The Calm
With only a short interlude, in the camp among orchards towards Lacouture, by the farmhouse whose pigeon-loft caused sudden suspicious alarm and inquiry, and in the inconvenient roar and shock of a busy heavy howitzer, we moved again to relieve trenches. That afternoon we halted in the open by the La Bassée Canal, and many of us swam there in unexpected luxury, to the admiration of the small boys of the surviving houses near. One of them told me with some emphasis that he envied us; and he looked miserable as I started off my platoon in small groups towards Givenchy. He was not the only miserable one at that moment. Givenchy was not expected to give satisfaction. The long weedy canal in drowsy summer’s yellow haze, with here a diver in his rubber suit exploring a sunken barge, there a solidly built battery position adjoining the bank, kept one’s attention until, beyond some broad pools wherein old clumsy hulks of barges lay awaiting what we were all awaiting, the Givenchy ‘village line’ appeared. We hid ourselves duly in and about the village.
From the old crumpled bridge which would take us southward into Cuinchy, the street northward was not displeasing in appearance. That is to say, it had not yet lost its rows of brick dwellings, which stood up externally presentable if inwardly dismantled; and it was perhaps wholly protected against enemy observation posts by the slight ridge which gathered gently to the east of it. The ridge was still adorned with a shrine, from which a Lewis gun nightly instructed the enemy in obeisance. Between the village line and the front trenches lay another road, roughly parallel with them, and originating at Givenchy Church. Some houses here, in the thick of it, yet retained their outline, and when one had walked up the communication trench – Wolfe Road, if I am right – it was curious and touching to see them, after the thought that one was past all houses. I took a walk among their white shutters and painted garden railings in the thick mists of morning, with that compelled spirit of reverence which those village ruins awoke in me, more vividly perhaps than a Wren masterpiece can to-day. To visit such relics of a yesterday whose genial light seemed at once scarcely gone and gone for ages, relics whose luckless situation almost denied them the imagined piety of contemplation and pity, was a part of my war. There were other ruins, which we made less emotional; ‘Haunted House,’ an observation post, lacked the true phantom-air.
I had written and left with a publisher in London a trifling collection of verses: I had forgotten about them, but they entered my story again at Givenchy. The scene is bright in my mind’s eye. Northcote and his subalterns, in their sandbagged ground floor in the village line, have had tea, and are arguing over some frivolous subject, as Mr Asquith’s benignity, or the effectiveness of our Archies, when with a great clatter and abruptness a shell from our own batteries behind hits the ground before our window and sends a nosecap into our wallpaper. We are still talking about this mishit and others similar when Colonel Harrison appears and surprises us almost as much with a demand for me. I am wanted at battalion headquarters. A review of my poems has been printed in the Times Literary Supplement (a kind review it was, if ever there was one!), and my Colonel has seen it and is overjoyed at having an actual author in his battalion. How rosy he looks!
Paternal Northcote pleaded hard, ‘Surely you won’t take our young Blunden, sir – Oh no! he’s quite happy here.’ I, too, when Colonel Harrison had left, appealed to my admirable company commander, saying how sincerely I knew myself unequal to the lordly style of battalion headquarters. But all to no purpose; that book of verse had done its work; and the same evening I was at dinner in Harrison’s presence, afraid of him and everyone else in that high command, and marvelling at the fine glass which was in use there – soon to be deposited by thoughtful Quartermaster Swain with regrets in some safe village, while we went to worse ruins and cruder warfare.
My new style was ‘Field Works Officer,’ and business, odd jobs about the trenches. The first Herculean labour innocently attempted by me concerned the abysmal Red Dragon Crater which had been blown here a little while before under the unfortunate Welshmen. Our posts held the ‘near lip’ of this devilish hole, and in order to reach them from the nearest sound trench, along a soapy brook under some hurt pollards, a longish sap had to be maintained. As the crater’s rim stood at a surprising height above the surrounding ground, and the battle-line curved to the south, this sap was under observation from the flank. And further, it ran through such pulverized burnt soil that it almost filled itself without the aid of bombardment. My plan was to scrape it out and to revet it with wood and galvanized iron, and I asked for a working party. To my amazement and consternation the Brigade sent up a hundred men, or more, from a reserve battalion; it was the practice of the time to send into the line at least twice the number of men who could possibly be employed, concealed and supervised. These worthies carried up plenty of material, dug quite brilliantly, and set in position the wooden frames and the sheets of corrugated iron or expanded metal; while my good Sergeant Worley, who to my delight had joined battalion headquarters as wiring sergeant, and was with me on this piece of work through sheer love, went round with me laying on muffled mallets and risking his life. Especially so; the miracle was that the whole of my spademen were not battered into the dust. I was less like a man in fever when they were gone at last, and Worley and myself remained behind adding some practical and (as the world was then constituted) some artistical touches; sandbags and duckboards sort out your artists. These degenerate days know nothing of a stylish revetment. With a duck-board under my arm, I was suddenly pulled up by the high and dry voice of the General, who appeared to be rather more displeased by the irregularity of an officer’s publicly transferring a duckboard from trench to trench than pleased by the reformation of the sap. He went off, leaving a dash of bitterness in my mild draught of content; but still it was a good afternoon’s work. Worley and myself had scarcely emerged when huge crashes and dirty rolling smoke behind us needed no commentary. The memory of Lot’s wife! We dropped into a tunnel-shaft and meditated audibly. It was some time before we could reasonably emerge.
But I had still a feeling that the sap might be converted, like drunkards, in confidence and secrecy, and on after days with a few skilful supporters I tidied it up. Lintott, who had sympathized, went up to inspect, whereon a minny descended and partly buried him. Others followed, and ‘work done’ was crossed out – on the ground, not on the report sent to higher regions. Who, I wonder, at last conquered this recreant, fulminatory alley? I should like to see that man; Madame Tussaud’s has scarcely exhibited his superior.
Not only the air but the earth beneath also menaced the tenant of Givenchy. Our own miners were busy, and an engine driving pumps could be interpreted by the most youthful earth-dweller. A large sunprint on view at headquarters ‘suspected’ many enemy mine-shafts – one stopped counting them, they were so many – and authentic opinion promised us that the support trench near the canal would rise, Kraken-like, any day or night. This affected me, particularly as I was sent up to take a turn or two of trench watch at night in that quarter, and we were to hold the line for eight or sixteen days. However, we got nothing worse than rifle-grenades, whipping angrily down while dawn came with sinister calm, white and weary as the sentries’ faces, through the sallow fog.
Givenchy with its famous keep and huge crater was no sinecure, but some memories of our incarceration there have an Arcadian quality about them. There, it was possible to send one’s batman back with some francs and a sandbag, and to welcome him in a couple of hours returning with beer and chocolate. There, the doctor’s monkey used to gambol like a rogue along a garden wall, in the village line, while a machine-gun at long range traversed over him. There, if you failed to see the official warning to trespassers, you might creep along the sunny canal bank in its untrodden part, and see among the weeds the most self-satisfied pike in numbers, who had almost forgotten the fact of anglers.
‘Were there hooks once?’
Moreover, a heavy concrete lock, barring the canal at our support line, afforded protection on our side to bathing-parties of our men, who were marched down in the afternoon, and chaffed and splashed and plunged, with the Germans probably aware but unobjecting a few hundred yards along. Outside the stopped electrical machinery in this place was an old notice, ‘Danger de Mort’ – exactly. The usual nuisance was the wires which generations of field telephonists had run through the bathing pool. But, on my last occasion there, sudden shelling on the high south bank scattered unwelcome jags of iron in the still lapping water. O ho, Fritz! I never dressed quicker.
By good luck, I escaped a piece of trouble in this sector. Had I come on trench watch two hours later, not young C. but myself would have been puzzled by the appearance of a German officer and perhaps twenty of his men, who, with friendly cries of ‘Good morning, Tommy, have you any biscuits?’ and the like, got out of their trench and invited our men to do the same. What their object was, beyond simple fraternizing, I cannot guess; it was afterwards argued that they wished to obtain an identification of the unit opposite them. And yet I heard they had already addressed us as the ‘bastard Sussek.’ In any case, our men were told not to fire upon them, both by C. and the other company’s officer on watch; there was some exchange of shouted remarks, and after a time both sides returned to the secrecy of their parapets. When this affair was reported to more senior members of the battalion, it took on rather a gloomy aspect; it appeared that the bounden duty of C. and R. had been to open fire on the enemy, and one hoped that the business might be kept from the ears of the Brigade Commander. Such hopes were, of course, nothing to the purpose; the story was out and growing, the unfortunate subalterns were reproved, and, what is more, placed under arrest.
Under arrest they marched towards the Somme battle of 1916. When we left Givenchy, it was known that we were at length ‘going South,’ and, curious as it may seem, the change produced a kind of holiday feeling among us. For some time to come, it was clear, we should be out of the trenches, and on our travels among unbroken houses, streets of life, and peaceful people; hitherto there had been very little but relieving here, and being relieved, and almost at once relieving there, a sandbag rotation. While the battalion was romantically lodged in ancient Béthune, it fell to me to haunt the sandbags a little longer. I was sent to receive instruction in trench-building from our Engineers, who inhabited a beautiful little farmhouse near Festubert. The daily plan was, after that indescribably sweet wash in well-water under leafy roofs, and a farmhouse breakfast, to cycle up to the hamlet of Le Plantin, among waterlogged grounds with willow groves of bamboo green, under which ran queer old defences and dugouts floored with ancient straw. In front of this place a support line was being made, and very nice and proper it looked to the simple mind, with its clean U-frames and footboards and symmetrical wire anchorages. Our instructor left us here with vague allusion to ‘carrying on,’ and several sappers also went about gravely with hammers and nails. At first we dug with medium force, but the weather was beautiful and even a little too sleepily warm, and presently we withdrew for lunch to one of the ruins behind, where thatch and brick and lath hung together still in no mean likeness of houses, and water of the most crystal dripped musically down from the tank of a well in what had been the garrets of the nearest cottage. The second morning, we took not only lunch but a walk after it; returning, we were offended by the foul smell of recent lyddite, by branches and rafters mutilated and strewn about the crossroad, by damp brown earth flung across the white summer dust. A visit to the new trench soon proved that it had been the main target; that German kite balloon which had been hanging in the blue like a boat swinging idly at mooring had not been there for nothing. We therefore elected to give time for the German observer to forget our trench, and sat simply chatting in a rustic row under a flowery bank (still smelling a little nitrous), when the instructor broke in on us. His Boer War experience, annotated in the ribbons which he wore, had given him a touch of overlordliness, which now tuned his irritable remarks. Then arose a slight argument, which seemed to promise us less of comfort in what was left of our engineering course; and I was pleased at the order a day or so later to lay down the hammer and nails and join the battalion in Béthune.
They had just come from a ceremonial parade in the yard of the Girls’ School when I reached them – another escape! This was the parade on which the Colonel made the cryptic remark to the sergeant who, on the command ‘Fix,’ dropped his bayonet. Such things were never forgotten, while bombardments passed into oblivion. They were all as cheerful as a choir excursion, and found that Béthune agreed with them. Indeed, it was a marvellous little town to be found so near the trenches. It was old, it was young; its streets were not of 1916, but its pretty faces were immediate, and the heartiness of ordinary life prevailed. There was keen preference in hotels and restaurants. One could even go to the Banque de France and draw money in a handsome setting, instead of parading at the Field Cashier’s deal table. C’est triste, la guerre; ah, malheur, malheur. That note was there, but above it for the time played the spirits of delight in whatever baffled war’s grey tentacles. In the church the twilight bloomed with art’s ancient beauty; the music adored its own centuries of grandeur. In the shops the white fingers that turned over pictures or books for one’s choice were pure poetry. It is a bitter reflection that, perhaps on account of the aforesaid ceremonial parade, with the gleaming bayonets and accoutrements not unnoted by German flying Scouts, this town was shelled by heavy guns on the day that we departed, and many citizens were killed. The chemist’s shop just vacated by battalion headquarters was unlucky.
And now, as I lie in bed in my billet, after a conversation on infant schools with the lady teacher whose house it is, with trees softly swaying almost to the window, and only the odd night voices of an ancient town about me, I conjecture briefly, yet with a heaving breast, of that march southward which begins to-morrow morning. It will be a new world again. The past few months have been a new world, of which the succession of sensations erratically occupies my mind; the bowed heads of working parties and reliefs moving up by ‘trenches’ framed of sacking and brushwood; the bullets leaping angrily from charred rafters shining in greenish flare-light; an old pump and a tiled floor in the moon; bedsteads and broken mattresses hanging over cracked and scarred walls; Germans seen as momentary shadows among wire hedges; tallowy, blood-dashed, bewildered faces – but put back the blanket; a garden gate, opening into a battlefield; boys, treating the terror and torment with the philosophy of men; cheeky newspaper-sellers passing the gunpits; stretcher-bearers on the same road an hour after; the old labourer at his cottage door, pointing out with awe and circumstance (the guns meanwhile thundering away on the next parish) his eaves chipped by anti-aircraft shrapnel; the cook’s mate digging for nose-caps where a dozen shells have just exploded; the ‘Mad Major’ flying low over the Germans’ parapet and scattering out his bombs, leaving us to settle the bill; our own parapet seen in the magnesium’s glare as the Germans were seeing it; stretchers or sooty dixies being dumped round trench corners; the post-cards stuck on the corner of Coldstream Lane; the diction of the incoming and outgoing soldiers squeezing past one another in the pitch-black communication-trench; the age that has gone by since I read Young’s Night Thoughts in the dugout at Cuinchy. And, now I think of it, I forgot to rescue that edition (1815) when it slipped down behind the bunks! We may go back again, of course: but—
Time glides away, Lorenzo, like a brook,
In the same brook none ever bathed him twice.