Specimen of the War of Attrition
Explanations followed. Our affair had been a cat’s-paw, a ‘holding attack’ to keep German guns and troops away from the great gamble of the Somme. This purpose, previously concealed from us with success, was unachieved, for just as our main artillery pulled out and marched southward after the battle, so did the German; and only a battalion or two of reserve infantry was needed opposite us to secure a harmless little salient. The explanations were almost as infuriating to the troops as the attack itself (I remember conversations fiercer than Bolshevik councils against the staff concerned), and deep down in the survivors there grew a bitterness of waste; one of the battalions indeed seemed never to recover from its immense laceration, though reinforcements, and good ones, made up its numbers.
Soon after this a circular appeared, which began, ‘All ranks must know that the great offensive has now definitely begun,’ and went on to assert the valuable creative principle that artillery and trench mortars cut the wire; infantry capture and consolidate the trenches. This promised to simplify the new warfare considerably, but as yet we were holding our sector according to precedent. If these parts were ordinarily peaceful – so peaceful that a shaky colonel was known to ask his adjutant upon hearing a single shell-burst, ‘Is that on our front?’ – we made up for the fact, in some degree, by our length of reign in them. We were genuine trench inhabitants as long as we were in the defences of Béthune. As yet, in spite of the fierce stories which had floated northwards from Vimy Ridge with its sixteen mine craters and its ‘ploughed fields,’ in spite even of the Boar’s Head disaster (which had indeed been restricted in its destruction of the look of things to a few square miles), few of us had any divination of the realities of the Somme offensive. I used to rely on a sergeant who had been out before with a cyclist battalion, lately disbanded, for a sensible point of view; for days after the opening of the Somme battle he refused to admit any signs of success whatever, but when presently a telegram was passed round among us containing the news ‘Cavalry ordered forward to High Wood,’ he softened somewhat, and remained open to persuasion for two or three days.
We discussed these mysteries at the head of a mine-shaft in the Cambrin sector, which lies towards Loos. Why we were suddenly sent in there I do not know, and I must have wished many times that we had not been there; the fact remains that one night our entire division and its guns were on the road southwards from the Richebourg country, leaving the district of orchards for that of collieries, crossing the Canal towards a town on a small hill, called Beuvry. There was pine-apple gas, the tear-compelling kind, all along our way. An odd coincidence. For my part I was fortunate; having reported at battalion headquarters on some point, I showed signs of asthma. Wallace, the adjutant, noticing this, unconcealed his feelings; he had me remove my pack, and weighing it in his hand and saying it would be far too heavy for him, instructed that it and I should be carried on pony-back to Beuvry. The town was asleep when we arrived. The men took over billets in a large school, fitted with bunks, which I think pleased them well. I myself went into a strange cottage without a light, and, creeping after my batman through the living-room, was blessed with a clean and comfortable bed. Beuvry, we liked you well, your church, your shops, your serenity; but it was upon short acquaintance, for next day under cloudy heavens we departed, in parties of six at a time, two hundred yards apart, on what I suppose was the real, war correspondent’s ‘Shell-swept La Bassée Road.’ I should have liked a job as storekeeper in one of the many deserted inns and dwellings, yet friendly, alongside this famous pavé; but the storekeeping genius of the nation was too abundant already. Such frowsty paradise as can be created in a cellar where the north wind of discipline never comes needs no recommendation; every man wants to be a storekeeper in some spot at once fairly safe in itself but not offering much attraction to such as give orders and handle offensives.
At Cambrin crossroads our parties of six at two hundred yards interval (or distance: I stumble at a familiar military crux) turned into a side-road by the church (which was a dressing station), and sat down by companies. While tea was dished out, a shell in the church wall, curiously embedded there, unexploded, was one topic; and another was the chocolate which a thrifty old woman – where had she sprung up from? – was peddling among us. Presently Major Harrison, now commanding us, turning from other matters, noticed this old stranger, and, recollecting that we were a relieving battalion at the foot of the communication trench – a most secret and confidential body of men! – he ordered her to be sent away. But by that time, I shrewdly fancy, the stranger had disappeared.
The communication trench was one of the longest that we ever used, and in many places it was bricked, sides and floor. It ended in a singular front line, approached by too many boyaux, known by their numbers; a front line not unhappily sited, but dominated by the enemy’s higher ground, on which rose Auchy’s crowding red roofs. Our company’s notch of this front line was a deep trench, passing every twenty or thirty yards under roofs of iron rails or duckboards built over with sandbags. And this trench had been kept elegantly clean. On the wrong side of it, their mouths facing the German line, were several deep dugouts; forward from it reached several saps, hot chalky grooves which were by no means so tidy. And, not without their awe to the unaccustomed, there were mine-shafts in the line, mostly with wooden barriers and notices excluding infantry. ‘Keep Out. This Means You,’ was seen here.
The reason for the overhead coverings did not long keep me in suspense. It was my turn for trench watch, one grey morning; I walked to our left-hand post, and talked to our sentry there, when whizz-crunch, whizz-crunch, two small trench mortar shells of the kind called ‘pine-apples’ fell on the covering above us, broke it half down and strewed the place with fragments. The immediateness of these arrivals annulled fear. Taking my meditative way along to the other extremity of our trench, I was genially desired by Corporal Worley to take cocoa with him; he was just bringing it to the boil over some shreds of sandbag and tallow candle. Scarcely had I grasped the friendly mug when a rifle-grenade burst with red-hot fizzing on the parapet behind me and another on the parados behind him; and we were unhit. Worley’s courtesy and warm feeling went on, undiverted as though a butterfly or two had settled on a flower. A kinder heart there never was; a gentler spirit never. With his blue eyes a little doubtfully fixed on me, his red cheeks a little redder than usual, he would speak in terms of regret for what he thought his roughness, saying dolefully that he had been in the butchering trade all his time. Where now, Frank Worley? I should like an answer. He was for ever comforting those youngsters who were so numerous among us; even as the shrapnel burst low over the fire-bay he would be saying without altered tone, ‘don’t fret, lay still,’ and such things.
The tunnellers who were so busy under the German line were men of stubborn determination, yet, by force of the unaccustomed, they hurried nervously along the trenches above ground to spend their long hours listening or mining. At one shaft they pumped air down with Brobdingnagian bellows. The squeaking noise may have given them away, or it may have been mere bad luck, when one morning a minenwerfer smashed this entrance and the men working there. One was carried out past me, collapsing like a sack of potatoes, spouting blood at twenty places. Cambrin was beginning to terrify. Not far away from that shafthead, a young and cheerful lance-corporal of ours was making some tea as I passed one warm afternoon. Wishing him a good tea, I went along three firebays; one shell dropped without warning behind me; I saw its smoke faint out, and I thought all was as lucky as it should be. Soon a cry from that place recalled me; the shell had burst all wrong. Its butting impression was black and stinking in the parados where three minutes ago the lance-corporal’s mess-tin was bubbling over a little flame. For him, how could the gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth-wall sotted with blood, with flesh, the eye under the duckboard, the pulpy bone be the only answer? At this moment, while we looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.
He was sent to company headquarters in a kind of catalepsy. The bay had to be put right, and red-faced Sergeant Simmons, having helped himself and me to a share of rum, biting hard on his pipe, shovelled into the sandbag I held, not without self-protecting profanity, and an air of ‘it’s a lie; we’re a lie.’
Cambrin was beginning to terrify. My excellent sentry in the longest sap, looking too faithfully through his loophole, was shot clean through the head; but the stretcher-bearers resting in a too exposed cubby-hole at the top of a boyau were mutilated in their death by the rifle-grenade which chance lobbed into their quiet dreams of home-folk. And, while these tragedies happened here in the ordinary course of trench dwelling, policy began to be more irritable and irritating. Our fire operations (every man of every employment firing his rifle, or his Lewis gun, dispatching his rifle-grenades or throwing his Mills into No Man’s Land for so many minutes of the evening) called down one general answer, a sharp bombardment. The little support trench in which company headquarters was (a muddy but beloved dungeon) glowed with white-hot fragments of shells for a long while. Then, the hairy Jocks south of us made a raid, and, whether it was that, as was said, they really did bring back the enemy’s mail that had just come up, or whether they did too much damage, the enemy gave proof of his anger. Forms shrouded with blankets lay still on our fire-step next morning.
Yet it was not a place in which all hours were poisonous. The summer afternoon sometimes stole past unmolested, and, sleep being now almost an abandoned archaism in the trenches, Limbery-Buse and myself would tour old diggings and admire well-carpentered loopholes or recesses, to sit with Sergeant Terry and his telescope, or shoot at fat but too clever rats with our revolvers. I fancied myself as a map-maker, but the sign which I used for trees annoyed my critics: ‘Damn these Q’s of yours!’ – not all the offensive spirit of this quarter belonged to the Germans. Our own bombers with their rifle-grenade batteries were busy, sourly witty, sending over by one pull of a cord volleys of half a dozen, which cooed somehow like pigeons as they soared over to do mischief with a final whining. One attended these conjuring-tricks when they came off. There was some talk of using a ‘West Spring Gun’ which lay inert in our dump, a legacy of the ingenuity of 1915, but antiquity was respected, and our lives may have been saved from the probable miscarriage. By way of substitute I called for the company barber and sat meekly under his respectful hand, noting the distance of any disturbances.
But let us be getting out of this sector. It is too near the heats of fiercer Hulloch and the Hohenzollern. The listening-posts are not anxious to go out far into No Man’s Land at nights, and I am sure I unofficially agree with them; they have had too many pine-apples, and not enough sleep. When we got away, it was a full moon, eternal and, so it happened, but little insulted by war’s hoarse croaking. We passed the neat portcullises which were to pen the enemy in blind alleys, should he come: the loopholes, neatly set for his destruction if he would stick to the conditions; we got out of the imprisoning trench, and stretched our limbs towards Cambrin village. Daylight came to us assembled on the paved road there, and, as I said to Northcote, now commanding C Company, it seemed that we were out of range of rifle-grenades. What was this? Here were some of the old London ’buses coming, disguised with drab paint: for us! Foot soldiers to be carried to billets? I cannot believe it even now; however, according to all the available evidence, I sat on top of a ’bus that fresh morning while we rolled along into Béthune past the miners mechanically turning out with their rattling clogs to their day in the pits.