeting and getting ready for action again; of the village that no English troops had visited before, and the inhabitants that feared us, and afterwards did not want us to leave; of the friendly bearded patron of an estaminet, who flourished an ‘Echo de Paris,’ and pointed to the words ténacité anglaise in an account of the fighting; of the return of the signalling officer, who, while attending a course at an Army School, had been roped in to lead one of Sandeman Carey’s infantry platoons; of the magnificently equipped casualty clearing station that a week before the offensive had been twenty-five miles behind the lines, and only got its last patients away two hours before the Boches arrived!
* * * * *
April 2nd: A few more new guns had come in from the Refitting Depot. We were almost complete to establishment. The horses were out grazing and getting fat again. Most of the men were hard at it, playing their eternal football. The colonel came out of the chateau, which was Brigade Headquarters billet, and settled himself in a deck-chair. He looked sun-tanned and fit.
“If all colonels were as competent and knowledgeable as our colonel, we should have won the war by now,” said Dumble as he and I walked away. “What a beautiful day.”
“Yes. Oh to be in England, now that April’s here,” I chimed in.
“Oh to be in England, any bally old time of the year,” Dumble corrected me.