The Impossible Happens
It seemed far away from war’s unruly ravings, that lamplit but damp dugout at Passerelle de Magenta (the better side of the Ancre) in which the General was resting on his bed, his arms folded on his breast; but the occasion made me bold. Closely following the map, with my narrative, then I hope much plainer than now, Harrison decided that we had nearly been into Grandcourt (still a name of distance and wild desire) and that we had come up against the real line which the Germans were holding. But, however these things might be, one immense fact came out like the sun at midnight: our division had almost done with the Somme. The misty trees might have been Hyde Park, and my feet moved with a rhythm, as I kept pace with the Colonel’s always vigorous but now champion pace.
A Highland unit was filing into the line. At the ration-party’s rendezvous below Thiepval, our hearty Quartermaster Swain had arrived with his transport, and in particular he was guarding, with all the skill of years of suspicion and incident, our issue of rum. When he called at headquarters presently, he was distressed, and his ‘eyes were wild.’ Two jars of the rum had been ‘lifted’ under his very nose by the infallible Jocks. It was a feat of arms indeed, but poor Swain felt his occupation was gone. A few hours later we took our belongings from Thiepval, and went down the track and surviving country road, still being shelled in a casual way, and busy with men and transport, to the Bluff dugouts. These were gradually deteriorating, and Harrison sent in an ironical report on their condition, in case they were being relied upon for ‘the coming winter.’ A pleasing incident of the course of inspections which occupied that day of rest was the quenching of a pushful officer, who was ever to the fore with accounts of his unrewarded perspicuity and daring, by the Doctor, who, seizing as his pretext a more insolent phrase than the other usually snapped out, put down a scintillating barrage of army satire and even sanctimonious benedictions, to the joy of all who were present. Warmed by his success, Doc. Ford proceeded the same evening to serve the general good again, entering the dugout of the Lewis-gun officer, who was not thought the most energetic altruist among us, and disturbing his rest in an ingenious and sociable manner. I loved this Doctor, athletic, bright and young – I particularly remember his beautiful opposition to our conventional explanations of Patriotism, his ‘No, that’s Jingoism’ – but already he was sickening for trench fever, and after a short time he had to give way to its heavy siege.
The first kit inspection proved that we were short of all sorts of things, rifles, leather equipment, gas masks and all the rest, and next morning early I took a party of men and a couple of limbers up towards Thiepval and set about salvaging what was wanted. The inward upheaval of our promised exodus made this seem one adventure too many, and we observed the grouping of the customary big shells snouting up the grey mud and derelict timber with great care; but we needed not range far, for the greying haversacked British dead were all round – not many of the German thereabouts, but what should one want with their red-hide hairy knapsacks, their leather respirators, curious but somehow inhuman? There was no time for deep feeling in the mysterious presence of all these masked men. My explorers did their work with vigour, the limbers were soon more than brimful, and we hustled down through Authuille and over Black Horse Bridge, ‘for ever and for ever.’ The battalion was on the roadside ready to step off, and amid humorous and artful smiles and glances we fell in. Lancashire Dump in the verge of Aveluy Wood, and the old French finger-posts and notices, and the mossy clear places between the trees, and the straight, damp, firm highway, good-bye to you all; there in the sedge the wild duck and moorcock noise, and farther behind one hears the stinging lash of shells in the swamp, but we are marching. Not the same ‘we’ who in the golden dusty summer tramped down into the verdant valley, even then a haunt of every leafy spirit and the blue-eyed ephydriads, now Nature’s slimy wound with spikes of blackened bone; not that ‘we,’ but yet here and there was the same face that had belonged to them, and above all Harrison with his merry eye and life-giving soldierly gesture was riding up and down the column.
After a night’s respite in huts in the Nab Valley, not far from our old cover, Martinsart Wood, we were able to add a few more kilometres to our distance from the line, and, passing Albert with songs and in some amazement, left the pools of the Ancre behind, and came to the substantial village of Warloy. There, too, we stayed one luxurious night. The house in which some of us were lodged was the quietest conceivable, the most puritan, with little square plots of grass and tiled paths between it and the road; our beds were in the attics, and during the night we had scarcely thrown down the French novels which we picked up there and put out our candles, when, it seemed, an aeroplane was buzzing overhead and something hit the tiles. This dream was confirmed next morning, for the raider had killed some transport-men in the village with machine-gun fire.
We now marched in earnest. Of all the treasured romances of the world, is there anything to make the blood sing itself along, to brighten the eye, to fill the ear with unheard melodies, like a marching battalion in which one’s own body is going? From the pit, arise and shine, let the drum and trumpet mark the pride of your measure; you have now learned that the light is sweet, that a day in peace is a jewel whose radiances vary and frolic innumerably as memory turns it in her hand, infinitude of mercy. Here is this jewel; kind Nature will shield it from the corrosions of yesterday; yield yourself to this magical hour; a starling curving among tens of thousands above the blue mere, a star spinning in the bright magnetic pilgrimage of old God; follow that God, and look you mock him not.
So inexpressible was the exaltation of that day, and the solid ground was ethereal, not much being uttered from man to man for many miles. An old friend of ours, however, did not feel this. In his grimmer mood and best red tabs he rode up, shrilly calling me out of my planetary dream to him, and ordered me to arrest the transport sergeant for the offence of allowing what he called ‘super-structures’ on his vehicles. Poor Sergeant Luck on his black horse came up in confusion, accepted his fate and observations on his gross unmilitary character, and the General reluctantly went devouring elsewhere. The super-structures (‘surely you can see them, Blunden? Why did you not immediately place this non-commissioned officer under arrest?’) consisted chiefly of the illegal extra blankets which the batmen had contrived to collect for their winter campaign; and once again one innocent suffered while many guilty went free. I condoled with Luck, and he with tears in his eyes thought of his hitherto spotless name in the world of limbers and Maltese carts and horse-lines.
Hardly believing what was happening, we came through places which had been so remote from possibility that their names were unmeaning to us. Greenness, even if it was only November greenness, was our dream scenery. There was to have been green country on the victorious far side of the Somme battlefield. Ridges and valleys disappeared behind. We passed Beauquesne, where somebody said, was Advanced General Headquarters. Well, you say so. We ended our resurrection road in Doullens, a placid town, with cobbled complicated streets, withdrawing courtyards under archways, and curtains, and clocks, and mantelpiece ornaments, and roast fowl, and white and red wine. One longed to take one’s ease in that miniature triumph of domesticity, but it was no more than a stage, only long enough for some claims for damages to be registered against A Company. I was soon reporting at the station yard, trying to obtain all the information about the battalion’s train journey northward, and the sunset flared the brazen news that it would be a cold one, while the shifting wind whistled through the black chains and waggon-wheels of the waiting cattle-trucks. But it was a beautiful world even then.