The Major came in as we sat at breakfast in our Stevenson hut.
“Well played, A Company,” he said, “Well done, G. B. The Corps Commander is very pleased with your effort, and, between ourselves, he is putting you in for the M.C.”
I expected that G. B. would be as pleased to hear this as I was, but he answered rather discourteously, I thought.
“Headquarters give decorations as lightly as they give up bits of the line that have cost lives to take.”
The Major popped a lump of sugar into his mouth and shrugged his shoulders. “Well, you have done your job, G. B.; yours not to reason why.”
G. B.’s leave was long overdue, but with the Somme battle dragging on there was little or no leave going. The Major rang up one morning, however, to say that H.Q. had a vacancy and that G. B. could go that day. He packed up then and there and went, and I was left temporarily in command of the company.
We were enjoying our rest in the little valley. I shared a tent with G. B., and now that he was away I had it to myself. It was perched on the slope above the valley, and from it I looked across the rolling Somme country to the scarred hillsides whereon the battle still raged; and at night the horizon, framed in the pyramid tent flaps, often resembled a Crystal Palace firework display. The valley itself was full of movement, troops coming and going, and an occasional high-velocity shell to liven things up. Below me was the corps prisoner-of-war cage presided over by Hubbard and some of B Company, and periodically a long grey column of prisoners wound its way out of the valley, shepherded by our friends the Lancers looking very warlike with their steel helmets and drawn swords and spare bandolier round their horses’ glossy necks.
I wrote a long letter to Helen describing as much of it as I could, for the censorship was more stringent in those eventful days. When I had finished the letter I found that I had no envelope, and I rummaged in G. B.’s kit on the chance that he might have some. I found a whole packet and a few odd ones already stamped with the battalion censor stamp. I was rather amused at this. It was strictly against orders, of course, to stamp an envelope with the censor stamp before the letter was written, but we had sometimes done so in Melford’s day to avoid the nuisance of taking the letter to the orderly-room. I put Helen’s letter in one of the stamped envelopes, scrawled my name across the corner, and sent it off to the divisional post office at the far end of the valley.
On the following day I met Pagan standing by the Zoo, as we called the corps cage.
“Hast heard the news?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied promptly. “The old squire lies foully murdered!”
“And out in the snow with no roof to his mouth,” grinned Pagan. “But seriously, have you heard the news?”
“Rather,” I answered lightly. “The Esquimos have joined the Allies, and President Wilson has written another note to Germany.”
“Funny ass!” he said. “B.F. cubed. But there are alarums and excursions going on at Battalion Headquarters.”
“What about?” I asked, becoming interested at last.
“Headquarters are re-censoring a lot of letters now, you know.”
“Well?”
“They have opened one containing a map of this front—positions and what not marked on it.”
“Someone’s a B.F. then, and for it. Who was it?”
“They don’t know. There was no letter; only the map.”
“But what has that got to do with us? Why is the Major perturbed about it?”
“Because,” he said and paused oratorically, “because it has our censor stamp on it.”
I whistled. “The battalion censor stamp?”
He nodded.
“Well, it can’t be anyone in A or B Companies,” I said, and then stopped short.
“No, because we get our letters stamped by the nearest unit and don’t use the battalion stamp,” he finished for me.
“Therefore it must be one of C Company,” I put in hurriedly.
“But pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,” he quoted smilingly. “Battalion Headquarters and C Company send their letters through the Corps post-office, and this particular letter happens to have been opened at the divisional office here.”
“By Jove!” I exclaimed. “The one we send ours to.”
“And ours also,” added Pagan. “But there is more to come, as the story-books say; this mysterious missive—rather good that—contained a map, and that map happens to be the one Melford lost from the old Company.”
“Sacred pigs!” I exclaimed; and then was silent for a moment. “You say that there was no letter with it?”
“No; therefore the charge lies against a person or persons unknown, as the lawyers say.”
“But how about the officer who censored it? His name should have been in the corner of the envelope.”
“It was ‘A. Nemo’! Commands Z Company, perhaps!”
“Um! Sort of nom-de-plume, eh!”
“Nom-de-crayon—it was written in pencil. Evidently the fellow is a profound Latin scholar and not untouched by a sense of humour.”
“How about the handwriting?” I suggested.
“Written with an entrenching tool and with the left hand, I should say,” he replied.
“And the address?”
“Miss Smith, care of some little post-office at Hammersmith.”
“Um! I shouldn’t wonder if there were two or three Miss Smiths in Hammersmith,” I commented.
“Exactly. He has covered up his tracks pretty well.”
“But why on earth all this heavy plot stuff?” I exclaimed. “That wretched map is worthless now; every unit in France has been moved since it was made.”
“Ah! that’s the question, as laddie Hamlet said. My own theory is that we are harbouring a lunatic in our gentle bosoms—that or some bright lad who has been to the movies and found the excitement too much for him.”
“That’s rot, of course,” I said. “But I’m dashed if I can see any other explanation. Some idiot steals a map—a secret map—keeps it till it is no good, and then risks cashiering by sending it to Miss Smith of Hammersmith! And the same perfect idiot sent that photograph to the papers, I suppose.”
“Oh, somebody is potty all right,” agreed Pagan. “You know, Baron, I always had a sneaking belief that it was Groucher that did this map and photograph business; but this proves it can’t have been him.”
“It’s a good thing we are under corps and not under the old division, anyway,” I growled. “If this had cropped up with them after the other business, there would have been hell to pay—and may be still as far as I know.”
Pagan shook his head. “They won’t stop the war for it,” he said. “It’s only a question of discipline; the map is worthless—and they have got their hands pretty full with this little battle. They will pull the Major’s hair, and he will strafe the battalion, and that is all. We shall have him up here presently asking questions; you’ll see. And now, having given you all the latest latrine rumours, for which I generously make no charge, I must get on with the war. B Company calleth.”
On the following day G. B. returned from leave; and the C.O. came up to see us, as Pagan had prophesied. The officers of A and B Companies assembled under the tarpaulin that served B Company as a mess, and the Major began his strafe.
He told us that a divisional headquarters had opened a letter stamped with the battalion censor stamp and containing a map. He made no reference to the previous history of that map, for he knew nothing of it, and none of us felt called upon to enlighten him. He pointed out that a breach of the censorship regulations was a grave offence; that the lives of thousands of men might be involved; and that by failing in his duties as censor, an officer was as disloyal to his country as if he had deserted to the enemy. The sending of a map of that nature through the post was a flagrant crime, and the sender, whoever he might be, by signing a false name upon the envelope, showed that he realized the seriousness of what he was doing.
“Now, I am not suggesting that any of you sent that map,” continued the C.O. “No one with a spark of patriotism or decency could do a thing like that. We all bear the King’s commission—officers and gentlemen, as the phrase goes. The man who sent that map is certainly not a gentleman, and I do not believe that he was an officer—not one of mine at any rate.
“I prefer to think that one of the men—one of the new drafts—sent it. Not in the usual way of course; otherwise the letter would have gone to his platoon officer or company commander for censorship. I believe that the letter went direct from the sender to the post-office and arrived there already stamped with the censor stamp and signed with that false name.
“But the question then arises as to how the letter became stamped with the battalion censor stamp. The men have not access to it. I suggest that some man got hold of an empty envelope already stamped, scrawled that name in the corner, and so avoided the usual censorship. Therefore, what I want to ask you is this: Have any of you ever put the battalion censor stamp on a blank envelope or kept such envelopes in your kit? For if you have, you see it would be quite possible for someone else to get hold of one. Now I am going to put that question to each of you separately.”
While the question was being put, I had my eyes on G. B.’s face, and when it came to his turn and he answered “No,” our eyes met. It was only for a moment that they met, but something in my glance must have told him that I knew of those envelopes in his kit for I was instantly aware that he knew that I knew.
It was some time later, when we were alone together in our tent, that he looked up from the returns he was signing and said, “So you knew about those envelopes in my kit!”
“Yes,” I replied. “I wanted one when you were on leave, and I looked to see if you had any.”
He made no comment, and continued his checking of returns by the light of a candle stuck in a cigarette-tin.
“Why did you lie about it, G. B.?” I asked at last.
He went on with his work for a moment or two and then looked up. “Well,” he said, “if I had admitted it, there would have been a row and it might have got to Headquarters; an that would have been very unhealthy for me after that photograph business.”
“Might have lost you your M.C.,” I suggested cuttingly, for I was angry with him.
He looked up sharply at that and seemed about to make some quick retort, but the look of annoyance passed, and he laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I’m not worrying about that,” he said.
The Somme battle dragged on, but the hoped-for breakthrough and return to open warfare did not come. We had one or two false alarms, and the battalion created some records in rapid concentration; but the gap through which we were to have pushed did not appear, and as the possibility of its appearance grew more and more remote, Corps Headquarters became less insistent on keeping us together. At first companies only had been detached, but now platoons and even sections were sent off on various duties. B Company was scattered over the whole Corps area on various jobs for the A.P.M., whose hand Hubbard licked with dog-like fidelity; and A Company also was split up. Gurney’s platoon was away east of Montauban, Dodd and his platoon had taken over Pagan’s job of manning the Corps observation posts, and my own platoon alone was with Company Headquarters doing odd jobs, chiefly burial fatigues.
Before long, however, orders of a different sort came from Crops. A biggish attack was coming off, and Corps wanted a platoon for a job of observation from a point in the first day’s objective. G. B. was away when the orders arrived, and my own platoon being the only one available, I made the necessary preparations at once. But to my surprise, when he returned he said that he himself would take up my platoon and that I was to remain behind with the C.Q.M.S., sanitary men, and other odds and ends.
I was much annoyed at this order. Not that I was a fire-eater: Heaven forbid! The job was likely to prove as unpleasant as the last, and, like most men who have wandered about in a modern battle, I was not pining for repetition. But it was my own platoon that was going up, and it was my job to lead it. It would be employed on a job calling for special knowledge such as we were supposed to possess and which I believed I possessed, and my professional pride was hurt by this possible imputation that I was not up to the job.
G. B. reassured me on this point, but he would give no satisfactory reason for his action; and I was driven to the conclusion, rightly or wrongly, that in this stunt, which if successful would earn for us the praise of Corps Headquarters, he intended to take all the kudos for himself.
The platoon marched out at dusk, and when it had disappeared in the gathering gloom, I returned to my tent in a very touchy mood.
It returned next evening, or rather what was left of it returned, in charge of my sergeant; and it was from him that I learned what had happened. They had reached their objective—an exposed position—to be pounded heavily and counter-attacked. During the afternoon, when things were a little quieter, G. B. had taken two men and crawled out to a broken building that lay in front of their position. He returned after an absence of about half an hour to report some movement of the enemy, and then crawled back again with his servant to the two men he had left on watch. One of these came in with further information about twenty minutes later, and then an hour went by without any communication or sign from them.
At the end of an hour and a half the sergeant became anxious, and taking a man with him, crawled out to reconnoitre. On reaching the stunted, jagged walls of the broken building the first object that met their eyes was G. B.’s servant dead with a bullet through his forehead. Farther on they came upon the body of one of the other two men with one side of his face blown away. Cautiously continuing their exploration, they came upon the second man lying upon his back on a heap of brick rubble with a bayonet wound in his throat, but there was no sign of G. B. At considerable risk to themselves they crawled right round the building without finding any trace of him, and only when a minen-werfer began pitching flying pigs into the ruins and a bullet through his water-bottle warned the sergeant that a sniper had spotted them did he abandon the search.
They were rather heavily attacked soon after he rejoined the platoon, and I gathered that there was an unpleasant mix-up of bomb and bayonet; but he managed to hold his ground, though when things had quietened down again my poor old platoon had been reduced to something less than half its strength, Eventually a unit came up to relieve them, and he had thereupon got his men out safely and come straight back to me to report. That was his story.
I questioned him very closely about G. B., but both he and the man who had been with him were positive that G. B. could not have been in the ruined building or its immediate neighbourhood. They declared that had he been lying wounded they could not have failed to have found him. They had found his servant and the other two men at once and had spent nearly twenty minutes searching for G. B. The three men were dead, and the sergeant was positive that the third man had been killed by a bayonet jab.
“Jerry must have crept up and rushed ’em, sir,” said my sergeant. “There was a lot of heavy stuff coming over all the afternoon, and we wouldn’t have heard a little row like that. I told the Captain that it was very risky, but he would go; and now Jerry has got ’im, sir.”
We still half hoped that G. B. might yet turn up, but the days went by, and it became evident that my sergeant’s view of the situation was the true one.
G. B. was posted as missing.
The Battle of the Somme dragged on into the Battle of the Ancre, and it was not till December that the Corps came out for a rest and we found ourselves in billets in a little village not far from Doullens. Hubbard’s tireless cultivation of the Provost-Marshal bore fruit, for he left us to become an A.P.M. himself, and Pagan was given the command of B Company, an event of which he informed me in his usual fashion by an apt quotation from Henry V. Harding, our American M.O., also left us to become one of the big guns, I believe, in a base hospital. I went on my long overdue leave and found that Helen, though as comradely as ever, could not be induced to become Mrs. Baron even by the glamour of my three pips and the mention in dispatches which I had collected. Indeed the prospect of that event now seemed remote. I was rather badly hipped and in consequence, childishly perhaps, refused to write to her. But I will pass over these purely personal matters.
In the early spring the Canadians began that offensive which resulted in the capture of Vimy Ridge, and when they came out for a well-earned rest, our corps took over from them, and we moved up to the bleak hillsides just north of Arras. The ensuing attacks took us well over the ridge and on to the plain beyond, and there we stuck. The battle had reached that stage which we had now learned to regard as inevitable, the stage in which the enemy, having been driven back out of reach of our concentration of guns, had had time to mass his own guns and bring up reserves—the stage at which fresh operations on a large scale are necessary for any further advance. But G.H.Q. had learnt by experience the costly futility of hammering away at an enemy well prepared and forewarned; and they transferred the attack to another sector, leaving our line very thinly held.
Meanwhile the battalion had been equipped with Lewis guns, and we had one to each platoon. Six of our guns were always in the line, which, to tell the truth, was shockingly undermanned. One night the enemy put down a box barrage on us. In a box barrage, it must be explained, the shells pitch not only on the fire trench but on a line some distance behind it and to the right and left as well, thus cutting one off on all sides from reinforcements and placing one in a “box.” The object of this device is to allow a raiding party to come over and to ensure that they will not be disturbed whilst dealing with the unfortunate troops in the box.
It was unpleasant while it lasted. Our parapet was blown up in several places, and one of my two guns was put out of action in the first few minutes. I spent an anxious time dodging along the empty fire-bays between the two guns. My one remaining gun was twice blown off the parapet, but my stout Number One got it back again into position and fired drum after drum into no-man’s-land as fast as Number Two could ram them on the magazine post. He must have done a lot of execution, for when the raiding party loomed up on the heels of the barrage, there were very few of them.
The other gun team were working the bolts of their rifles like fields, and I believe that only two of the enemy got into the trench. One of them jumped on top of one of my men and then went down under a smashing blow from a steel helmet, delivered sideways. The other, an officer, with an automatic pistol in his hand, shot two of my men as he stood on the parapet. Then he jumped, and I let drive at him with my service revolver. He came down sideways and lay motionless in the bottom of the trench.
My other team got their gun firing again, but no more Germans appeared. One of the two men shot by the Bosche officer was dead with a bullet through the eye; the other had a flesh wound in the neck. I put a field-dressing on him and turned to have a look at the officer. I pulled the cumbersome German-pattern steel helmet off his head and switched on my torch.
It was then that for the first time in my life I doubted my sanity. My shaking thumb caused the torch-light to flicker, and in the wavering light the pale face appeared to be grimacing at me. Was this a preliminary sympton of a faint? I asked myself. I leaned back against the solid wall of the trench and was grateful for the support. The strain of those last few minutes must have been too much for me, I suppose, and I was “seeing things”; for the bloodless face of the German officer with closed eyes and head resting on a couple of empty Lewis-gun magazines seemed to me to be the face of G. B. I could even see the scar across his cheek that he had carried ever since that desperate stand of his on the Somme.
I knelt there staring at the man and trying to pull myself together, telling myself that this was not G. B. With my own eyes I had seen this German officer shoot two of my men, one of whom was an old A Company man and had served under G. B. in the old days. And then I remember a sudden dazzling light, a feeling of warmth, and a sensation of falling, falling… and no more.
When I opened my eyes I perceived a long brown level plain stretching from me and a broad low black arch silhouetted against the distant sky. Gradually my muddled brain began to function, and on reopening my eyes I slowly realized that the brown plain was an army blanket and the black arch the iron foot of a bed. I perceived with vague surprise that I was in a long hut and that there were other beds placed against the opposite wall with military regularity; and an army nursing sister was bending over one of them.
I closed my eyes and wandered again: I saw the German officer lying in the bottom of the trench and the face that was the face of G. B. A cold sweat broke out upon my forehead. I must pull myself together, I thought: I was losing grip—seeing things. A sign of nerves at the breaking-point. I must stick it; if the Bosche came over again… And then I opened my eyes and remembered where I was. I had done with all that for a time. A hospital now… Blighty perhaps…
But I was too tired to feel thrilled, and I dozed off into oblivion again.