Cæsar Went into Winter Quarters
Then we went into the trenches round about Thiepval Wood, which not long before had been so horrible and mad; but now they had assumed a tenderer aspect, were voted ‘a rest-cure sector,’ and we were envied for them. The land in front was full of the dead of July 1 and other days of destruction, but our own casualties were happily few, and there was cover for all. Occasionally heavy shells blocked up parts of Inniskilling Avenue, or the waterside path to Mill Post (opposite our old mill at Hamel) which Lapworth, the mild-looking boy who had so stalwartly endured the pandemonium of Stuff Trench, now commanded. At battalion headquarters it was like old times, everyone having time and means to appear with shining face and even shining buttons, and arguments about ghosts, Lloyd George’s ammunition, the German Emperor and the French artillery rising into sonorous eloquence until some near explosion put out the acetylene lamp, or ‘paper warfare’ warmed up with the receipt of large envelopes from Brigade. Those not in the front trench were sheltered in mediæval-looking archways hewn through the chalk and the roots of the trees; the forward posts were chiefly manned from tunnels called Koyli West and East; and in truth everyone seemed disposed to be satisfied. In Paisley Valley, alongside the wood, some tanks were lying veiled with brown nets, and one might have translated the fact; but a week or so passed, and nothing had happened except rain and fog. Had it not? With the aid of the sergeant cook I had built four ovens in the wood, which Wren himself would have eaten his dinner out of – or gone without.
In spite of the sylvan intricacies (a trifle damaged) of Thiepval Wood, and a bedroom in the corridored chalk bank, and the tunes of the ‘Bing Boys’ endlessly revolved, one was not yet quite clear of Stuff Trench; my own unwelcome but persistent retrospect was the shell-hole there used by us as a latrine, with those two flattened German bodies in it, tallow-faced and dirty-stubbled, one spectacled, with fingers hooking the handle of a bomb; and others had much worse to remember. We were merry when at length the relief was sent in and we emerged from the Ancre mists to form up and march in pale daylight to Senlis, a village six or seven miles behind the line. The road wound and twisted, but we liked it well, and as at one point the still lofty stump of Mesnil Church tower showed above the dingy trampled fields it was hard not to shout aloud. ‘Not gone yet,’ signalled the tower. We heard the church bell ring in Senlis, we bought beet and chocolate, and we admired with determination the girls who sold them; so vital was the hour of relaxation, so kindly was the stone of the road and the straw of the barn. We envied the troops employed as road-sweepers and ditchers in their drains and puddles. Fatuous groups of dugouts, tin and match-board, seemed unfair luxury. We heard the high-velocity gun shooting at the Bouzincourt Road with no anxiety. But, prime gift of eccentric heaven, there was the evening when Harrison took all the old originals and some others to the divisional concert-party performing in the town. The barn roof ought indeed to have floated away in the pæans and warblings that rose from us, as the pierrots chirruped and gambolled there. In sweet music is such art – and never was music sweeter than the ragtime then obtaining, if appreciation indexes merit. ‘Take me back to dear old Blighty’ was too much for us – we roared inanely, and when a creditable cardboard train was jerked across the stage and the performers looking out of the windows sang their chorus, ‘Birmingham, Leeds or Manchester,’ the force of illusion could no further go. ‘Mr Bottomley – Good old Horatio’ was a song scarcely less successful, though Mr Bottomley was blamed for several things scarcely under his control – as,
‘On the day on which Peace is declared,’ a neat little skit, and ‘When you’re a long, long way from home’ will never cease to ring pathetically through the years between. All the performers had been over the top. Glum and droll clown, where can I now find your equal? Will time yield you such a ‘house’ again? and you, graceful tenor, with what glorious air can you now awaken such a sigh as when in the farmstead you sang the ‘cheap sentiment’ of those newly from the outer darkness? ‘When you’re a long, long way from home’ – we seemed to be so.
Soon enough, from the huts in the orchard, from the mud-walled barns by the church, from the blankets in the straw or the mahogany beds with the mountainous straw mattresses, we were marching eastward again, with little to recommend our future to us. It was now approaching the beginning of November, and the days were melancholy and the colour of clay. We took over that deathtrap known as the Schwaben Redoubt, the way to which lay through the fallen fortress of Thiepval. One had heard the worst accounts of the place, and they were true. Crossing the Ancre again at Black Horse Bridge, one went up through the scanty skeleton houses of Authuille, and climbing the dirty little road over the steep bank, one immediately entered the land of despair. Bodies, bodies and their useless gear heaped the gross waste ground; the slimy road was soon only a mud track which passed a whitish tumulus of ruin with lurking entrances, some spikes that had been pine-trees, a bricked cellar or two, and died out. The village pond, so blue on the map, had completely disappeared. The Ligne de Pommiers had been grubbed up. The shell-holes were mostly small lakes of what was no doubt merely rusty water, but had a red and foul semblance of blood. Paths glistened weakly from tenable point to point. Of the dead, one was conspicuous. He was a Scottish soldier, and was kneeling, facing east, so that one could scarcely credit death in him; he was seen at some little distance from the usual tracks, and no one had much time in Thiepval just then for sight-seeing, or burying. Death could not kneel so, I thought, and approaching I ascertained with a sudden shrivelling of spirit that Death could and did.
Beyond the area called Thiepval on the map a trench called St Martin’s Lane led forward; unhappy he who got into it! It was blasted out by intense bombardment into a broad shapeless gorge, and pools of mortar-like mud filled most of it. A few duckboards lay half submerged along the parapet, and these were perforce used by our companies, and calculatingly and fiercely shelled at moments by the enemy. The wooden track ended, and then the men fought their way on through the gluey morass, until not one nor two were reduced to tears and impotent wild cries to God. They were not yet at the worst of their duty, for the Schwaben Redoubt ahead was an almost obliterated cocoon of trenches in which mud, and death, and life were much the same thing – and there the deep dugouts, which faced the German guns, were cancerous with torn bodies, and to pass an entrance was to gulp poison; in one place a corpse had apparently been thrust in to stop up a doorway’s dangerous displacement, and an arm swung stupidly. Men of the next battalion were found in mud up to the armpits, and their fate was not spoken of; those who found them could not get them out. The whole zone was a corpse, and the mud itself mortified. Here we were to ‘hold the line,’ for an uncertain sentence of days.
Harrison had his headquarters at the Thiepval end of St Martin’s Lane, and, while the place was deep down and even decorated with German drawings, its use was suspected by its former occupants, whose shells fell nightly with sudden mangling smash on the roof and in the trench at the exits. Nevertheless, he had a lantern put out in the night, to guide those who made the awful journey from the line; it took an experienced messenger, such as our still smiling runner Norman, four or five hours to come and return. The nights were long, but the Colonel could not sleep; ordering me to watch, he might lie down for a time, but, if a visitor or a signaller with his pink forms came and spoke with me, he at once called out the instruction wanted. At Hamel he had once remarked to me, ‘We’re going to lose this war, Rabbit – we don’t work hard enough;’ and he seemed to be trying to make up for the general defect by his own labours. His face was red and pallid with the strain; he buckled his coat, and forced his body round the eastward mud-holes in the early morning, and on returning would find the General paying a call, with ‘Well, Harrison, the air of Thiepval is most bracing.’
In saying this, the General was perfectly serious, and he was not less so in many other remarks of a more military and not less tangential kind, which caused Harrison to carry with him habitually a letter of resignation. One day some unforewarned and desperate order led to the display of this letter. ‘No, Harrison,’ piped the now amazed General, ‘no, I shall not look at it. I shall put it in my breeches pocket;’ and the event ended in Harrison’s gaining his point and a personal anecdote of the General which never failed to charm. But the background of such humours was a filthy, limb-strewn, and most lonely world’s-end, where a Picard village had been, and where still a foundation of bricks, or the stump of an apple-tree, or even a leaf or two of ivy might be found – at your own risk.
Of all the strange artifices of war, Thiepval was then a huge and bewildering repository. The old German front line on its west slope still retained its outline, after the lightnings of explosive which it had swallowed month after month. Steel rails and concrete had there been used with that remorseless logic which might be called real imagination, had been combined and fixed, reduplicated and thickened until the trench was as solid as a pyramid. In front of it here and there were concealed concrete emplacements, formerly lurking in the weeds and flowers of No Man’s Land, the fountains of whole rivers of sudden death; beneath it, where now our reserve company lived, were prodigious dugouts, arranged even in two storeys, and in the lower storey of one of these was a little door in the wall. Opening, one went steadily descending along dark galleries, soon discovering that the stacks of boxes which seemed to go on for ever were boxes of explosive; then one arrived at two deep well-shafts, with windlasses and buckets ready for further descent, but at that point it seemed as if one’s duty lay rather upstairs. This mine in due course would have hurled the former British line over the Ancre. In another great dugout were elaborate surgical appliances and medical supplies; another, again, was a kind of quartermaster’s store, in which, although in one of the crushed staircases were some corpses not to be meddled with, one stooped and turned over heaps of new, smart, but now inapplicable German greatcoats, or tins of preserved meat with Russian labels (I tried it, but made no converts), or heavy packages of ration tobacco which extremest want would not force us to approve – and egg bombs japanned black, and ‘windy bombs’ with their bat-handles and porcelain buttons, and maps in violet and green and scarlet, and letters in slant hand with many an exclamation mark, and black and gold helmets, and steel ones with cubist camouflaging, and horse-hide packs, and leather-faced respirators, all in one plethora and miscellany, bloodstained here and there. The smell of the German dugouts was peculiar to them, heavy and clothy.
There was, moreover, one vault here which was arrayed with mirrors, no doubt collected from the château whose white ruin still exposed the interior of a cellar, and on which a tall image of the Virgin was dreaming in the sullen sunlight. One could find books in Thiepval; I am guilty of taking my copy of Ferdinand von Freiligrath’s bombastic poems from that uncatalogued library. (Von Freiligrath had been a regular contributor to the London Athenæum. I did not know it in 1916, but I was to become a writer for that journal too.) But it is time to return from these abysmal peregrinations to the world up aloft, where still here and there in outlying pits a minenwerfer (without its team) thrusts up its steel mouth towards the Old British Line; where the ration party uses the ‘dry places’ in the mud – those bemired carcasses which have not yet ceased to serve ‘the great adventure’ – and the passer-by hates the plosh of the whizzing fuse-top into the muck worse than the fierce darts of the shrapnel itself; where men howl out angry imprecation at officers whom they love; where our poor half-wit and battalion joke, whom red tape will not let us send away, is running out above the Schwaben half-naked, slobbering and yet at times aware that he is not in his perfect mind,
‘Waking in the wet trench,
Loaded with more cold iron than a gaol
Would give a murderer.’
We came away for a couple of nights, and were billeted in dugouts by Authuille, built against the high sheltering bank called ‘The Bluff,’ and there we passed pleasant hours. They were not shelling us here. The blue Ancre swirled along as though it could not be beaten from its brookish gayness and motion, right against our feet; songs sounded sweetly there, and the simple tune ‘We were sailing along on a moonlight bay’ held me enchanted; I can never escape from that voice in that place. The cold and clear stream was a blessing, and many a soldier dipped his hands in it spontaneously and in happiness, or crossed to the islands midstream to wash out a haversack or a shirt. Poetry with her euphrasy had her triumph, no matter how brief, with many of those pale weary men; nor could she find it strange when they were hurrying up to the canteen kept open there by the South African heavy artillery, or when their song changed to ‘When the beer is on the table, I’ll be there.’
Now November’s advancing date seemed to warrant us in believing that actual battle was finished for the present, and when we took over the Schwaben again we did not think of anything worse than a trench tour – ordeal enough in that den of misery. Sluggish, soaking mists, or cold stinging wind, loaded the air and the spirit of man; the ruins of the world looked black and unalterable; Thiepval Wood’s ghostly gallows-trees made no sound nor movement. Thus, then, beyond doubt, the gigantic clangour of the Somme offensive had ceased, and once or twice one heard it alleged that Cæsar went into winter quarters, and if so—. The fog, dewing one’s khaki, scarcely let the sun rise, and the grey chalky mud, as though to claim the only victory, crawled down the dugout entrances, whether those still had stairs, or were mere gullets, their woodwork burnt out by phosphorus bombs or shells. Where it had the chance, the mud filled these to the top. We fell into a routine, relieving companies at short intervals, clearing our wounded and concealing our dead; to indicate how steady the look of things was, let me mention that one day someone had to report at advanced Army headquarters and view a new patent oven (constructed of five oil drums) in operation. The victim, myself, left Thiepval and arrived duly by a course of lorry-jumping at Toutencourt, at least a dozen miles back; the miraculous oven was displayed to a selection of ordinary officers by a selection of staff officers, and an aroma of roasting sirloin (or it may not have been sirloin) was detected; it should have been served to the audience. Thence ‘home’ from aristocratic Toutencourt through the best villages imagination could paint to democratic Thiepval, and a night of the usual blended notes – chiefly the double bass of high explosives on the dugout exit.
‘And this,’ said Lupton, the adjutant, one gaunt morning (Lintott had become temporary transport officer) – ‘this,’ remarked Lupton casually, pulling his moustache, ‘is Z day minus two.’ My eye must have looked like a pickled onion. ‘Really,’ he continued. ‘The biggest attack of the lot.’ That had been the case before. But – anyway, the news was right, and whatever Z day might do, there was a little affair for the battalion to administer at once. A German strong-point thirty or forty yards ahead of the Schwaben was awkwardly situated in regard to the proposed ‘doings,’ and would be cleaned up by us. I received this information with distaste, and Harrison seemed at first to think it applied specially to me, as odd-job man; then he changed his mind, and sent James Cassells and Sergeant Stickland out with a fighting patrol that night; if this failed, it was intended that I should try my hand the night after. As soon as Cassells and his men moved, they were bombed and fusilladed, whereupon they lay down in confusion round the inconvenient saphead, and, by the grace of God, suddenly two of the enemy from another direction wandered among them and surrendered. These prisoners duly arrived at battalion headquarters, seemingly half expecting to be eaten alive – a milkman and an elementary schoolmaster – most welcome guests. They blinked, gestured, accepted cigarettes, became natural. The back areas were so well pleased with these samples that they accepted the perfectly sound report of Cassells, finding the enemy’s post too thickly wired and resolutely held for any but a carefully studied assault.
By a foolish error in taste, I, who was then ‘mess president,’ had brought up to Thiepval an ample bottle of Benedictine, but little whisky; and on the eve of attack that little had disappeared. Poor Harrison gazed as one in a trance at the deplorable bottle of Benedictine, and more in sorrow than in anger at me. I felt that I had to recover my position, but whisky does not appear at a wish. In double gloom the short day decayed, and the noise of shelling swelled until my Colonel sent me up above to listen occasionally if there was any sound of rifle fire. For during this battle of the Somme, there must have been a hundred shells for one rifle-shot; and the cracking of bullets from the front trench in the general stormsong would have been a danger signal. But the night dragged its muddy length without German interference, and the attacking troops assembled in the ravenous holes more or less as was planned on paper. Our own part was subsidiary, and the main blow was to be struck northward towards Grandcourt and Beaumont Hamel. Struck it was in the shabby clammy morning of November 13.
That was a feat of arms vieing with any recorded. The enemy was surprised and beaten. From Thiepval Wood battalions of our own division sprang out, passed our old dead, mud-craters and wire and took the tiny village of St Pierre Divion with its enormous labyrinth, and almost 2,000 Germans in the galleries there. Beyond the curving Ancre, the Highlanders and the Royal Naval Division overran Beaucourt and Beaumont, strongholds of the finest; and as this news came in fragments and rumours to us in Thiepval, we felt as if we were being left behind. But the day was short. Towards four o’clock orders came that we were to supply 300 men that night, to carry up wiring materials to positions in advance of those newly captured, those positions to be reconnoitred immediately. This meant me.
A runner called Johnson, a red-cheeked silent youth, was the only man available, and we set off at once, seeing that there was a heavy barrage eastward, but knowing that it was best not to think about it. What light the grudging day had permitted was now almost extinct, and the mist had changed into a drizzle; we passed the site of Thiepval Crucifix, and the junction of Fiennes Trench and St Martin’s Lane (a wide pond of grey cement), then the scrawled Schwaben – few people about, white lights whirling up north of the Ancre, and the shouldering hills north and east gathering inimical mass in their wan illusion. Crossing scarcely discernible remains of redoubts and communications, I saw an officer peering from a little furrow of trench ahead, and went to him. ‘Is this our front line?’ ‘Dunno: you get down off there, you’ll be hit.’ He shivered in his mackintosh sheet. His chin quivered; this night’s echoing blackness was coming down cruelly fast. ‘Get down.’ He spoke with a sort of anger. Through some curious inward concentration on the matter of finding the way, I had not noticed the furious dance of high explosive now almost enclosing us. At this minute, a man, or a ghost, went by, and I tried to follow his course down the next slope and along a desperate valley; then I said to Johnson, ‘The front line must be ahead here still; come on.’ We were now in the dark and, before we realized it, inside a barrage; never had shells seemed so torrentially swift, so murderous; each seemed to swoop over one’s shoulder. We ran, we tore ourselves out of the clay to run, and lived. The shells at last skidded and spattered behind us, and now where were we? We went on.
Monstrously black a hill rose up before us; we crossed; then I thought I knew where we were. These heavy timber shelters with the great openings were evidently German howitzer positions, and they had not been long evacuated, I thought, stooping hurriedly over those dead men in field grey overcoats at the entrances, and others flung down by their last ‘fox-holes’ near by. It is strange how carefully, though rapidly, I looked at these bodies. The lights flying up northward, where the most deafening noise was roaring along the river valley, showed things in an unnatural glimmer; and the men’s coats were yet comparatively clean, and their attitudes most like life. Again we went on, and climbed the false immensity of another ridge, when several rifles and a maxim opened upon us, and very close they were. We retreated zig-zagging down the slope, and as we did so I saw far off the wide lagoons of the Ancre silvering in the Beaucourt lights, knew where we were, and decided our course. Now running, crouching, we worked along the valley, then sharply turning, through crumbled pits and over mounds and heaps, came along high ground above what had been St Pierre Divion, expecting to be caught at every second; then we plunged through that waterfall of shells, the British and German barrages mingling, now slackening; and were challenged at last, in English. We had come back from an accidental tour into enemy country, and blessed with silent gladness the shell-hole in which, blowing their own trumpets in the spirit of their morning’s success, were members of four or five different units of our division. We lay down in the mud a moment or two, and recovered our senses.
The way to Thiepval was simpler. At the edge of the wood a couple of great shells burst almost on top of us; thence we had no opposition, and, hitting a duckboard track, returned to the battalion headquarters. Johnson slipped down the greasy stairway, and turned very white down below. We were received as Lazarus was. The shelling of the Schwaben had been ‘a blaze of light,’ and our death had been taken for granted. Cooling, second in command, shone with pleasure at our good luck. Harrison was speaking over the telephone to Hornby, and I just had vitality enough to hear him say, ‘They have come back, and report an extraordinary barrage; say it would be disaster to attempt to send up that party. Certain disaster. Yes, they say so, and from their appearance one can see that these are men who have been through terrific shelling … Yes, I’ll bring him along. That’s all right,’ he turned to his second in command. ‘No wiring party. Carry up to Point 86 instead. I said it would all come out in the wash. Seven o’clock – take it easy, Rabbit, we’ll go and see the General when you feel a bit better.’