iv

The Sudden Depths

The brief gas course being ended, I set out to rejoin the battalion, who had disappeared in an easterly direction, somewhere south of the ominous canal. We therefore strapped up our packs and stepped off in the bright weather along the towing-path, passing through Béthune without the chance to explore that popular town, or see why the Padre’s visit to the boot-shop was interesting. I heard that the battalion had been at le Quesnoy for a night, but where le Quesnoy was I did not know, and when I asked a Frenchman he assured me indignantly that it was in the hands of the Germans. He meant a large town, I meant some small group of cottages; and continuing our waterside walk, at last we discovered that hamlet. The battalion had left, and was in the trenches. By now we were sweating and thirsty, and the evidence of a war began to gnarl the scenery. We passed the last melancholy estaminet on the eastward track, with shell-holes round the door, and we tried (at the suggestion of my batman) its coloured syrups: no more Rhum Fantaisie for me, I decided; then on again past battery pits and excavations. Here telegraph wires no longer ran aloft in the air, but lay festooned thickly along the torn-up railway bank, their poles and teeth-like rows of insulators leaning this way and that, the several rails here and there curved up like hurt reptiles into the air. The day was sultry, and the brooding presence of war made one’s whole being sultry; yet things were generally quiet. The red-brick hollow ruin of a station marked ‘Cuinchy’ told us that we were almost at our journey’s end; other ruins of industrial buildings and machinery hovered through the throbbing haze; the path became corrupt, and the canal dead and stagnant. Over it stood a steel bridge, with a deep deformity in the middle, where no doubt some huge shell had landed. This was Pont Fixe. Here silence, heat and blind terror shared the dominion. One did not wish to loiter. I forget who gave us the instruction to turn southward into ‘Harley Street’; battalion headquarters was in one of the best of the tottering anatomies of houses here, which no specialist could have cured. So, reporting, dusty, mystified and cowardly, at barricaded and padded ‘Kingsclere,’ a tall villa with mattresses stuffed into the upper windows, I was sent with Hunt the runner (like a young Athenian torch-bearer he was) to my company, now installed beyond any question south of the infamous canal.

The way had grown long that day as the sun climbed high; and the final passage through cuttings in chalky ground, zig-zagging and wire-entangled, was weary going. But fortune allowed me this – C Company was in support. The officers’ mess, dormitory and council-chamber was a fair-sized cellar under a once capacious farmhouse. Thence, it was not far to Cuinchy Keep, where I was finally due. At first sight the keep appeared as a group of irregular, low, brick walls enclosing a dust-heap. ‘You’ve timed it well,’ said Charlwood, meeting me outside. ‘Fritz put 600 shells on this keep in an hour this morning.’ ‘Has he finished?’ ‘I doubt it.’ I detachedly looked round for the dugout, and made for it.

That dugout was a deep one, with a steep mud-slide of an entrance; it was the smallest deep dugout that I ever saw, and yet it was friendly to us. So much could not be said for the area in which we were; it was one of violent surprises. Esperanto Terrace, our principal holding, was a tidy trench, but sudden shrapnel bursting over it destroyed several of our men, two brothers among them. Some of us were just in time, when next the enemy gunners whizzbanged here, to jump down from the fire-step into a dugout stairway; waiting there, I felt the air rush in hot tongues on us as shell after shell burst just at the exit. One could never feel at ease in the Cuinchy sector, though perhaps I imagined all was well one afternoon as I went down through a trench dark and cool with tall grass and arched branches above it – there was also an iron railway overhead, a contrivance for carrying stretchers – to battalion headquarters in Kingsclere.

Kingsclere’s shuttered windows, and masses of sandbags, looked better than C Company’s cellar. Kingsclere had a cellar, too, a delicate retreat from the glaring heat-wave outside, and a piano in it, and marguerites and roses in jars on the table. But there was an air of anxiety and uncertainty about the headquarters staff as they came and went. Had I lived longer in the line I could have interpreted this particular muteness and inquietude in regard to the job which I had been fetched to do. That was to produce an enlargement of the trench map showing our front line and the German front line at a chosen point. The cause, of which I remained innocent, was that the Colonel had been ordered to make a raid at once on that point. The word ‘raid’ may be defined as the one in the whole vocabulary of the war which most instantly caused a sinking feeling in the stomach of ordinary mortals. Colonel Grisewood was confronted with the command to attack some part of the enemy’s line, here fortified with the keenest intelligence, the thickest wire and emplacements, in the dark and without any preparation. Not unnaturally, he was worried. What came of this is told by Neville Lytton in his war memoirs: Grisewood demurred, was disposed of, and another battalion was forced to lose the lives which ignorance and arrogance cost. But of such perturbations I felt no tremor as I finished my map, in colours, and enjoyed my tea, and the genteel conditions.

There was enough to occupy a commanding officer in the Cuinchy trenches, without lightning raids. It was as dirty, bloodthirsty and wearisome a place as could well be found in ordinary warfare; many mines had been exploded there, and tunnelling was still going on. We had scarcely found out the names of the many trenches, boyaux and saps when midnight was suddenly maddened with the thump and roar of a new mine blown under our front companies. The shock was like a blow on the heart; our dugout swayed, there were startled eyes and voices. I was sent up, as soon as it appeared that this disaster was on our front, with some stretcher-bearers, and as we hurried along the puzzling communication trenches I began to understand the drift of the war; for a deluge of heavy shells was rushing into the ground all round, baffling any choice of movement, and the blackness billowed with blasts of crashing sound and flame. Rain (for Nature came to join the dance) glistened in the shocks of dizzy light on the trench bags and woodwork, and bewilderment was upon my small party, who stoopingly hurried onward; we endured a barrage, but we were not wanted after all.

Brothers should not join the same battalion. When we were at the place where some of the wounded had been collected under the best shelter to be found, I was struck deep by the misery of a boy, whom I knew and liked well; he was half-crying, half-exhorting over a stretcher whence came the clear but weakened voice of his brother, wounded almost to death, waiting his turn to be carried down. Not much can be said at such times; but a known voice perhaps conveyed some comfort in the inhuman night which covered us. In this battalion, brothers had frequently enlisted together; the effect was too surely a culmination of suffering; I shall hint at this again.

The casualties caused by the mine were nearly sixty. Cuinchy (which the battalion was proud to hold, believing it a sector hitherto allotted solely to Regular troops) was a slaughter-yard. My ignorance carried me through it with less ado than I can now understand. The front line, which C Company in a few nights occupied, was in all ways singular. It ran through an extensive brickfield, with many massive foursquare brickstacks, fused into solidity; of these historic strange monuments about a dozen lay in our lines, and about the same number in the German lines. The brickstacks, such of them as were occupied, were approached by insecure, narrow windings through a wicked clay; our domestic arrangements naturally grouped themselves on the home side of them, and no less naturally the Germans at their discretion belaboured them and their precincts with high explosive. The deep dugouts behind them were not quite deep enough, but to any one arriving there the sight of a smoky black stairway down, with equipments suspended like trophies at the entrance, was better than what Moses saw from Pisgah. From the gap in the sandbags above, a bulky benevolent figure, reminiscent of the police force, emerges with a frying-pan, or a canvas bucket, and grins respectfully. ‘Corporal Head, dare you laugh at my huge stick? Isn’t it helping me through this filth to a couple of hours’ rest?’ – ‘Well, I hope you’ll get your rest, sir. Here they come again.’ – Just in time; the most malevolent flattening crash follows one down the steps: one’s body tingles: the candles are out. This is the first line of a long monotonous poem, but we are inside, and can wait for the end. The roof-beam may be cracked, but that need not be one’s only thought. Who’s got the matches?

I have heard it ruled that the minenwerfer was unimportant, and its effect principally (to use the obtuse English of this subject) moral. But in stationary war it seemed to me to make large holes not only in the nervous but also in the trench system. My first glimpse of what I likened to a small black cask wabbling over and over in the air at a great height above us produced from me the remark: What a large rifle-grenade! The cask pounced down with speed and a corner of the brickstack flew into a violence of dust and smoke; but meanwhile other ‘airy devils hovered,’ and Corporal Rowland, who had smilingly corrected my error about rifle-grenades, watched with as keen an eye as ever faced fast bowler, and scuttled one way or the other. There was nothing for it but to copy experience, and experience was nothing but a casual protection, for one of our soundest officers was killed at the entrance to the brickstacks. I still hear the voices of his friends, sharing this news, shocked and sad. A problem also recurs to me, which became for a time a bad dream; in the narrow slit, already knocked nearly shapeless, and sloppy with rain, which led from our company headquarters towards the rear, a large ‘minny’ fell but did not explode. Something must be done about it, quickly – for traffic must pass, day and night. I suppose that this dud was presently set off by an electrical charge, but it had an awkward effect on a person expecting to pass that way – the only way.

Meanwhile, our trench protection was most meagre. The front trench, then marked at intervals with large location-boards reading (from our side) somehow thus: was shallow and uncommanding. I could not understand its connections, one part with another. Probably nobody else could. Saps ran out, like thin arms reaching towards the enemy, but whether they or the fragmentary fire-step from which they emerged formed our chief bulwark, I did not know. We held Jerusalem Crater, an enormous hole in brown exploded soil with a pool in the bottom of it; we held it, but our post was at the bottom of it too. The sentry had to lie down behind a few sacks of clay and glare with intensity into his periscope. One reached him through a burrow under our parapet, a sort of culvert, a heroic ingenuity; if one lay long beside him, one of the periodical releases of stick-bombs from the overhanging German side of the crater would reward such patience. At night our patrols inquired perilously into the farther side of this crater; I went; there was nothing to be discovered but fractured earth, old iron and anxiety. We even dragged ourselves to the possible lair of our opponents; but found no person nor prepared position. Clearly the German habit was to crawl out in the day and throw the bombs from ‘no fixed abode.’ Sometimes the bomber would show himself, head and shoulders, in an unexpected position, out of contempt or daredevilry. He was always reported to be of gigantic stature – no mere Saxon youth. It was here that one of our officers sent back a note to Lytton, ‘Germans have thrown six bombs into Jerusalem Crater. Shall we throw any back?’

Now this was the tendency of our brigade; one’s mind was more filled with one’s relation to superior beings behind us than to those who were not losing the war in front of us. Such questions as these, ‘Have your men had Porridge this morning?’ ‘Have you your Gas Message in your pocket?’ and ‘What is the number of Loan Boots in your company?’ were never far away from the young officer, even as a German bomb burst beside him; they impeded, shall I say, his ‘offensive spirit.’ This awkwardness pervaded trench war. Even when our headquarters were wildly calling for information and co-operation on the stormy occasion of our mine, an urgent message came in demanding an immediate return of the number of picks and shovels on our sector, or something still wider – the usual ‘Please expedite.’

Who that had been there for but a few hours could ever forget the sullen sorcery and mad lineaments of Cuinchy? A mining sector, as this was, never wholly lost the sense of hovering horror. That day I arrived in it the shimmering arising heat blurred the scene, but a trouble was at once discernible, if indescribable, also rising from the ground. Over Coldstream Lane, the chief communication trench, deep red poppies, blue and white cornflowers and darnel thronged the way to destruction; the yellow cabbage-flowers thickened here and there in sickening brilliance. Giant teazels made a thicket beyond. Then the ground became torn and vile, the poisonous breath of fresh explosions skulked all about, and the mud which choked the narrow passages stank as one pulled through it, and through the twisted, disused wires running mysteriously onward, in such festooning complexity that we even suspected some of them ran into the Germans’ line and were used to betray us. Much lime was wanted at Cuinchy, and that had its ill savour, and often its horrible meaning. There were many spots mouldering on, like those legendary blood-stains in castle floors which will not be washed away.

In our front line under the fire-step, and indeed now chiefly propping it up, were numerous cylinders of gas, installed for the Loos battle, but undischarged. These could not easily be dug out, and promised additional inconvenience or murder at all hours of shelling. I had been talking on this and similar matters one evening with Corporal Rowland, when, he having gone away to some minor job, I heard a dozen bombs burst very loud. What to do I did not know: I was in a disused bay alone; I was hurrying to find someone else when he came running along, saying that they were German bombs. We both waited on the parapet, with our own bombs ready, but after a few more abrupt thunderings the episode ceased. It turned out that some Germans had tried to raid our right company. In such a dark night it was not easy to be sure of that wandering front line.

At four o’clock one afternoon our tunnellers, suddenly locating German mining near their own, put up a defensive mine between the two lines. All had been drowsy till some pale-faced engineers with lengths of fuse in their hands came past, flinging their brief news over their shoulders at us. Now for it: a big drum-tap underground, and the earth heaved up to a great height in solid crags and clods, with devolving clouds of dust; there was the flame and roar, then this dark pillar in the sunlight, then a twittering, a hissing and thudding as it collapsed. At once the new crater was raked with machine-gun fire and blasted with trench mortars and rifle grenades; neither side wanted it, but neither would let the other set foot in it. Several of us, highly excited, regardless of machine-gun bullets, stood up on the fire-step staring into the confusion and trying our longest throws with Mills bombs; the smoke and dust hung long and swallowed up hundreds of such missiles. At length the affair died out; dixies of tea went round at the usual hour and easily became more important than the blowing of a mine.

The strain of this sector made everyone exceedingly tired. I tremble at one particular memory of this. I had taken trench duty at the dawn ‘stand to,’ it had been quiet enough, and now the sun was warming and gilding the grey dawn on the sandbags; having dragged myself up and down the trench many times, and used up all my store of intended jokes and encouragements at each group of sentries, I sat down on a convenient sandbag emplacement. Like a fool; the occasional bullets sounded more and more peaceful to my ears, and ceased; I woke up some minutes after, thanking heaven it had not been the General’s morning, and that no one had come to the little outlet in which I was nodding. But I was an officer, and fortunate: when my hours of trench watch were over, I could plough my way back to the black hole under the brickstack, and there imitate sleep with no greater defect than that of rats running over me, or explosion somewhere. The men must hunch and huddle on the fire-step, their legs pushed aside every two minutes by passers, the sky above perhaps drizzling or pouring, and nothing but hope and a mackintosh sheet between them and the descent of minenwerfer shells or ‘rum jars.’ And yet they were in general alert and proud – the first Kitchener battalion, they said, to hold the sector. While we were here, the news came that Kitchener had been drowned. I believe the Germans hoisted a blackboard with this information on it above their parapet.

If these British trenches were not a masterpiece of fortification, at least they were well equipped with notice-boards. Some fine examples of sign-writing adorned the least desirable localities. The brickstacks proclaimed in graceful characters that persons who, speaking over the field telephones, gave away any information at all, which the enemy with his listening sets would undoubtedly pick up, would be court-martialled. And high up inside these mausoleums of much labour, another notice, worthy of an expert monumental mason, played on the imagination. It set forth instructions to the machine-gunners sitting there for throwing open with a pole their secret loophole and coming into action on the day of attack. Clear as these orders were, I felt nevertheless that I would rather not be the executant of them in that odd casemate at the top of the ingenious cemented staircase. Another noticeboard, which I must not be so squeamish as to ignore, led to a familiar place far enough from the brickstack which we held to receive the ‘overs’; it is the case that a trench latrine and a trench mortar emplacement mapped from the air look alike, and one’s visits were always the worse for that knowledge and occasionally for directed or misdirected shells.

Our work in the Cuinchy trenches was pleasantly relieved by a night or two in a village a short march westward – first through long trenches across the Tourbières or swamp (hence of course ‘Tubular Trenches’), and then down the Béthune road; Annequin, where holes made in roofs by enemy guns were speedily repaired by the imperturbable inhabitants. The village was friendly, and near it lay the marshy land full of tall and whispering reeds, over which evening looked her last with an unusual sad beauty, well suiting one’s mood. But gloomy we were not. I remember how Limbery-Buse and myself chirped and rarefied over some crayfish and a great cake, in a little side room of a miner’s cottage, with vine leaves peeping in, and a flower-bed in front. The miner told me that he was one of some forty who daily inspected the state of the coal-mines from the pit-heads close by so far as those in the German area. Over Annequin towered its slag-heap with a trolley-tip on its pyramidal apex, looking like a big gun; the gunners observed from this eminence, and one heard thereabouts at night the huge crash of German shells intended to spoil their chances. Brief as our stay in Annequin was, we nevertheless went up to the trenches as working-parties from there; and so generally at this period whenever there was a prospect of genuine recuperation, it had to be ruined with long trampings up and down communication trenches for digging or carrying. Many of us would say that it was the better part to stay in the line.

At last, the wonderful news came that we were to be withdrawn from the Cuinchy system, and march back to rest billets. A tired and bemired platoon it was that, after the painful delays usual to night reliefs, I presently led down in the oily black night. How they hated, how I hated the innocent Lytton, riding up and down beside the strung-out company on the charger brought to the foot of the trenches for him. He was gentle, indeed, but the suspicion of ‘march discipline’ rankled along that canal bank. The chief business was to avoid staggering into the canal. Somewhere near the village of Gorre we had a long halt by the towpath, almost all falling asleep at once on their packs; daylight was waterily spreading as we passed the cemetery and timber-yards of Béthune; too silently we bowed along to Hinges, our former haunt. But if we were so profoundly tired then, how must the battalion have been almost mad for sleep when two years later it had stood before the master offensive of Germany? I cannot speak as those could who were there before me, and who were there after me – some of whom survived and truly came out of great tribulation. Imagine their message; they will never open their mouths, unless perhaps one hour, when the hooded shape comes to call them away, they lift from the lips of their extremest age a terrible complaint and courage, in phrases sounding to the bystanders like ‘the drums and tramplings’ of a mad dream.